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Seven Science Journals Have A Dog On Their Editorial Board (atlasobscura.com)
An anonymous reader writes:
A professor of health policy at Australia's Curtin University got seven different science journals to put his dog on their editorial board. The dog is now associate editor for the Global Journal of Addiction & Rehabilitation Medicine, and sits on the editorial board of Psychiatry and Mental Disorders. The professor says he feels sorry for one researcher who recently submitted a paper about how to treat sheath tumors, because "the journal has sent it to a dog to review." The official profile of the dog lists its research interests as "the benefits of abdominal massage for medium-sized canines" and "avian propinquity to canines in metropolitan suburbs."
An Australian news site points out that career-minded researchers pay up to $3,000 to get their work published in predatory journals so they can list more publications on their resumes. "While this started as something lighthearted," says the dog-owning professor, "I think it is important to expose shams of this kind which prey on the gullible, especially young or naive academics and those from developing countries."
An Australian news site points out that career-minded researchers pay up to $3,000 to get their work published in predatory journals so they can list more publications on their resumes. "While this started as something lighthearted," says the dog-owning professor, "I think it is important to expose shams of this kind which prey on the gullible, especially young or naive academics and those from developing countries."
Pay for the most expensive school, then load your CV with pay to publish articles, and eventually you will get grants and "win"!
If any industry needs disruption, it's the education industry.
The dog is on the editorial board to sniff out bullshit
I don't see the problem here. How is this any different from a real person using a stage name, pen name, or sock puppet? Any work credited to the dog is ghostwritten by the owner.
Its pretty simple, non peer reviewed generals do not represent good science and research. Stop citing them, stop reading them. People publish in them not necessarily because their results are bad, but because their research methods are trash and often unrepeatable.
Actually, all that this article shows that a minimum of seven science journals have a dog on their editorial board.
Look, our lab has published in standard pay walled journals, and in open access journals. They both put you through the usual peer review, which can be honest and thorough, quick and uncritical, absurdly overcritical and just plain silly sometimes. Each journal is different. Some journals are so bad that their editors can put their dog on the editorial board. Many are much better than that. But the scientific review process is so fractured and disconnected that there is no way to know which publications are reliable, and which are not. Even the top tier, pay walled journals publish crap sometimes, and even they have to retract some papers after serious problems are found. Opening up the review process to the public and making reviews more inclusive, honest and accountable (no anonymous reviewers) would go a long way to improving the system.
Paying $3000 to get your work published in an honest and properly peer reviewed open access journal is a good thing, it means that everyone can read the work for free. Fixing the existing peer review and scientific publishing problems is going to take a lot of concerted effort on the part of scientists and publishers.
A brain is a terrible thing to waste... Mind? That's debatable.
Global Journal of Addiction & Rehabilitation Medicine is published by Juniper Publishers, and Psychiatry and Mental Disorders is published by Austin Publishing, both on Beall's infamous list of predatory publishers.
If you don't know what a predatory publisher or journal is, it's basically a scheme to monetize the publication of fake or unpublishably bad science. Say you want to publish your vaccines cause autism paper; you pay a predatory journal a fee and they put your paper in the journal. To a layman who doesn't know what the real journals in the field, it looks indistinguishable from a genuine publication.
Bogus editorial boards are one of the key tipoffs that a journal is predatory. It's a hell of a lot of work to be on the editorial board of a real journal, and it's not easy to get invited to join the board of Nature or The New England Journal of Medicine. But if you look at the boards of predatory journals their editors are often on a ridiculous number of boards, more than a human being could handle.
Now if this guy got his dog on the editorial board of Lancet, that'd be stop the presses news: the sky would indeed be falling. But bogus is what bogus journals are in the business of.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
That's a big deal.
Why is Snark Required?
Silly me - I thought the main job of teachers was to teach. But apparently their main job is to write papers that are published, so that they can pad their resume.
I panicked for a second, I thought it said WOG.
Why? How bad was the dog's criticisms of the paper?
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Kenji Watts was the first afaik. Kenji joined the Union of Concerned scientists in Oct 2011?
He almost went to the "March for Scientific Consensus" too:
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2017/01/30/help-send-kenji-to-the-scientists-march-on-washington-event/
I thought the main job of coders was to code. But apparently their main job is to fork projects that are popular, so that they can pad their profile.
Why do these journals have a dog on their editorial board, but no cats? This is yet another example of the canocentric world that had to be changed.
Did the dog improve the overall quality of the reviews?
Dogs do sometimes have common sense which humans lack.
She was hired for her expertise in detection of trace compounds in gaseous media. Bonus: as a Staffordshire terrier, she could defend herself easily at conferences.
Pay for the most expensive school, then load your CV with pay to publish articles, and eventually you will get grants and "win"!
The first assumption is only valid in the US. Top-ranked universities in many countries outside the US are generally no more expensive for national students than any other university (in the UK they even used to be free). They are very selective on grades to get in though but that is something which costs you time and effort to acquire.
Secondly, any institute who accepts this pay-to-publish articles in dodgy, predatory journals in the CV of a prospective faculty hire is not doing their job. As someone who has sat on several faculty hiring committees, we don't just look at the number of papers published but where they have published and what they are about. Serious candidates need to have publications in journals that those in the field know about and have a good impact factor and the area experts generally read a few of the papers. Having a large number of papers in a dodgy, predatory journal will kill any chance of being hired.
That's one of the nasty things about this. They target those hoping for an academic position but who are unlikely to get one (otherwise they would not need to publish in these predatory journals). These publishers fleece them for money that people at this stage of their careers don't really have and then give them something which is likely to harm whatever chances they have of a permanent job. That's the best case scenario - if they actually managed to persuade a youg, but naive, researcher with decent results to publish with them it would actively harm their careers because it would probably be discounted as a worthless, vanity paper.
and you wonder why nobody takes science seriously anymore...
can't figure it you can you...
sad...
Find the iffy journals, submit a couple of fabricated papers, bingo! A 50+ y/o software engineer might get a new job.
In online academic journals, nobody knows you're a dog.
Last I checked, Oxbridge was about 50% ex-private school
This is certainly not true for Cambridge. The year I went there (well over 20 years ago) was the first year that those of us from state schools were in the majority and it's now ~62% and there are 8 institutes with a higher percentage of private school intake than Cambridge. Even Oxford has been dragged kicking and screaming into the 20th century and its intake is now over 50% from state schools.
So yes, private school gives you an advantage but it's the typical advantage of wealth: it makes things easier to achieve. So long as the advantage of wealth can be matched by additional hard work and effort on the part of those of us with less money then I've no problem with it. That certainly seems to be the case in the UK and Canada...and I say that as someone who went through a comprehensive state school and still managed to get into Cambridge and then academia.
There's no rule on the books saying a dog can't be on the editorial board.
Hey, my dog is the CEO of our company. Canine Entertainment Officer that is...
are not science journals. Medicine is not a real science, neither is psychology or any of the humanities. They can't or don't use the scientific method.
It's their fault.
They're the ones responsible cause they let all the dogs out on the internet.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
at least the dog wont be bribed....
How does the dog compare to her replacement?
Sadly, I wouldn't be surprised if she is doing a better job than the human she replaced.
(I read the article to check if the dog was male or female to get the gender right, but held back replacing "dog" with "bitch," which would be more accurate. I recommend rereading this entire thread, replacing "dog" with "bitch" for a more entertaining and still PC read).
It's nothing to be ashamed of. It's too hard for most people.
As the holder of a "big name brand" STEM PhD, I'll assure you that a decline decision is not just sour grapes. The process is much more like Survivor Island" than a meritocracy. I knew extremely bright students who washed out, and very mediocre ones who made it. I told a friend that I fantasized about successfully defending my dissertation, getting everything signed, and then just not bothering to turn in the paperwork. He understood perfectly. I didn't attend graduation ceremonies.
Are any of the dogs named "Incitatus", by chance?
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
During these times of publication deluge, the value of introducing random factors to cull the population can't be understated.
I'm not quite getting it why these dodgy journals keep being a problem. Why aren't there people keeping blacklists, or setting up some rating system? Publish in one of them an nobody will take you seriously any more. Cite a paper that has been published in one of them and your own paper is automatically assumed to be garbage quality. Soon enough nobody will feed money to these junk journals and they will die out with a whimper.
F.D.C Willard sends regards...
In the Star Trek movie series, it was announced that James T. Kirk cheated on the Kobayashi Maru test, and undefeatable program to teach learners about the experience of failure in a situation where they couldn't defeat the enemy and win.
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Now the relation to this story; it effing worked, didn't it? Now people are talking about it and even Slashdot has a post on it. Not only did he succeed, but now the "free advertising" has more people reading his initial work that wouldn't have even known it existed before. He succeeded. Bitch all you want, but it worked. The more you bitch, the more attention it'll get. See: Adolf Hitler, Julius Caesar, George Washington, Charles Manson, etc. The more you talk about his work and him, the longer his legacy will continue.