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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."

3 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. 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.