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It's pretty hard. You need a lot of gravitas to generate momentum for a journal. There are thousands of spam-level journals out there ( ref beall's list of predatory publishers ) who just want papers and don't offer/care about peer review. You would need several field-leading researchers to support it by submitting to it, reviewing for it, and citing from it. And you would have to tend that reputation for quality very carefully.

I suspect anyone in that position is so well established that they barely notice how crappy journals are.

http://scholarlyoa.com/2014/11...

Agree completely. America is leading the world down a very dark path where everything, including education, is monetized, turned into a commodity, and slowly but surely destroyed. Higher education is one great example, leaving graduates with relatively poor educations and crippling debt. The NIH has been turned into a "translational medicine" adjunct to the pharmaceutical industry. Money is a great motivator, but the things it motivates people to do are usually negative or harmful (think pollution, lack of worker safety, habitat destruction, species extinction, etc.). Scientific publishing is also now highly monetized, and that includes hundreds of so-called predatory journals (kept track of at Beall's list http://scholarlyoa.com/publish...). People need to understand that when only things that make money get done, that lots of good things worth doing don't ever get done.

What you need to do is look at the impact factor of each journal -- a measure of how often articles in that journal are cited. What constitutes a "good" IF varies from field to field, so you want to compare the IF of a journal to the leading journals in that field. In this case the IF for the journals in question are 1.47 (0.3 for a five year period) and 1.15.. By comparison, the ACM Transaction on Intelligent Systems and Technology has an impact factor of 9.39.

There have always been low quality journals, but recently I'm seeing an uptick in pseudo-science advocates like anti-vaxxers and climate change denialists citing "published research" that makes absurdly broad claims. It's important to look up the IF for the journals referenced, they're often predatory journals that function like a "vanity press" for unpublishable papers.

The site http://scholarlyoa.com/ is also very useful. It maintains a list both of predatory journals and predatory publishers in the business of giving a platform to junk scholarship. Journal of Computational Intelligence and Electronic Systems is not on the list of standalone predatory journals, nor is the publisher American Scientific Publishers on the list of predatory publishers -- yet. Aperito *is* on the list of suspect publishers.

Unforutnately IF isn't infallible. You can't automatically dismiss a paper because it's published in a low IF journal. You have to look at the whole pattern. A new paper making unusual claims is a lot more credible if it's published in a high IF journal like Nature. If it's published in Fred's Research Journal, you have to wait and see whether the paper gets cited by reputable scholars or by papers in more mainline journals.

Check out the list of reasons for why certain publishers are on the list: http://scholarlyoa.com/other-p... They include things such as: "Very few editorial board members from the west despite claiming to be International'" "Much of the authors’ guidelines is copied from other sites." "The journal has a very broad coverage to attract more author fees, and there are already many journals with a similar coverage — there is no authentic need for this new journal. It’s just being done for the profit." "There no indication of the journal’s digital preservation policies." Just to mention a few.

In case anyone wants to know the full extent of the self-plagiarism, here it is.

http://scholarlyoa.com/2013/07/16/recognizing-a-pattern-of-problems-in-pattern-recognition-in-physics/

Then again, there is Retraction Watch in case deniers just want to claim that the scientists are sitting on their billion dollar yachts sipping their mojitos, and selectively killing only articles about global warming - hey, might as well add creationism while we are into denialism.

http://retractionwatch.com/2014/01/17/climate-skeptic-journal-shuttered-following-malpractice-in-nepotistic-reviewer-selections/

Some Elsevier journals should be included in the list of fakes. They publish a lot of bad research (although some are also good). They're not on the level of these shitty "journals" though. Try reading one of them. Just pick a random journal off this list and select a random paper from the list. Put it through a free plagiarism detector and read the paper while that runs. After five minutes, stop reading and look at the results (if you still feel the need to).

As mentioned in the other recent academic publishing story, there has been some progress but it has been slow. One thing that I am hopeful about are "epijournals" which separate the review from the distribution by serving as overlays to the remarkably successful arxiv preprint servers, at least in many areas of math and physics.

There are a number of issues here, many of which have been brought up often before. A few to recap:

1. Prestige: As a fully-promoted researcher who isn't worried much about prestige, I am free to only submit articles to journals which are either open-access or are reasonably-priced (for example, many of those run by universities or professional societies, rather than by for-profit organizations.) Which I choose to do, and have made clear for many years via the Banff Protocol and now the CostOfKnowledge petition. However, when collaborations with junior researchers lead to publications, I am willing to submit to some of the other journals, as for the co-author, the prestige may be important for them getting a job, tenure, promotion, or grant funding.
2. Standards: Oddly, many of the open-access/free electronic journals have standards that are much higher than many of the for-profit journals. The second and lower tiers of for-profit journals will often publish less-than-impressive to just plain terrible articles and have much lower standards than the typical electronic ones. They have economic incentives to publish many articles, and there are sites devoted to exposing various sham journals or editorial failings of journals from Elsevier, etc. I think that many of the electronic free journals are worried about not being prestigious enough and so they tend to have high standards, significantly higher than many for-profit ones. I've had things that were rejected by good electronic journals that were accepted quickly and with high praise to middling traditional journals.
3. Author-pays model: there has been a proliferation of "open-access" publications, some of which are outright scams, see Beall's list of predatory "open-access" publishers. Often, these journals have names very similar to existing prestigious-to-middling journals, which complicates things and has made many authors naturally suspicious of various open-access journals as a whole.
4. Institutional culture: it takes a while for things to change. There have been a few mass resignations of for-profit journal editorial boards to start more-or-less identical less-expensive or free versions which are basically identically, but not nearly as many as I have hoped. Tim Gowers' efforts and the recent White House memo in the USA are progress but of course there is still a long way to go.

Yep, "peer reviewed". This is apparently volume 1, issue 1 of a new series of journals started by an Indian publisher that decided to simultaneously launch 53 new journals. In order to fill them, they took pretty much anything that anyone wanted to publish.

Taking a larger set of stations would seem to mean that this study includes stations that other studies eliminated as poor-quality. For example, stations with siting issues, stations that have moved over time between rural/urban locations, stations suffering UHI in unknown amounts.

Given the need to work in corrections for all of these quality issues, and given a pre-stated conclusion, it is very easy to make the corrections in a way that supports your desired conclusion.

In short: not credible.

" One of the problems that new journals face is that no one wants to submit an article to a journal that doesn’t have any articles yet. If the journal turns out to be a dud, then you are left looking silly as one of the few authors to submit to a failed journal.
IJERSRT has invented a creative, yet unethical, way of solving this no-articles problem."

New Journal Publishes Seven Issues of Bogus Articles to Appear Successful
http://scholarlyoa.com/2012/10/18/bogus-articles