Slashdot Mirror
Fake Academic Journals Are a Very Real Problem
derekmead writes "Because its become so easy to start a new publication in this new pixel-driven information economy, a new genre of predatory journals is emerging at an alarming rate. The New York Times just published an exposée of sorts on the topic. Its only an exposée of sorts because the scientific community knows about the problem. There are blogs set up to shame the fake journals into halting publishing. There are tutorials online for spotting a fake journal. There's even a list created and maintained by academic librarian Jeffrey Beall that keeps an eye on all the new fake journals coming out. When Beall started the list in 2010, it had only 20 entries. Now it has over 4,000. The journal Nature even published an entire issue on the problem a couple of weeks ago. So again, scientists know this is a problem. They just don't know how to stop it."
What exactly is the difference between a 'fake' journal and a 'real' journal? How much you pay?
Journals aren't cool anymore, everyone just lets the entire internet know that they just brushed their teeth.
The Study of Rectal stretching via first posts on Slashdot and Reddit.com mbust be stopped.
Mod down with your hosts file.
They just don't know how to stop it."
Really? Because in cryptography, we solved this a long time ago: It's called a web of trust. If you find a journal that is reputable and like it, then "sign it". Except instead of using crypto in this sense, give your readers a list of trusted peers on the back page.
It's just like what we already do: We trust our educated friends to separate bullshit from genuine science... why not formalize this process?
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
If your grandparents or parents or senior staff where published in print and can be found in top university libraries...
Pay your fee, publish with us and you too can enjoy true academic bliss.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
You're preaching to the crowd here. We all know how much more important liberal arts are than engineering and science.
I'm not saying there are any false positives on the list, but rather that having any could be a really, really, bad thing. Scientists all over the world are fed up with the rising costs of publication, and several journals have tried to pop up to address it. This is one thing that many of the fakes are trying to exploit, but if a real journal comes up that can get work reviewed and published for less than the rest, it should not be suppressed.
Hence if a valid new journal comes up that wants to do business for less, care must be taken to ensure it doesn't end up on the dreaded "fake journal" lists.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
I just read an article in the latest issue of Natchure Juornal to hit my doorstep saying that fake publishing isn't an issue at all. They also had some great offers for Genuine Faux (that's French for 'extra fancy grade') Rollex watches. I know it's a reputable journal because they publish from smart real people like me for only a nominal distribution fee (payable in 28 monthly installments of $29.95).
In medicine, even "real" journals are mostly filled with crap, dishonest and distorted research papers.
Fuck systemd. Fuck Redhat. Fuck Soylent, too. Wait, scratch the last one.
What exactly is the difference between a 'fake' journal and a 'real' journal? How much you pay?
I'm the editor of the Faux Spurious Journal. We take articles on other journals. I can tell you that it is a huge problem!
A real journal has a pear reviewed articles and other academics looking at them. We cost hundreds of dollars per year - payable in BitCoins. We accept all articles - with a small fee - because of academic
Fake journals, OTOH, only accept articles when the Editor (*snicker*) likes you. THEY cost THOUSANDS of dollars a year; which is indicative of their questionable authenticity.
Sincerely,
Heywood Yablowme, Ph.D.
University of Nigeria
our paper-based academic publishing paradigm is showing it's age, and it's about time we found a new outlet for knowledge.
open access journals are a start, but even they take too many clues from a dying paper publishing system.
http://isites.harvard.edu/icb/icb.do?keyword=k77982&tabgroupid=icb.tabgroup143448
http://peerlibrary.org/
Huh? It's very easy. If your paper is good, just submit it to a known prestigious journal .. a list would be published in mainstream journals -- and you dont really need one .. you can go by citation indexes or just *gasp* read some of the entries in existing publications and see if they are coherent. Or you can ask around by attending seminars at colleges that are reputed.
It's easy to get familiar with who the top researchers are in any field .. it really doesn't take a lot of effort. If you are in a particular field you would know, so all you have to do is find out where their publications are .. (you can find this out easily from their corporate webpage or university department links).
being right == you idiots idea of peer review.
This is just the effetes crying because they can't stand that they no longer monopolize on effective channels of communication anymore! WAHHHHHHHHH!!!!!
Publish or parish. That the accedemic motto. However a lot of science needs a lot of time to complete. However they are pressured to publish, in order to keep funding. Real journals are about real science, but those fake ones are so the can blabber about some stuff to get published, add it to their site and get back to work.
Your profession in life doesn't mean you are of a higher moral caliber. A scientist will hurt the rest of science so they just work on their stuff, they will lie cheat and steal to get what they want. Just like the rest of humanity you have good eggs and bad eggs and usually their motives are complex and hard to pass easy moral judgement on.
The way to curve bad behavior is to constantly work on adjusting the culture to prevent people from manipulating the system.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
While the 'fake' journals may not be high-impact they would enhance the total number and diversity values. This type of formula might be used when hiring for academic positions.
Remember, everything you read on the internet is true!
A sleazy op is likely to make mistakes.
I'm wondering why someone can't use the copyright angle to yell at any "fake pub" that swipes professor photos. (Possibly even the name-credentials part as well)
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
I don't debate that most are propaganda but reading through their criteria for a fake journal it basically says if it ain't crammed chock'a'block full of academics then it is fake. This sounds a bit like old media complaining about new media writers not being professional journalists who graduated and worked their way up from the bottom (read: aren't baby boomers).
So it is great that the corporate shills are being outed but I would prefer some actual analysis. Look at the articles, look at who funded them. Look for real connections between those who write and those who are publishing. A great example of a superb analysis was when Encyclopedia Britannica called out Wikipedia as basically a bunch of half assed crap while they were the bastions of excellence in research. So a group of people randomly selected a bunch of articles from both, then rigorously fact checked them with the result that at the time they were basically even with Wikipedia adding articles at a fantastic rate.
A simple question that I have about Wikipedia is, what qualification did Jimmy Wales have to start Wikipedia? To be specific his job prior to Wiki was running "a male-oriented web portal featuring entertainment and adult content" Another would be Matt Drudge (love him or hate him) of the drudge report who had "a job in the gift shop of CBS studios, eventually working his way up to manager" just prior to becoming one of the single largest forces in modern journalism.
These people were about as unqualified on paper to do what they did as is possible yet they were massive forces of change. Was slashdot created by a team of experts from the leading technical universities in the world?
Then there are the failings of the best journals themselves. Bad article do slip by. Big companies get their one-sided views in print. Yet right now there is a revolution going on where institutions are sick of paying crazy prices for access to the top journals who are having trouble justifying these prices except to their shareholders.
When I read the criteria to be a "bad" journal some it is quite reasonable such as how open the whole process is, but over and over it basically says, we academics know better and had better be the gatekeepers so that we can keep our jobs. To me a bunch of crap journals are a sign of good things being in the wind. Much like how social media is changing the world with great things that Twitter can bring us it brings us tweets like, "nothin on tv, so bord, YOLO!!!!"
This is genius, this idea is unbeatable
I patent it
What? You mean, that the paper we just submitted to the Journal of Universal Rejection isn't for a real journal? I'm shocked! :-)
It seems that many posters are coming to the conclusion that the journals are "fake", but that's not fully understanding the issue.
There are apparently some organizations that go the whole fake journal/conference route, but these have always existed and are no different than the diploma mills (except at the post-graduate level). Or those places you can order "trade-rag" magazines with your picture on the cover that you can put in your waiting rooom to impress your clients. Or those fake conferences where people get their employer to pay for their vacation (or in some cases the government in the form of tax breaks). These will never be quashed because the customers are often not really victims, but co-conspirators (although they may claim to be when outed).
It appears that another part of the issue is that criminal organizations are putting up fake websites that masquarade as the official website of real, but obscure journals (that don't have a website) or a website that is confusingly similar to a well known journal and then using these websites to trick people into sending them submission fees. Often these websites have scraped academic search sites for TOC and other publically available information to fool people.
This aspect is like people putting up typosquating websites, cloning websites in different top level domains, or setting up fake websites for businesses that don't have a website (kind of like what domain tasters do, but in a more malicious manner) and doing a bit of SEO...
Sadly these two problems are conflated.
We're overlooking the obvious benefit to these "fake" journals: It's so much easier now to add references to our Wikipedia articles!
And what's non-"fake" about legacy print journals? Especially if they're publishing something outside their field of expertise.
(One recent example: The New England Journal of Medicine publishing criminological studies on guns, most now thoroughly debunked by researchers in the actual field, publishing in the field's own, well-respected, journals.)
I wonder how much of this is the existing journals (and paridigm-embedded academic cliques) trying to maintain their business model and hold on the field in the face of competition, much of it higher quality and timeliness, from online journals.
They have exactly the same problem as the mainstream news and entertainment media versus the Internet-based alternatives. This looks like they're taking one of the same approaches: Discredit the competition as a class, rather than those individual publications that rate the discredtation.
(Print journals have plenty of non-mainstream competition - both from "valid" alternative viewpoints and crackpots. All that's different about internet journals are the lower costs, barriers to entry, and publication delays.)
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Really? Are you serious?
The name of the journal " Faux Spurious Journal."
"pear reviewed articles" - PEAR reviewed? Reviewed by a piece of fruit?!? Huh? huh?
The subscription is payable in BitCoins - OK, not so bad.
"We accept all articles - with a small fee - because of academic" academic what? I never finished the sentence.
" when the Editor (*snicker*) likes you." - I mean please!
And the last:
"Heywood Yablowme, Ph.D.
University of Nigeria"
God! If I'm gonna write this stuff and get taken seriously, I mean, I have no reason to live!
As a PhD who was, for a brief period, a world expert in a certain obscure branch of DNA technology:
The idea that people don't know what the real journals are is ludicrous.
In any field, there are 10 or 20 to journals; most scientists spend most of their time in no more then 20 or so journals; you can easily verify this by looking at the citations in any scientific paper.
However, the are a lot of not very good and bad papers; some are sleazy efforts to promote some companies products; others are just the normal work product of scientists (sturgeon's rule applies)
So, driven by profit motive and the desparate need to publish so as to obtain tenure, journals arise to fill the need
However, everyone who is not an idiot knows what the small number of decent journals in their field are.
You tell me another field [than medicine] that comes even close [to having as much trouble actually doing good science].
Easy: Economics. You have similar, if not greater, problems conducting controlled experiments, especially in macroeconomics, and there's even more money and politics involved.
They also have funding bias by interested parties.
For instance: The Federal Reserve Bank has spent enormous amounts of money supporting economics jourals and departments, as have governments.
Is it any wonder that Keynsianism - with its abysmal record of failed predictinos and its support of government and bank looting of the population by inflationary printing and pumping - is mainstream, while the Chicago and Austrian Schools are considered "crackpot"?
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
There is a relatively recent scam of announcing fake conferences, sometimes with the name of a real one, gathering the registration fees, and disappearing. Sometimes they steal the real conference's entire web site to make it look real.
One long-running conference shut down within the last year or so because the fake clones were having such a big impact that they couldn't get enough paper submissions or registrations anymore.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
but the Antarctica Journal of Mathematics has such a great webpage.
It would seem that scientific publishing in the current model is on the way out. Let's look at some of the problems.
Tenure and status are influenced [highly] on publication. Thus, there is an incentive to publish trivial results, to publish results using shaky statistical reasoning, and to publish erroneous and fraudulent results. (Example)
Because of the emphasis on "quantity" instead of "quality", few results are independently verified. (Example)
Journals demand that scientists turn over the rights of publication in order to get published. The journals, in turn, charge outrageous fees to view the work - so high, that most of the work is inaccessible to the general public. (Example)
The fees are growing so large that smaller universities can no longer afford journal subscriptions. (Example)
The journals do not pay for peer review, or editing, or (in the modern age) even printing and binding. So far as anyone can tell, they are rent-seekers; they provide no services of note to the scientists, their readers, or the community in general. (Example)
It is entirely possible to masquerade as a scientific journal. In fact, journal quality is a spectrum that contains completely bogus, slightly spurious, mostly useful, and high quality. Being published by a notable company such as Elsevier is no guarantee of quality. (Example)
There is enormous monetary value in published papers which validate the particular positions or opinions. (Example)
These are just off the top of my head. I'm sure people can find other problems with the current system. Sadly, I can't think of any way to fix the current system. It has so many inherent problems that we should probably transition to a different model, but I don't know what should be.
Like global warming?
I get the impression that businesses calling themselves "journals" are reviewing and publishing legitimate scientific works from legitimate scientists... But isn't that what a journal is supposed to be? This is some weird propaganda put out by Elsevier. I thought slashdotters WANTED more indie open-access scientific publishers?
I'm sorry but as someone working in research I have to say that these fake journals are causing problems in our mailboxes (i.e. more spam to filter), otherwise they don't matter at all. What I mean is, those who wish to publish, will either know the relevant journals of their area, or - if they are early in their careers - their supervisors and colleagues will know them.
Additionally, in all normal research institutes and universities people will want to publish in journals that have a registered - and not negligible - impact factor, which the fakes will not have.
Also, when looking into a journal that you never published in, the first thing you look at is the IF, the second thing you look at is the organization backing it, and the third thing you look at are the members of the editorial board. All have to be at least somewhat relevant. If you can't judge it, always ask someone from your field with more experience. It's not hard to get such help.
So, while the high number of fake journals seems high, I'd say those who willingly (silly) or unknowingly (ignorant) publish in them deserve what they end up with.
As always, as a researcher, what you publish is what people will judge you by, so always be inquisitive, careful and selective.
I am putting myself to the fullest possible use, which is all I can think that any conscious entity can ever hope to do.
If the journal does peer review, and has a broad collection of qualified degree'd reviewers. Is it still fake?
Or just a new entry trying to break the journal cartel that helped kill Schwartz?
"scientists know this is a problem. They just don't know how to stop it."
Seriously? They don't know how to stop them?
Well, I've only put a total of 60 seconds of thought into this:
-Establish an industry guideline on how article review should happen that is respected by the general audience.
-Establish a name for this standard "Estra Special Gold Platinum Peer Review Whatever"
-Get the respected journals to adopt the standard to keep the riff-raff out
-Journals without the extra special seal on the front will be of dubious value to anyone and everyone.
-Make profit off of for the audits necessary each year to insure integrity among those who want the credentials
You are telling me that they could not come up with a better idea than that after giving it serious thought for years?
Warning: Teh poster of this messaeg is lysdexic
The only science I care about is published in reputable journals.
Like the discovery of "N rays". http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N_ray
And the discovery of "Potassium Flares" in the spectra of stars. http://adsabs.harvard.edu/full/1967PASP...79..351W
Not to mention the discovery of Cold Fusion by Pons and Fleishmann. http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/0022072889800063
What exactly is the difference between a 'fake' journal and a 'real' journal? How much you pay?
A journal is fake if it is not published by Elvesier Springer-Verlag, Foster-and whatever or one of the established publishers who have been publishing for at least 50 years
After all those publishers have interests to protect. Those are to have a "real" system of journals where the publishers get paid to publish the articles, get paid a lot for subscriptions, and get paid a lot to access the articles electronically, and where the biggest amount of labor is done by editors and peer reviewers who offer up their work for free.
I've got a great idea for a doctoral thesis - Needs a little work, but it's something about the proliferation of online journals and the impact on....hmmm....executive compensation? No, maybe carbon emissions? Interest rates and liquidity?
Seriously?!? In a series of post discussing how can we authenticate the veracity of a publisher you propose that the government should be the final arbiter of what is true and what isn't?
Even worse, you suggest that the government should have final say as to who gets to speak publicly. Which government agency gave you permission to express that opinion?
Right, which is why we've got rampant inflation and a devalued currency. Like the Austrian and Chicago schools have been predicting to happen any time now, for 4+ years.
Don't shame Answers In Genesis because they're real because God told them they were.
Trying to keep up with fake or illegitimate journals sounds impossible with the potential rate they can expand. Instead create a curated whitelist of known reputable journals. Maybe to add new or obscure journals require a minimum number of votes before a review committee endorses the journal. A nice extra step would be an optional whitelisting committee and public rating of each journal as well as good summaries of focal areas.
As for the genesis of such a committee, start with offers to join to department heads from all tier 1-4 university in the US and Europe (allow them to round-robin responsibility every n years within their department following their first "term"). Allow committee members to decide what subject areas in which they are involved (due mostly to STEM subject area and expertise overlap).
While I would like the cryptanalyst's public key signing strategy, it's highly flawed. We don't know the credentials of the signers, and the potential signer pool is too unlikely to be filled with people we directly know and trust. Sure, with so many department heads, lots of unreliable data will be introduced, but it will only be noise at best (assuming it does not become a California textbook + Feynman type situation).
Dear Fellow Scientist,
It has come to our attention that you are looking to find an academic journal that not only presents the most cutting edge information, but one that embodies world class professionalism.
JCRS has a long history publishing innovative and informative articles that have furthered human knowledge in a number of disciplines. Among the organizations that subscribe to our journal are: Bethesda University of California, Bakke Graduate University, EUCON International College, and Pacific Islands University. These universities are all members of Transnational Association of Christian Colleges and Schools, which is recognized by the United States Department of Education and the Council for Higher Education Accreditation.
We are also pleased to include submissions from Bob Jones University. This is highly regarded institution who provides some of the leading curriculums for children in home schools, and has been approved for some state funded schools in the state of Louisiana.
Thank you for your time and we look forward to providing you with some of the most sophisticated research available
Best Regards,
Dr. Flat Earth
D6 63 0D 70 89 81 BB 8E 7B 7C 5F 5D 54 EA AB 73
> The journal Nature even published an entire issue on the problem a couple of weeks ago.So again, scientists know this is a problem.
"even"? "even"? oh well then... Come on. I smell bias in this submission. It doesn't mention that Nature is owned by an academic publisher making $$$. Those publishers hate open access journals. If they accuse these fake journals of being there to make a profit, isn't that what Nature's owners are in the business for too? It may also be an attempt to smear genuine open access journals with a broad brush.
> The journal, along with several others like it, was published by Elsevier. Go figure.
That's terrible. Can someone please contact Jeffrey Beall and tell him to add Elsevier to the fake journals list.
Thank God! We nearly let that one get through!
Not to troll, but it's still almost impossible to question the "science" behind various studies posted here on slashdot and similar sites. It's sad how gladly we will accept anything that is published as a scientific study, without question. Us nerds need to remember that science is a methodology steeped in scepticism; it's not a certification.
The problem is not so much the rise of fake science journals (like the one started to get the "sasquatch genome" published...) but rather uncritical readers and especially journalists that package everything "sciencey" as The Truth. Among scientists, the value of a publication is reputation based - a journal with a high science citation index (so citations in newspapers do not count, only other scientific publications that have been accepted into the list of indexed journals) does provide more trust than one lacking any such measure at all. Despite this, citation index is also not everything (journals like Nature and Science like the spectacular stories, which often turn out wrong) and a scientist will thus also remain sceptical about findings found in such journals until they have been independently repeated directly or indirecly by follow-up studies.
The thing is we're not talking about the idiots in the mainstream media vs the idiots with blogs, we're talking about scientific journals and the thing which differentiates the two is peer review.
Without peer review, the publication of a scientific study, no matter how well researched is no different than anything you read in the newspaper. That is to say it's just some idiots opinion. Having just some idiot's opinion come out of something which claims to be a scientific journal is a scary prospect for everyone. From a matter of practicality none of us have the expertise to personally read every scientific paper we might see referenced somewhere, let alone actually properly analyse it and try to replicate the results. We trust the reference because the journal has credibility, because it's supposed to be peer reviewed. If we can't tell the difference between peer reviewed and non peer reviewed journals then we're left essentially with the options of trusting everything we see referenced or nothing we see referenced, neither of which is good for creating an informed society.
Yes, this is just more positioning so that the "consensus" of what is good research or not is determined by who is involved. There would be no problem with "fake" journals if people were taught not to blindly trust what they read to begin with.
yes, because science and reason are completely coddled in emotions such as 'hate'...and obviously when the declaration of independence said "all men are created equal" it must've only meant the people who agree with you, right?
if there's a group who doesn't deserve the protections of the constitution, it is made from crybabies like you who can't handle criticism and want big mommy government to ban it.
Digital libraries with actual librarians.
You are correct, trust nothing. Peer review is not what it is cracked up to be. It is better than nothing, but still only gets you to 80-90% wrong rather than 99% wrong.
Find those fake journals and submit them SCIgen papers.
New Economic Perspectives
When the Declaration of Independence said "all men are created equal," it certainly didn't include men with black skin, Native Americans, or women either --- no idea how these groups overlap with the "people who agree with" the GP poster. I'm not in the category of agreeing with the GP poster either (about free speech being something "deserved" rather than protected regardless of personal merit; I don't disagree that Republicans "poison science with their hate"), but that puts me equally at odds with anyone else, including the parent poster and writers of the Declaration of Independence, who've got their own narrow criteria about who "deserves" societal protections.
I am largely of the opinion that non-classified publicly funded research should be public domain, at least for the sake of reading and learning. Let them patent the crap out of research and benefit from their work but I should not have to pay anywhere from $20 - $200 to read a document that my taxes paid for. It's total bullshit.
...would rather have it as an exposé (pour les initiés) after meaningful peer review. ;-)
If you are just starting out in a tenure-track position, you have about five years to show that you are capable of pulling in funding, getting talks accepted to conferences, and publishing papers that get cited. It's easy to say that fake journals are simple to spot because "everyone" knows what the real journals are, and besides, I wouldn't waste time publishing anywhere but in the best journals... True if you are still a PhD student or postdoc, but wait until your adviser's name no longer appears on your author list. Suddenly results that you know you could have published in a top journal are being scrutinized by referees at a bread-and-butter "specialty journal" who have no reason to believe in your competence.
Now imagine you get an email from a shiny new open-access journal asking you to be on their editorial board. You think "gee, I'd like to support open-access" and hey, look at that, someone I know is already on the editorial board. Suddenly you are getting phone calls asking for the title of the talk that you have been invited to give at a conference in Vegas (for which you are certain to be billed after the fact). And you find out that your job as an editor is to submit papers to their journal. You of course don't want to, because a paper with zero citations is worse in many ways than no paper at all. But your doe-eyed grad student, who has just had a string of bad luck, really needs a paper for their CV. You feel responsible for this person's future and guilty that their project isn't producing ground-breaking papers every other week. So you let them write up a paper for this crappy journal, which is when you find out that they charge even their editorial board for "publication fees." And the best part is that, when you politely explain to them that you can't afford $3000 to publish a paper no one will ever read, they start negotiating the price with you! Classy.
Then there are the legitimate journals and conferences that are put together by, for example, a bunch of foreigners that you have never heard of. It's neigh impossible to determine the legitimacy of such things and, because of your recent experience serving on an editorial board, you are extremely skeptical. The end result is that we are right back where we started; only participating when we see other scientists who we know and respect. But, see problem above--they only need to con one person into lending their name before it cascades. (And good luck getting your name removed from their editorial board.) It creates a chilling effect for unknown/up-and-coming/young scientists to organize conferences or to try to innovate in the publication/conference sphere.
Fake journals are a symptom of a broader problem, which is for lack of a better term the "neoliberalization" of science. Each science has a few gatekeeper publishers who we all trust and who therefore has editors that we've all heard of. We read them, we cite them, and we know that any new journals they roll out will likewise be active and highly cited. If you want to have access to such journals, you must be at an academic institution that can afford massive subscription fees to thousands of journals. Papers are, however, the currency of academic science, so academics will expend enormous effort to get grant money to do research to ultimately publish a paper. These fake journals have spotted a nice opportunity to skim some of that money the same way spammers work, by relying on that 1-2% that gets duped into publishing a paper, once, or agreeing to serve on an editorial board, once, or agreeing to an "invited talk," once. And the closer they are to an industry, the worse the problem. Drug manufacturers, for example, have a profit motive to publish garbage in pseudo-peer-reviewed journals with real-sounding names.
Fake journals, the publish-or-perish model, the evaporation of research funding, the over-production of PhD scientists, etc. have combined with the power of the Internet and digital publishing to, ironically, push science back to exactly wh
Actually, I wrote my thesis on life experience.
matches the fake science of the Anthropogenic Global Warming scam. They have to have places willing to publish their nonsense without proper review to
gain funding, to publish more fake science.. it's a supply and demand world...
http://slashdot.org/submission
Is it any wonder that Keynsianism - with its abysmal record of failed predictinos
Someone who reads conservatives blogs demonstrating the inverse relationship between competence and confidence.
Like all pain, suffering is a signal that something isn't right
If it was about the content, they wouldn't charge for a submission, but pay the person delivering them actual content. Like they used to do with newspapers, people or press bureaus would get paid if their submission got printed. This is about money and "reputable" academic journals will only print papers that will look good to their subscribers and on top of that, require a hefty fee from the person wanting to publish.
However much I hate online music sales websites, there should be at least two good online websites/blogs where you can publish your paper. Maybe crowd source the review? You start off with reviewers that are well known editors, they will give both articles and crowd sourced editors points for quality. People submitting papers will get a period where the "raw" paper can be commented on by editors and they can fix anything the editors mention, or withdraw the paper. Withdrawal will give you negative points, to keep trolls and "sponsored" research out. You may need to have two sponsors per university vouch for the paper before you can get it submitted, to wield out fake identities and plagiarism. I'm sure there are other details to thought of, but something like this might actually work and because of the model, the cost will be relatively low and could probably be covered by advertisements. Elsevier and others may not like it, but once a website like this will gain momentum, publishing scientific papers may finally enter "web 2.0". So, who's up for it?
I was promised a flying car. Where is my flying car?
Universities need accreditation.
Will future journals need accreditation or at least some kind of "grade" from a recognized, trusted "grader?"
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
You trust things just because of the source? I learned a hell of a long time ago that even a working clock is sometimes wrong.
Given that I can't trust anything without verifying for myself that it isn't complete bullshit, these "fake" journals can be far more useful to me, just as long as they are free to read, because if it isn't free to read then it doesn't matter how much quality review goes into the publications as I won't get to read them anyway.
Lack of peer review also makes my task of sorting useful information from garbage easier. With peer review, some moron can write up a paper about some nonsense, get it rejected, and refine it until it makes enough sense to pass peer review, at which point it's much more difficult to identify it as bullshit. Without peer review, they can publish immediately, and everyone can discover with relatively little effort that the paper is complete nonsense.
So I guess that's how it goes. "Real" journals with intense peer review are wonderful for people who have no intention of reading the articles within, but instead assuming everything published is absolutely true, whereas "fake" journals with no peer review are best for those who want to read articles for free and want it to be easier to spot the bullshit articles.
The Times certainly values heritage and prestige. fair enough, but these journals that our outside establishment academia are a threat to that establishment prestige, just as internet-only news sites are to The Times. And no objective person could deny that the Times, like most news outlets, has a "point of view", also known as "bias".
If you aren't powerful enough to form up alliances with Federal prosecutors and harass people so heavily that they off themselves out of grief, then your journal is FAKE, pussy!
There are plenty of bad articles in good journals, true; however even if you point out it's not a difference in kind there's surely a large difference in degree. It doesn't give anyone ammunition to say anything negative about the non traditional models (e.g. plos). All these fake journals are parasitic on the reputable journals that have a rigorous peer review whether they are for profit or are completely voluntary, print or online only.
They also predicted that there is no way to escape the crash precipitated by an arbitrary credit expansion (Greenspan monetary policy and the housing bubble).
For the last 4+ years the Keynesians have borrowed and spent over $5T and the Fed has pumped trillions in additional credit into the economy with no real recovery. This can only end with a collapse of the currency. If the Euro and the Yen were not in trouble, there's no way the dollar would be this strong.
I hope you don't trust The Fed when they tell you that there is no inflation. What do you think this stock-market run-up is all about if not asset price inflation? Have you looked at food prices lately? Notice any package down-sizing to hide price increases?
The majority of landmark cancer studies CANNOT BE REPLICATED...
http://science.slashdot.org/story/12/04/06/139231/majority-of-landmark-cancer-studies-cannot-be-replicated
Peer review addresses the consistency of the logic, and the data analysis, but raw data isn't checked; so GIGO often gets through. Data is more likely to be checked during replication, which happens less often; original research is sexy, replication is grunt work.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
to be fair, in requesting copy-right they do actually need the right- to -copy your work in order to legally publish it.
In case you don't see two posts by Anonymous Coward, I'll expand on what they said:
A journal doesn't need a copyright assignment just to reproduce and distribute a given article. It can also do so under license from the author, and this license can become nonexclusive after n months. Requiring an assignment or decade-long exclusive license is a business model decision, not a legal decision.
typically you can self-publish the final draft of your PDF on your personal website without conflicting with their copyrighted typeset version
That's called a "preprint", if I'm not mistaken. But do all major scholarly journals allow making preprints available to the public? And are authors of articles published in a journal allowed to cite preprints, or does the author's institution have to subscribe to the journal that published each cited article?
The real problems are that scientists don't actually read and judge each others work, they just count the number of publications, and then there is the problem that the majority of articles that are published in prestigious journals aren't repeatable anyway. So maybe if the scientific community paid more attention to actual content and less to idiotic metrics like how often one is published this wouldn't be a problem. But then what would they do to get grants if they actually had to produce....
As an academic standard remove publishing quota for professors and let it be a sum of publishing & review. To create valid knowledge, you need both people who create knowledge and also individuals who can filter out the crud.
I've met professors who genuinely love teaching; letting them filter out the garbage is a lot less work than trying to concoct papers and can't be any less valuable.
If it's cited in any Murdoch owned property, probably a Faux Academic Journal.
Read PZ Myers' take on this subject, http://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2013/04/09/the-dark-side-of-open-access-journals/
The biggest problem isn't the scam journals -- they are easy to spot and only a short-term bump. The bigger problem is how the debate around them is standing in the way of producing a better journal system, that would fix problems in the mainstream journals as well. The NYT is indicative of this -- it almost conflates "predatory" with "open access".
So again, scientists know this is a problem. They just don't know how to stop it.
Hey, I have this really cool idea. I call it Hubs and Authorities ; the idea is that there is peer review and the best-reviewed journals are considered the best journals to send your paper to! Whaddya think?
DNA is a Turing machine. You, however, being dynamic and emergent, are not.
It's not that there's no inflation, it's that it's very low. Like historic lows. Certain goods have had spikes, mostly due to competition with the emerging world and due to diversion of food to fuel stupidity. Higher inflation would be a _good_ thing because real inflation requires wage inflation, but doesn't inflate the amount you owe in your debts. Inflation is something you should put into calculations when getting a mortgage. If your mortgage takes 30% of your salary now, and there's 5% inflation (but low interest rates like we have now) you'd be crazy to get a 15 year instead of a 30 year. The dollars that you use to pay off the second 15 years would be worth much much less to you than they are now.
You don't have to trust what the Fed tells you: http://bpp.mit.edu/ and http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/04/01/billion-price-update-2/
The rich, the "rentiers" are the people who cry foul about inflation. People working for a living shouldn't, it raises their wages and ameliorates their debts.
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There is a kind of funny unspoken assumption going on here; the _work_ is not being judged on its own merit.
Read the comments here and it becomes apparent that _careers_ in academia rest not on _what_ you published, but _where_ you published. But if the concern is good science, no worries.
It depends, therefore, on what you use the publications for. If you are looking for articles relevant to your field, get everything you can and then judge it on its own merits. Poor quality articles will stand out if you know your field, regardless of who published them. But if you publish simply to be recognized by people who likely won't read your papers, that is by recruiters, then you have to play the game as it exists.
So it's really a question of what the publications are used for.
"Consensus" in science is _always_ a political construct.
You could always pressure Mozilla and Google to divert known 'fake' journals to a page warning the user...
How to stop? Make journal articles free. Eliminate the profit motive. And suddenly legitimate science is the only kind that survives.
Let's Evolution follows its course...