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Comment by Jedd | Hacker News Reader

I've spent basically zero time in academia. I've heard the phrase 'publish or perish', and I know the evils of Elsevier, and the popularity of sci-hub - but that's about it.

How are these guys making money? Is it just the 'editing fees' for people trying to publish? Presumably advertisers are savvy enough to not throw money at these types of journals? Proper scientists / researchers are (hopefully) also not easily fooled - and whoever peer reviewed this article (assuming it actually was peer reviewed, as claimed) won't want their name attached to the publication.

These stories come up often enough to suggest it's a well known problem, and the culprits are easy enough to identify. But that these stories do keep coming up suggests there's good money being made somehow, and attempts to thwart these publications are failing.

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Yes, it is the editing fees. Nth-tier universities in many countries are pushing faculty members to publish more. This is all done with the best intentions -- we all want faculty at the cutting edge of research. So many of these universities offer financial incentives of various sorts to faculty who publish more. For instance, they may tie pay hikes or promotions to the number of publications. There's often grant money available for research (and publication) to support these activities.

This has led to the inevitable unintended consequences. Most of these faculty members do not have the resources or the ability to publish in "real" journals, nor do they even understand what a good journal is. So they publish in whatever venue that accepts their paper. If it requires them to pay, then so be it. And thanks to the beauty of capitalism, a bunch of predator journals have emerged to lighten the purses of these poor folks.

It seems odd to call the journal "predatory" in this situation. Who is it preying on? The person who got rejected from a journal with standards but still wanted to keep his job?

The problem with these journals isn't that they accept low-quality papers. They're called that because they don't make an honest attempt at peer-review, and the publishing/editing fees are pocketed by the publishers.

IEEE Access is an example of a journal which charges a hefty "article processing fee" and publishes rather mediocre papers. But I wouldn't call them a predatory journal. They do get feedback from real researchers working in the field, they do reject fake and obviously-flawed papers, and they do not just use the publishing fees to enrich themselves. The journal in the OP did none of these things.

I am happy to stipulate that these journals do no review and pocket their editing fees. But they are not victimizing the authors, they're helping them. That's why they can charge fees.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predatory_open_access_publishi...:

"Complaints that are associated with predatory open-access publishing include

Accepting articles quickly with little or no peer review or quality control, including hoax and nonsensical papers.

Notifying academics of article fees only after papers are accepted.

Aggressively campaigning for academics to submit articles or serve on editorial boards.

Listing academics as members of editorial boards without their permission, and not allowing academics to resign from editorial boards.

Appointing fake academics to editorial boards.[34] Mimicking the name or web site style of more established journals.

Misleading claims about the publishing operation, such as a false location.

Improper use of ISSNs.

Fake or non-existent impact factors."

One could say they prey on society's trust in science.

Ah, then society's trust in science should be warned to watch out.

Or perhaps the metaphor is misapplied?

> Ah, then society's trust in science should be warned to watch out.

Perhaps you've noticed an alarming rise in society's distrust in science, perhaps partly exacerbated by an increase in poorly peer-reviewed publications.

No, that's mostly a result of global warming denialism paid for by fossil fuel companies, vaccine denialism pushed by chancers like Andrew Wakefield, and the completely awful state of media pop-science.

You forgot anti-GMO horror stories paid by agriculture and "organic food" companies.

I'm not sure on this one; I suspect there's a lot of "media management" going on by Monsanto, as well as a lot of activists who are under-informed on the technology. Personally I thought that Big Ag was in favour of GMO and that organic food wasn't big enough to fund a disinformation campaign.

If a local producer is getting outpriced by a foreign company with more resources, turning it into "stop importing harmful GMOs" issue is rather convenient.

GMO is not inherently unsafe, nor is it inherently safe. Plants can be engineered to produce additional nutrients and better withstand drought, but they can also be engineered with insecticidal proteins that may be harmful to humans. This is perfectly analogous to pharmaceuticals. If someone said "ban all pharmaceuticals", we'd agree that they're crazy, but the correct response is not "pharmaceuticals are perfectly safe". Some pharmaceuticals are perfectly safe. Some are deadly poisons. GMOs need to go through an evaluation process before being approved for the open market.

Except that - if you've ever argued with a conspiracy theorist online, you will know their propensity for posting links to really bad papers as "proof".

I would like to cite this comment as a great example of having a potentially valid point but presenting it in such a way as to make the audience reject it.

Who is it preying on? The person who got rejected from a journal with standards but still wanted to keep his job?

Yes.

There area also a lot of people naive to how BS publishing has become. Plenty of PhD students get sucked in, a common one is being asked to publish your thesis as a book. Learning hubris comes before an embarrassment is a right of passage to the vast majority of people who think anyone really wants to read their thesis in a bound form from a third rate publisher created last year.

In some arts/humanities subjects publishing a book is equivalent to publishing papers. These publishers are filling the same gap as the lower quality pay to publish journals.

> Most of these faculty members do not have the resources or the ability to publish in "real" journals

I definitely wouldn't use "Most" here. The vast majority of faculty will publish in respected journals. Unless you can cite a source for your claim?

I'm not talking about faculty members in any halfway reputable university. They obviously publish in reputable journals. I used the word "these" here refers to faculty members at the bottom of the academic ladder, many of whom are based in developing countries and are being forced to publish (often due to governmental initiatives.)

I don't want to pick a particular university or person to name and shame. But my suggestion would be to look at authors in the OP's journal and evaluate for yourself whether these authors are publishing in "respected" journals.

Can he cite a source published in the Urology & Nephrology Open Access Journal?

> a bunch of predator journals have emerged to lighten the purses of these poor folks

Are the poor folks not getting exactly what they paid for in this instance? They wanted to be able to hit a published papers quota to get a raise/hired/not fired/whatever and the journal provided that. I don't feel like it's warranted to treat the journals customers as victims here. Both the 'predatory' journal and the customer are just playing the same shitty game set up by silly incentives being put in place by outside forces.

> I don't feel like it's warranted to treat the journals customers as victims here.

He means they are victims of their universities' polices.

OK, so if the customers are victims of their universities, why would we call the journals who help them out "predatory"?

The quoted phrase, "a bunch of predator journals have emerged to lighten the purses of these poor folks", clearly implies that the journals are out to hurt their customers.

Don't be easily fooled. Even people in 3rd world countries who work at universities understand what a predatory journal is, and in fact publish there because they get easy publication with no sweat.

It sounds like these journals are good business.

Real publishers make a good chunk of their profits from selling subscriptions of their journals to libraries. These allow anyone at a university to read the journal, but the fee can be many thousands per year (per university). These are legitimate businesses, problems aside.

Fake ones like this make it off the $800 publishing fee. Since it's "open access" they just put the PDF online and call it a day. $800 isn't bad for a few hours of proofreading and updating one web page.

Note that there are plenty of legitimate journals, like PLOS, that charge a fee to publish. It's a common business model for open access journals. Usually they have some mechanism for waiving the fee if an author can't afford it.

Also, allegedly many of these journals actually have per-paper expenses in the hundreds of dollars (!!), mostly from editor time spent soliciting and managing reviewers. That seems crazy. In contrast, major ML venues like NIPS handle all the review management in a mostly automated way and are run by volunteers. But then again, the average review quality at ML conferences seems to be pretty poor, at least compared to what I've heard about in some other fields.

>>> I've spent basically zero time in academia. I've heard the phrase 'publish or perish', and I know the evils of Elsevier, and the popularity of sci-hub - but that's about it.

I don't know if they are so evil as people say. They send me nice invitations on linkedin to interview with them :D

They appear to have interesting data and text analysis problems to solve.

this particular case is what is called an "open-access journal" which is a controversial topic. the nominal goal of journals of this sort is to break up the fairly awful stranglehold on academic publishing that companies like Elsevier have created. however, it is a deeply problematic space and many of these open-access journals are fraudulent publications in that they don't even attempt to do appropriate and necessary peer reviewing. it's just pay to play at a corrupt journal like this. pay your fees get your publication. it's like vanity publishing. independent of academic merit.

the ideal is an open-access journal that is open in terms of who can read it but very closed in terms of who can successfully get an article published. that's not what we're getting these days though.

international policy pissing contest: countries actually rank education internationaly by counting number of published articles. you can't make this up.

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