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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."
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.
And it's happening at a time when universities are replacing full faculty with very low-paid adjuncts who don't even get basic benefits.
The sad part is that of the three (housing, healthcare and education), higher education would be the easiest to reform, but university administrators and board members, who are increasingly coming from private industry, have little to no incentive to do so. I'm glad I got out of the game when I did.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Pay for the most expensive school, then load your CV with pay to publish articles, and eventually you will get grants and "win"!
Doesn't work. People evaluating your publication record (your dept. head, your dean, someone reading your CV when you apply for the next job) know which journals are junk pay-to-win rags, and not only discount those items, but then figure you don't know what the heck you are talking about since you even had those useless items on your CV.
Had you read the summary (not even TFA), you'd see that the "victims" are "the gullible, especially young or naive academics and those from developing countries". Not "the most expensive schools".
Funding agencies are even more discriminating. When your program has only 10-20% of the funds available needed to fund the incoming proposals, crap like this doesn't even make the first cut in a grant application. Why? There's not enough money available to fund the really good proposals. Go ahead, make my life as a proposal reviewer easier by giving me an excuse to move one of the huge stack to the "do not fund" pile.
If any industry needs disruption, it's the education industry.
Maybe: but if you want to make that argument, make one that holds water.
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.
I would even go further: A single paper in a dodgy journal on your CV can easily kill your career in science. It is a red flag that shows, that you lack one of the most basic skills any researcher should have. You show that you are unable to tell the difference between a real and a predatory journal and often it even shows that even your advisor was unable to do so. A PhD from a clueless advisor is almost worthless.
Quantity over quality is not a valid excuse. There are plenty of non-predatory, real lower rank conferences that will happily publish anything with only the slightest bit of scientific value.
Jan
Doesn't work. People evaluating your publication record (your dept. head, your dean, someone reading your CV when you apply for the next job) know which journals are junk pay-to-win rags, and not only discount those items, but then figure you don't know what the heck you are talking about since you even had those useless items on your CV.
Nope, it works up to a point. It helps to get a foot in the door. I have a student (and am posting anonymously for that reason) who obviously had some journal publications in his CV that I assumed were not really peer-reviewed. I read them. After I took the student, I discovered that, basically, all his publications were in such outlets. It was quite a surprise that an IEEE conference would publish pay-for articles in IEEE proceedings without requiring the author to appear at the conference. Ough.
Bottom line, the student is excellent. But, I would have probably not started considering him if he had zero publications in his CV (which would be the honest state give that the university he was from had zilch funding for research). He had five publications, all turned out to be self-published worthless stuff in the end, would have not passed peer review, but that hooked me to look further and eventually take him.
The effort he made to beef up his CV under the circumstances showed that he would make whatever effort necessary to get through. As I have said, he's an excellent student. Now that he's in a well-finded group in a Western university, he has many real well-cited publications.
I imagine this trick works much further in career in, err, third-world countries.
And you should be asking "why?" is it rising faster than any other category.
A large part of the 'cost' of education rising so fast is that public schools are being increasing defunded from public sources -- putting the cost of education to the student rather the state or fed. In 1996, the State of Michigan supported on average 85% of the total budget of the largest three research schools -- today they support less than 15%. Similar stories in most other states. The actual cost of schooling somebody at a public school, taking into account all funding sources has been flat or has gone down in most cases. That accounts for the rising cost of health care, energy, etc. that have been rising as well.
Private schools, however, have been increasing the price to match the apparent increase to students in the public sector. Since most private schools's students are eligible for federal loans, there is no incentive to keep the costs down.
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