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Seven Science Journals Have A Dog On Their Editorial Board (atlasobscura.com)

Posted by EditorDavid on from the woof-reading dept.

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."

4 of 106 comments (clear)

  1. Academia is Pay To Win by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:Academia is Pay To Win by Vermonter · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Education costs have risen faster than any other cateogy for the last 20 years. Faster than housing or even healthcare.

      Well, when you make it really easy for people to get student loans, of course prices are going to go up. It's basic economics - if the demand increases, costs go up. Good or bad, it's one of the side effects of federal sponsored student loans. If you created federal mortgages that made it easier to people to buy homes, you would see home prices skyrocket as well.

    2. Re:Academia is Pay To Win by thegarbz · · Score: 1, Insightful

      That would allow them to weed out left and right and make sure that only the absolute best really graduate. Drop out rates of 90% should actually be the norm, at least when 100% can afford to enroll.

      Sorry but disagree. University is for serious education not for giving everyone a go. Dropout rates should be low and people should be weeded out before they get to that stage. I mean there's a whole lifetime of school leading up to university where attendance is high which could be used as an indicator.

      The last thing you want is a lecture hall with 1000 people where 900 aren't interested.

      I say this from experience. In Australia classes are assigned with fixed positions and those are filled based on talent from best to worst. Unfortunately engineering was not popular despite a high number of places available. The cut-off for acceptance showed there were people who failed a significant number of subjects in high school enrolled in engineering at our university. An engineering maths class room full of disinterested brain dead people who probably thought they were there to lean to drive trains was incredibly disruptive to everyone.

  2. stop reading and citing them by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.