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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."
Fake journals let anything and everything in, so you can pretend you have lots of papers published. Some of them pretend to be prestigious jornals: can't get published in Nature or Science? Why not Nature and Science?
They're there in their room. You're on your own.
Or to push an agenda.
A famous example is the Australasian Journal of Bone and Joint Medicine, which published only articles favorable to Merck drugs and was paid for by Merck. There was no disclosure of the conflict of interest. Well-known scientists and doctors were added to the list of "honorary editors" without their permission.
The journal, along with several others like it, was published by Elsevier. Go figure.
Precisely like this one. Or should I say "Ron Paul's propaganda machine."