Predatory journals entrap unsuspecting scientists
nature.com
nature.com
Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach a man how to run an academic journal and academia feeds him for a lifetime.
I get that each has built industry specific social capital, but what makes it so hard to establish a new platform?
In Computational Linguistics (disclaimer: I'm a member of the ACL, the association that organizes the bigger conferences) you only pay the conference fee for at least one author to present your results. You pay ~$700 (students and virtual attendees pay less, but depends heavily on the location of the conference), your paper is published online for free, and you also get a conference out of it.
The main problem are Universities: when applying for a position, each University will rank you based on which conferences you've published. CL conferences used to be ranked lower than CL journals, so if you want to have a chance at tenure then you have to aim for the well-established ones. Why are they well-established? I can't say for sure but my best guess would be "look at all the marketing a $10k publication fee can buy".
From an outsiders perspective it would seem pairing individuals (university and department heads) personal reputations in press with the sloppiness or unseriousness of the process would at least create some stakes for the decision makers no?
I've never witnessed straight corruption, but I did witness marketing teams sent to prey on researcher's fears. So I wouldn't discount that too.
When you go up for tenure, your publications are still fresh, so your impact is hard to know. So the rough rank of the journals in which you publish is a proxy for it. This is why universities reward publishing in some journals rather than in others.
Why do higher-ranked journals publish better studies? This may be for a number of reasons. Better studies are more likely to be submitted to higher-ranked journals first rather than to lower-ranked journals. Researchers who write better referee reports are more likely to accept requests to referee papers at those journals. And the editors may shepherd papers at such journals better too.
Notably, predatory journals do none of the above. It is no surprise that publishing in predatory journals will not get you tenure nor promotion at such universities.
Do you often get emails from Nature soliciting your papers, or asking you to be a keynote speaker in their conference, dear Dr/ Professor <your name spliced on your co-author's name when you were still a PhD student>?
No? Well, that's because "predatory journals" are not the same thing as Nature.
I mean fuck Nature, don't make me defend those assholes, but please be aware of what the hell you're talking about.
Nature Group is not without criticism here, either. Still one of the crown-jewels of research publications. I used to subscribe to Nature but dropped it due to their limited archive, the proliferation of their specialty journals (separate subscription required), and the high amount of sponsored content.
Still subscribe to Science Magazine which makes its full archive available and doesn't have as many spinoffs.
The amount of damage caused by shitty articles and shitty journals out there is terrifying to think about.
Being published in them is a good way to get social media karma though. Some people even manage leverage the article to get a tenured position somewhere (often to their future students' peril).
As a Science subscriber I try hard to make time to read papers well out of my expertise. I start with the research summary article (by an independent writer) for context before going to the full paper. I figure if it made it to press there, it is worth my time to figure out what makes it important to that field.
I, like many young graduates, were tasked with finding 5-10 "less popular" journals to publish to in order to get some practice in. This was mostly an exercise in learning the industry and so I didn't get much help from my advisor. In my particular sub-field of computer science the major journals were highly exclusionary and so getting published even with your advisor's name on the paper was not likely.
I cannot tell you how many times I went back to my advisor only to find out a couple journals I chose were predatory. Some were obvious to remove (and I did), some you could Google and get to the 3rd page to figure out if it was predatory, some you really needed to understand how journals work (scoring, reviewing criteria, rejection rate, etc). A hallmark is always a strangely low rejection rate. Sometimes you can dig deep and figure out by looking at the review process.
It is sometimes a lot of work to avoid accidentally publishing to one of these. They crop up as often as they get knocked down.
Wow. That's really not standard in my experience. I'm in the UK, and the advice I always got was to try and publish only good-quality work in highly-rated venues.
I hope you can get published in one of the decent journals in your field. That's what you should be gunning for.
The reason that publishers don't want to go to the open-access model (which makes sense for a product that is largely taxpayer-financed, i.e. government agencies make their reports available to the public without fees usually) is that universities pay thousands of dollars a year for each journal they subscribe to. (There is archival value for printed paper versions of journals, however.) This becomes particularly important for research into known subjects, e.g. if you want to get the complete history of a certain antibiotic's discovery and production and testing history, at the level of primary research reports (which include methods etc.), it's still very difficult to do that without access to a university library with a comprehensive set of journals, and that's what publishers are trying to protect by going after sites like sci-hub.
The model that Nature and Science want to perpetuate is their 'high impact value', meaning if they accept a paper, it's good for the researcher's career in terms of getting tenure and more funding, and a switch to open-source publishing on arxiv-type platforms might disrupt that stable system. A sticky point is the peer-review system, which is kind of a mess anyway.
Viewed through this lens, the apparently irrational state of academic publishing becomes entirely rational.
Is there still scientific value in many of these journals? Or has it become a career-boost network similar to LinkedIn?
The handful of pHds I know all work in private industry and don't publish anymore, despite working on some interesting studies in the tech space
They outsource a lot of their stuff to India, and ask for a 3500$ fee in return to host it open-access, or ask everyone who wants to see it 50-90$ but then they'll publish it for 'free'.
Reviewers are unpaid academics, authors are unpaid academics, editors are badly paid Indians. The only ones profiting from this are the people owning the publishers.
Look up some publishers parking lots on google street view. Springer for example has a Porsche sitting right in front of the building.
A genuine new journal is created by experts in the field, for the purpose of communicating between each other. A predatory journal is created by publishers, with minimal expertise in the field (often none).
If nobody is reading the journal, then it exists solely for the purpose of gathering fees in exchange for the ability to put it on your CV.
The limiting factor for a new journal is who is interested in reading it. That happens when a new field opens up (or more often, when some sub-field becomes active enough that the contributors find it useful to carve it out).
There is also a need for new kinds of journals, to manage the workload of knowing what things people should read. There are a lot of experiments going on there, trying to solve the mismatch between the sheer amount of work being done and the limited time for keeping up. But the predatory journals don't care if anybody is reading them at all.
This is like getting advice from an MLM on how to avoid calling into MLM scams. Advice from a cult leader on how to avoid cults.
I'll listen to somebody who publishes in a non-predatory journal.