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."
Probably the difference is that "real" journals use peer review among respected and knowledgeable research in the field, and hold the papers to a high and rigorous standard. A "fake" journal would allow anything in, just to make a profit and allow anybody with money to get their work published, with a pretense of quality peer review.
Hamsters are at least as feathery as penguins. HamLix
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
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.
I think the difference is peer review. With a "religious science" journal all you get are confirmation bias.
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.
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.
There are two different types of 'fakes' (and maybe more)
One is where a fake site is set up for a real journal, and suckers authors into submitting to it (and more importantly, paying for submission). It is basically phishing.
The other is what appears to the public (and potentially other academics) to be an academic journal that has no standards for submission other than the fee. It is good for submitting claptrap to later refer to.
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
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).
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.
A third class is politically/ideologically/commercially motivated journals, like the young-earth-creationism journal in the pharyngula link, or Elsevier's fake pharmaceutical journals. These will publish "research" supporting particular unscientific bullshit that serves the interests of a particular group, so that unqualified/uniformed decision makers (think, e.g., right-wing politicians wanting justification for unregulated pollution or teaching "creation science") can be handed "sciency-looking" reference to back up their policies, so they have something "equal" to fire back with when the "other side" brings actual scientific facts to the table.
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!!!!"
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!
One can hope that Elsevier's "real" reputable journals will stay "clean" because (a) their own journal-level management team are actually conscientious scientists, and (b) they are constantly subject to close scrutiny by experts --- every issue they publish gets read by the top minds in the field, so they'd be in hot water fast if they tried to pull any funny business. Reason (b) is something that didn't apply to Elsevier's fake Australian pharmaceutical journals: these were not intended to attract the interest/scrutiny of researchers in the field, but to provide realistic-looking "peer reviewed research" references that the drug companies could use in the regulatory approval process or for marketing blurbs ("proven 70% more effective according to research in ...!"). Elsevier is a nasty problem in the world of publishing; they are a for-profit enterprise (unlike most other major reputable journals, which are non-profit foundations) which has (over their long history) accumulated many reputable journals, but also has amoral profiteering scumbags for their top management (the type of folks who would aid and abet drug companies in potential mass murder by shoddily-tested drugs when they think they can make a buck and get away with it).
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.
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'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.
What? You mean that there are academics out there that have bias and agendas? Whodda thought?
Can you read, my son?
Precisely like this one. Or should I say "Ron Paul's propaganda machine."
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
Which category is this one: http://www.universalrejection.org/
> 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!
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?
That's genius. You can just casually drop at an interview, "And, of course, I've been published in Nature and Science," and sound like a total BAMF. What a brilliant scam.
Arrr, it be the infamous pirate, No Beard Pete!
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.
The fact that just dropping that you were published in a specific journal can lead to career advancement indicates the poor state science.
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.
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?
As there are two companies named Merck, and both are working in the same field, it would be nice to say which Merck you are actually talking about, Merck & Co., Inc, or Merck KGaA? (Both are among the largest pharmaceutical enterprises, with US$ 48 billion resp. US$ 14 billion annual revenue.)
A solution could be simply an open forum on a site like google scholar, so that a process similar to peer review can take place after the publication.
An additional advantage would be that people are then able to ask each other questions about scientific papers, and share experiences, etc.
If Pandora's box is destined to be opened, *I* want to be the one to open it.
Some "fake" journals have peer review, but it is really a group of professors teaming up, who already hold the same opinion, or support each others non-mainstream position in the respective fields. This can be problematic because it does not provide independent, skeptical review.
That said, main-stream journals are also not fair. Payment increased by a huge fraction (4x IIRC), countries are paying triple (publishing, reviewing and accessing), which effectively blocks out a large fraction of the population. see here for a introductory video. This leads to a big demand in cheaper publications also for legitimate research.
NB: The message above might reflect my opinion right now, but not necessarily tomorrow or next year.
Until the interviewer asks, "Wow, that's amazing! What did you publish in there?" And it becomes obvious that your papers aren't worth paper....
Yes, if the last 20 years have taught me anything, it's that interviewers are always well-informed on basic scientific standards, ask tough questions, and demand thorough answers.
Before anyone asks, the sky in my world is purple and simply beautiful.
"All these years believing you're the signified monkey, only to find out you're just a big hunk of nobody cares."
That's very unlikely to work in academia but there's a good chance it will work on your average half-witted HR department.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
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