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Science Journals Caught Publishing Fake Research For Cash (vice.com)
Tuesday a Canadian journalist described his newest victory in his war on fake-science journals. An anonymous reader writes:
In 2014, journalist Tom Spears intentionally wrote "the world's worst science research paper...a mess of plagiarism and meaningless garble" -- then got it accepted by eight different journals. ("I copied and pasted one phrase from a geology paper online, and the rest from a medical one, on hematology...and so on. There are a couple of graphs from a paper about Mars...") He did it to expose journals which follow the publish-for-a-fee model, "a fast-growing business that sucks money out of research, undermines genuine scientific knowledge, and provides fake credentials for the desperate."
But earlier this year, one such operation actually purchased two prominent Canadian medical journals, and one critic warns they're "on a buying spree, snatching up legitimate scholarly journals and publishers, incorporating them into its mega-fleet of bogus, exploitative, and low-quality publications.â So this summer, Spears explains to Vice, "I got this request to write for what looked like a fake journal -- of ethics. Something about that attracted me... one morning in late August when I woke up early I made extra coffee and banged out some drivel and sent it to them."
He's now publicizing the fact that this formerly-respectable journal is currently featuring his submission, which was "mostly plagiarized from Aristotle, with every fourth or fifth word changed so that anti-plagiarism software won't catch it. But the result is meaningless. Some sentences don't have verbs..."
But earlier this year, one such operation actually purchased two prominent Canadian medical journals, and one critic warns they're "on a buying spree, snatching up legitimate scholarly journals and publishers, incorporating them into its mega-fleet of bogus, exploitative, and low-quality publications.â So this summer, Spears explains to Vice, "I got this request to write for what looked like a fake journal -- of ethics. Something about that attracted me... one morning in late August when I woke up early I made extra coffee and banged out some drivel and sent it to them."
He's now publicizing the fact that this formerly-respectable journal is currently featuring his submission, which was "mostly plagiarized from Aristotle, with every fourth or fifth word changed so that anti-plagiarism software won't catch it. But the result is meaningless. Some sentences don't have verbs..."
Try that with real science journals and see how far you get.
Say...: The Analyst, Analytica Chimica Acta, Beilstein Journal of Organic Chemistry, Polyhedron, Acta Physica Polonica, Molecular Physics, Applied Optics...
The problem here is what the media defines as "science". They don't really know what they are talking about.
Like any scientist would take something called the "Journal of Clinical Research & Bioethics" seriously. Ha! You can tell by the name it is bogus and has nothing to do with real science.
...a political activist that also wants to take credit for advances actually developed by engineers, entrepreneurs and lay inventors.
That's the most disgusting anti-intellectualist bullshit that I read today.
Half the scientists that I know are barely aware of politics, so it's hard to know how you came to this conclusion.
You do realise that the idea of a peer review is for others to replicate the research and attempt to come to the same conclusions from their own datasets, right?
No. This is wrong. I have peer reviewed nearly a hundred papers over my career, and I have never replicated the research. I read the paper, see if it makes sense, and if the conclusions are supported by the data. Sometimes I recommend the paper be rejected outright, sometimes I suggest revisions for clarification or completeness, sometimes I recommend that paper be published as-is. Typically I will spend a few hours to do the review, for research that would take a year or more to replicate.
Peer-review can detect sloppy writing and incompetent research. It rarely catches outright fraud.
So you're saying we need to destroy the planet in order to "prove" that we're destroying the planet to your satisfaction?
That seems a bit counter-productive.
do realise that the idea of a peer review is for others to replicate the research and attempt to come to the same conclusions from their own datasets, right?
You are entirely wrong. That's simply not what "peer review" means. That's a step after peer review, which BTW almost never happens. Peer review is simply a methodology check: did this research use accepted best practices.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
If you read the article closely, you'll learn that fake journals publish fake research papers. What a surprise.
Let's see him get his phony paper published in Nature, Annals of Mathematics or the Reviews of Modern Physics. Then we'll have something to talk about.
This is just another story from the hard Right (National Post was started by Canadian con-man Conrad Black) which seeks to convince people that you can't trust those crafty scientists so it can make it easier to get the yokels to believe whatever garbage they want them to believe.
You are welcome on my lawn.
It depends on the field a little. We work in material science and about 2-3 times a year we will attempt to replicate work as part of our peer review of other's work. We have all the kit and can usually run a couple of experiments in a few days and have them analysed in house. Again, it depends on the field and the more general approach is as the parent poster outlines.
"If they do otherwise y are blamed," -- y was not defined beforehand, nor was x... But Y?
"for example the sort of actions which people in a prisoner-of-war camp have been force to perform." -- Use the Force! English conjugations are so freaking difficult!
"What sort of acts, we must ask, should be we call compulsory?" -- I didn't find the sentence in which he accidentally a whole verb, but I did find where the verb ended up!
"It is by reason of erroneous reasoning of this kind that we become unjust and in general evil, or worse, slytherins" -- Aristotle . . . was he in Gryffindor or Ravenclaw?
"for who would bear fardles unless the person who does not understand these acts involuntarily?" -- and some editors should fall upon their bodkins
"But that is a topic for another day." -- This is probably the only sentence which is good enough for a fourth-grade paper . . . not good enough to get a good mark, of course.
You've claimed repeatedly that something better can be done. I used to work in science and published a reasonable number of papers (and have reviewed considerably more). How much journals suck and how to make them better is a really popular pub topic among scientists.
Turns out it's really hard and there are no easy solutions. So, instead of telling us how things ought to be better actually make a suggestion. Otherwise it's just abstract complaining about how things aren't good enough.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
No, peer review is the part of the system we need to keep. Replace the journals with websites, and invite peer review on the site. Access problem solved, journal monopoly broken.
Perhaps it's time for reputable publishers and the academic community to get together and agree on some minimal standards about what it means to be a "reputable journal" or a "reputable publisher."
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Try that with real science journals and see how far you get.
You missed the point.
If you read even the SUMMARY of TFA, above, you'll see that the POINT was that the fake-journal operations are buying up REAL journals, with real reputations, and converting them into more pay-for-play fakes. (Their customers will no doubt be willing to pay even more for placement in a respected journal, before its reputation collapses.)
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Several methods I can think of. First, just leave the printing stage off, let any libraries that find that important just print off their own copies, and remove that excuse for high fees. That's like version 0.01.
All journals are available electronically for less than the paper copies. Professionally edited ones like Nature are always going to to cover the costs of staff. Other than that, many journals are now open access or allow open access papers to be published there. The latter since it's now a requirement by some influential funding bodies.
After that, you can experiment (which is sort of being done) with proper reputation systems to replace the "we're a big organization with $X, no one else can play" model. Sure - the big organizations would still dominate most of those, and scoring 'points' in such a system would still require money - but that money should hopefully go more towards people doing work, and less towards organization fees, licenses, etc. That would get you to something like version 0.35.
What? I don't really see what that's got to do with peer review, so a reputation system for WHAT. And more importantly, how is reputation gained? Without absolute concrete examples, your ideas are less than useless. Just about everyone in science has vague ideas about how to make things better.
Getting to this point would involve lots of scandals - but proper ones that really should happen. To get further, you'd want replace the flawed "because we're older and got more mentions" system with a proper interactive vetting process, where replications are worth a larger percentage, even if they don't get 'published'. You can start to bring the newer system into the hiring process instead of 'must have published in x or y' process we've got now. That would get you around 0.5.
Describe the mechanics of this vetting system. You seem to be confusing the peer review process with citations and both of those with academic hiring. They could all be improved, but what you've said is little more than "make it better using the internet".
To get further than that, you'd have to get outside parties interacting with the process better. Imagine a world where not only free access, but journalists would actually use it, because it's mostly as convenient as 'industry sources' info. That, and being able to contact often obscure scientists to ask a question without having to wait for days in administrative limbo as often.
We have these things called "telephones" and "email" where you can contact someone on the other side of the world almost instantly. You should try them, they're t'riffic. Journals almost always publish contact info and for everything else there's google.
But seriously, WHO. Who should "get" outside parties interacting better. Many papers are available online. For the ones that aren't you can just ask and you'll almost always get a copy. The difficult bit is reading and understanding them which might take 5 years of study.
Any system is going to have flaws - I just don't see the journals as useful to anything at this point, when expert gatekeeping can be done so much better in other circles.
Journals are an imperfect filter. All you've described is a vague notion for a different imperfect filter, but one that's probably even more work than the existing system.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
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Jeff Bezzon's Puppet
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Would sing high praises
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The Connecticut Compromise
You see no politician has true principles, except for the principle of seeking more power.