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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
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.
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Why? How bad was the dog's criticisms of the paper?
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
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.
So quick to blame this on human corruption - for all we know, the dog was granted additional priority by other dogs on the editorial board.
*woof*
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