Hundreds of Researchers From Harvard, Yale and Stanford Were Published in Fake Academic Journals (vice.com)

In the so-called "post-truth era," science seems like one of the last bastions of objective knowledge, but what if science itself were to succumb to fake news? From a report: Over the past year, German journalist Svea Eckert and a small team of journalists went undercover to investigate a massive underground network of fake science journals and conferences. In the course of the investigation, which was chronicled in the documentary "Inside the Fake Science Factory," the team analyzed over 175,000 articles published in predatory journals and found hundreds of papers from academics at leading institutions, as well as substantial amounts of research pushed by pharmaceutical corporations, tobacco companies, and others. Last year, one fake science institution run by a Turkish family was estimated to have earned over $4 million in revenue through conferences and journals.

Eckert's story begins with the World Academy of Science, Engineering and Technology (WASET), an organization based in Turkey. At first glance, WASET seems to be a legitimate organization. Its website lists thousands of conferences around the world in pretty much every conceivable academic discipline, with dates scheduled all the way out to 2031. It has also published over ten thousand papers in an "open science, peer reviewed, interdisciplinary, monthly and fully referred [sic] international research journal" that covers everything from aerospace engineering to nutrition. To any scientist familiar with the peer review process, however, WASET's site has a number of red flags, such as spelling errors and the sheer scope of the disciplines it publishes.

Comments

Journals are tricky

[damn_registrars]

As a scientist I run in to this all the time. Everyone would love to get all their work into Nature, Science, and Cell; but they know the reality is that very little gets published in those journals. Then they look in to other journals with lower impact factors and they have to weigh a lot of factors - including costs to publish and the expected length of time to get a publishing decision. Some journals aren't forthcoming with either of those, either.

Then we see new open-access journals popping up with official sounding names all the time. They promise quick turn-around, low publication costs (sometimes even free), and their open-access setup is generally already compliant with NIH and NSF requirements. If all we want to do is get the manuscript out and move on, these can look very tempting.

What's the answer then? I don't know. Nobody does. BioXiv (and others like it) offer an interesting possibility but that isn't without pitfalls (not the least of which is that a paper there that gets rejected in a journal is somewhat more difficult to resubmit elsewhere).

Re:Journals are tricky

[sinij]

A dark secret is that even in peer reviewed journals that take peer review seriously you have bad papers. Bad, as in someone took unjustifiable liberties with methods and/or data to show correlation. It is nearly impossible to catch this in most fields, as information allowing to verify claims isn't part of 3000 or so words allowed by the journal.

I think peer review need to adopt a model that is close to open source - if you are publishing, you have to also open your data, so your findings can be independently verified by anyone, and not just 3 often not randomly selected peers.

Re:Journals are tricky

[drinkypoo]

What's the answer then?

Peer review of publications themselves, with results published to permit submitters to make intelligent selections. Maybe there ought to be a journal about journals.

Re:Journals are tricky

[ArhcAngel]

You mean like when Ancel Keys (a psychologist) took data on diets in regions around the world and hypothesized that heart disease was caused from eating fat? The only problem was he excluded data from his research that disproved his hypothesis. Like France where an extremely high fat diet showed very low instances of heart disease. His hypothesis was never proven but it has influenced our diets for the last 60 years. I switched to a ketogenic diet last year and am the healthiest I have ever been.

Re:Journals are tricky

[jellomizer]

The Publish or perish system is really at fault. It really puts more pressure on scientist trying to hype up their research, vs using their time to actually study, measure, modify... The actual science.

How much good science is going unnoticed because there is some low level scientist out there not getting noticed because he lacks the charisma to make a compelling journal entry.

Re:Journals are tricky

[Anonymous Coward]

congrats, you just invented impact factor

Re:Journals are tricky

[lgw]

... they have to weigh a lot of factors - including costs to publish ... What's the answer then? I don't know. Nobody does.

In fiction publishing, there's a clear, bright-line rule: any publishing arrangement in which money flows from the author to the publisher at any point in the process is a scam.* It's astonishing to those outside academia that it's different there. Heck, my one published academic paper paid a tiny honorarium IIRC, and they sent us some free off-prints, but that was ... more than 20 years ago.

*Obviously, if you're intentionally "vanity" self-publishing, knowing the books will never see the inside of a book store, it's not a scam, but I've only ever heard of one case where someone writing fiction made money that way with paper books.

Re:Journals are tricky

[Archtech]

Ancel Keys was a physiologist, not a psychologist. There is a difference.

In some ways Keys was an American archetype. His overriding concern seems to have been to build up his reputation, glorify himself, and belittle anyone who dared to disagree with him. The sad thing is that he was extremely clever and capable of conscientious work - until he got carried away by his cholesterol hypothesis. Then, when it was no longer possible to maintain that cholesterol in food was harmful, he switched to attacking saturated fat and red meat.

My favourite Keys episode concerns his "research" into the diets of Mediterranean peoples. His researchers inquired, rather perfunctorily, what people ate and drank in various countries.

They came to the conclusion that the people of Crete owed their good health and long lives to a diet low in meat; this was later developed into the "Mediterranean Diet". Unfortunately, one of the weeks during which the survey was carried out in Crete fell within Lent, when the local people fasted - avoiding meat among other foods.

Similar mistakes were made in countries such as Italy, France and Spain, whose people ate (and still do) far more meat than Keys admitted.

See, for an introductory account, https://www.diabetes.co.uk/in-...

Re:Journals are tricky

[mnemotronic]

As a scientist I run in to this all the time. Everyone would love to get all their work into Nature, Science, and Cell; but they know the reality is that very little gets published in those journals. Then they look in to other journals with lower impact factors and they have to weigh a lot of factors - including costs to publish and the expected length of time to get a publishing decision. Some journals aren't forthcoming with either of those, either. Then we see new open-access journals popping up with official sounding names all the time. They promise quick turn-around, low publication costs (sometimes even free), and their open-access setup is generally already compliant with NIH and NSF requirements. If all we want to do is get the manuscript out and move on, these can look very tempting. What's the answer then? I don't know. Nobody does. BioXiv (and others like it) offer an interesting possibility but that isn't without pitfalls (not the least of which is that a paper there that gets rejected in a journal is somewhat more difficult to resubmit elsewhere).

Isn't "Publish or Perish" the mantra for tenureship? As noted in the article, the journals contain a mix of actual research papers and total fiction. It's a bit disquieting to know that a doctor recommending some combination of medications or perform surgery has been getting his information from those totally fictitious papers published in an inadequately-reviewed journal.

So why would a person or group knowingly publish incorrect information with the intent of deceiving others? Someone, some person or group, has an agenda; an interest in achieving a specific outcome. Even if the interest is to support one cause or repress another, under that there's still some human being with a personal interest. What's the motivation? Personally I think it all boils down to fear or greed. And dig into the greed and you'll discover fear. So fear is bad. Unfortunately, fear is necessary. It helps keep us alive. It keeps most of us from making it onto the Darwin award list. So that provides a proposed direction for genetic research -- dial back the "fear" chromosome. < /rant >

Re:Journals are tricky

[Joosy]

In some ways Keys was an American archetype. His overriding concern seems to have been to build up his reputation, glorify himself, and belittle anyone who dared to disagree with him.

True! Only Americans are like that.

Re:Journals are tricky

[ShanghaiBill]

The Publish or perish system is really at fault.

So then what do we replace it with?

he lacks the charisma to make a compelling journal entry.

Writing a good paper has little to do with charisma.

Re:Journals are tricky

[Uecker]

There is only a problem if you think everything published in science must be true. This isn't the case and never was. There was a time, there was no peer review. And also otherwise good journals sometimes publish bad papers. So the solution for scientists is obvious: Do not believe everything you read. If a bad journal published only bad science, nobody will bother to read it and people who publish there do not gain reputation. So there is not really a problem for science... It is a problem though for stupid journalists who think every published article must be true or for stupid committees who judge applicants by the number of publications in peer-reviewed journals. If "fake" journals help getting rid of this stupidity, this can only be a good thing.

Having said this, there are definitely problem in science we need to address: And even the high-ranking journals often have standards which are too low in terms of weak statistics, clear descriptions, openness of data and code, etc.

Re:Journals are tricky

[damn_registrars]

the journals contain a mix of actual research papers and total fiction.

It's really, really, exceptionally hard to come up with a ratio of how many are made up. They come up, and they come up in nearly every journal you can think of, but how often do they make it through is really hard to determine.

In part this is due to how peer review works. Reviewers are there to read the paper and check it to make sure it is scientifically sound and that it meets the criteria of the journal. However, the reviewers are not paid to actually reproduce the experiments in said paper; indeed some papers go through that are done under such unusual conditions that it can be exceptionally difficult for anyone other than the author to reproduce the work exactly.

What's the motivation? Personally I think it all boils down to fear or greed

I would say the former more so than the latter. When scientists find themselves with their backs against the wall - and publications can mean more than just tenure they can often determine whether or not the scientist has a job at all - they may find themselves doing things for self-preservation that they would not otherwise endorse. Sure, some may do it for vanity but those I have known who have been busted for misconduct all did it to try to keep their jobs.

Re:Journals are tricky

[Nidi62]

I switched to a ketogenic diet last year and am the healthiest I have ever been.

Small sample size, but I recently switched to a "mostly" keto diet and am down about 10 lbs in the last 2 weeks after not losing weight while working out for the past 2-3 months. Cut out most carbs but still trying to keep fats in check to a moderate degree. Hoping I can keep up the pace.

Re:Journals are tricky

[Anonymous Coward]

I recently switched to a "mostly" keto diet

I'm glad to hear your low carb diet is working out for you, but there is no such thing as "mostly keto". Your body is either in ketosis or it isn't. Personally, I think you are very smart to not go into ketosis, but please don't pretend your doing something you aren't.

Re:Journals are tricky

[Anonymous Coward]

The Keto diet is just that... a diet. Someone can in fact be "mostly" keto. He (or she) specifically stated diet, not "mostly" ketosis.

Re:Journals are tricky

[Pinky's Brain]

Your body can be in ketosis for part of the day, it doesn't suddenly magic up extra glucose just because you ate 51g of carbs instead of 50.

Re:Journals are tricky

[Anonymous Coward]

We know the answer is definitely not to let fake institutions like WASET get away with taking money to publish papers (even a computer generated one like Svea submitted) with no review whatsoever. It doesn't matter if they're conning scientists or if the scientist knows they are an illegitimate operation, we can't let places like this erode science.

Re:Journals are tricky

[Phat_Tony]

That's right. My wife is a scientist, she has a PhD in pharmacology.

Talking to her through her undergrad, PhD, and Postdoc, I identified what I believe are three separate problems in science that each exacerbate the others and collectively are having a devastating effect on the field:

1. Publish or perish.

2. Nobody reports negative results

3. Most scientists who are below the level of Principle Investigator for a lab are being assigned their projects.

So it used to be, back when my parents got their doctorates, that a new scientist joined a lab, proposed their own research, conducted the research, wrote a thesis, and then defended it before committee. If the committee was decent, it didn't matter if the results were positive or negative. They grilled the candidate on how they generated their hypothesis, why the implications would be important whether positive or negative, how they set up the experiments and conducted them, how they analyzed and presented the results - basically, the candidate had to prove they knew everything it takes to operate effectively as a scientist.

Maybe if the research was exceptional, the thesis advisor would also be recommended that it be submitted to a journal, but most of the theses just went to the institution's library. The point was to prove the candidate understood and could perform science as an academic exercise, not to contribute usefully to the field. Today that is completely different. Most PhD candidates are assigned a project by the PI of the lab they join. So right off the bat, you aren't differentiating people by the quality of their ideas, which is probably the most important trait for a scientist. Instead, the quality of the idea assigned to them is likely to have a huge impact on how their career goes. It's like randomly handing out career potential without regard for ability. And there is no point in a committee grilling them about the formation of the hypothesis or what positive or negative results would contribute to understanding, because they never came up with the hypothesis in the first place.

Hence got your bad project."

Then they have to have one or more papers accepted by peer reviewed journals to get their PhD. The papers are their thesis, and as long as they were accepted for publication, defending them is perfunctory now. Their acceptance is the only real test to get the PhD.

Which means nobody is trying to make sure the candidate actually understands and can perform science; supposedly the papers evidence that, but we all know that isn't really true now; the peer reviewers do not attempt to replicate the study or dig in deep enough to see if any of it is actually high quality work.

Not being able to publish negative results means that if you are assigned a project that ends up indistinguishable from the null hypothesis, you can waste years of your life based on a luck-of-the-draw assignment, with no regard to your ability. Or... you can fudge the data.

"Fudging the data" here doesn't even necessarily imply anything overtly malicious. Talking to people in the lab who'd discuss how experiment after experiment had failed to show the desired effect, and what experiment they were planning next to try to demonstrate it, my standard comment was "we need to pass a 95% confidence test, so we'd better plan about 20 experiments to prove it."

A possible 4th thing to list here is that the system now takes so long to get through, from undergrad to PhD to a Post Doc or two or three, that by the time anybody gets to be a PI and actually start pursuing their own research ideas, they're past the age past scientists were when they achieved approximately every major breakthrough in the history of science.

Re:Journals are tricky

[parkinglot777]

I recently switched to a "mostly" keto diet

I'm glad to hear your low carb diet is working out for you, but there is no such thing as "mostly keto". Your body is either in ketosis or it isn't. Personally, I think you are very smart to not go into ketosis, but please don't pretend your doing something you aren't.

The word keto diet is from 'ketogenic diet', not 'ketosis'.

Re:Journals are tricky

[Anonymous Coward]

What do you mean it's tempting? If you don't care where your work is published, then you shouldn't do it in the first place, because you are just saying "my work is so shit I can send it to this journal".

Re:Journals are tricky

[Anonymous Coward]

That's a difficult one. Once thing I know is that Einstein, Darwin... most of the big names in science would have not been able to succeed today. For goodness sake, even Edward Jenner (vaccine) would have been struck off today if he dared to demonstrate vaccinations today.

I guess is simply... publish? quality over quantity?

Re:Journals are tricky

[careysub]

Sorry but Nina Teicholz is a fraudster, who has been successful in building an empire pushing dangerous nonsense. This site (thescienceofnutrition.wordpress.com) provides excellent detailed exposures of her BS. What is come down to is that essentially nothing in her magnum opus "The Big Fat Surprise" is true, and the attacks an Ancel Keys are without merit. Teicholz is not mistaken, she is engaging in deliberate deception.

Don't believe me? Go to the site, read what Seth Yoder reveals about Teicholz's lies (and plagiarism) and then look up the references he decides and compare. I did this for a whole raft of his citations, and every single one of them checked out.

Re:Journals are tricky

[careysub]

More on Teicholz's errors, plagiarism and fraud.

Re:Journals are tricky

[Anonymous Coward]

That is only because French record a heart attack as sudden death, not a heart attack.

Re:Journals are tricky

[Archtech]

In some ways Keys was an American archetype. His overriding concern seems to have been to build up his reputation, glorify himself, and belittle anyone who dared to disagree with him.

True! Only Americans are like that.

I did not assert that all Americans are like Keys, or that only Americans have those characteristics. I said that Keys was typical, in some ways, of a certain type of American.

archetype
n noun
1 a very typical example.
2 an original model.
3 Psychoanalysis (in Jungian theory) a primitive mental image inherited from the earliest human ancestors and supposed to be present in the collective unconscious.
4 a recurrent motif in literature or art.

DERIVATIVES
        archetypal adjective
        archetypally adverb
        archetypical adjective
        archetypically adverb

ORIGIN
        C16: via Latin from Greek arkhetupon 'something moulded first as a model', from arkhe- 'primitive' + tupos 'a model'.

Re:Journals are tricky

[Archtech]

Sorry but Nina Teicholz is a fraudster, who has been successful in building an empire pushing dangerous nonsense. This site (thescienceofnutrition.wordpress.com) provides excellent detailed exposures of her BS.

A quick glance at the blog you cite shows that its author claims to debunk not only Nina Teicholz, but also Gary Taubes, Zoe Harcombe and Tom Naughton. From a heuristic point of view, that is more than enough to make me dismiss everything he says about nutrition.

There are two main schools of thought about dietary fats, meat-eating and vegetarianism. I have read enough - the three authors named above, and at least a dozen others - to be sure that they are right. In other words traditional human foods such as red meat and eggs are healthy and nourishing, and the artificial foodstuffs recommended by all the authorities since the 1960s - particularly highly-processed grains and sugar - are harmful in any but small quantities.

How can it be a "fake" journal...

[Anonymous Coward]

...if it contained real, actual papers?

Re:How can it be a "fake" journal...

[Anonymous Coward]

The papers are real, but often the "peer review" is just fake - no review happens at all. I believe Ars Technica covered this last year with an nice article.

Objective knowledge my ass

[Anonymous Coward]

Have you heard? Massive reproducibility crisis in all fields of science at the moment.

Re:Objective knowledge my ass

[Anonymous Coward]

Citation please.

Cancer science does have a reproducibility problem indeed (afaik), but "all fields of science" is a long shot that is simply untrue.

They are not fake, just alternative

[Anonymous Coward]

So, they actually publish the journal and organize conferences in meatspace, yet we are supposed to believe they are fake?
Those are not fake, they are quite real. May be we should just call them alternative to the mainstream?
Way to oppress the startups.

Re:They are not fake, just alternative

[Nidi62]

So, they actually publish the journal and organize conferences in meatspace, yet we are supposed to believe they are fake? Those are not fake, they are quite real. May be we should just call them alternative to the mainstream? Way to oppress the startups.

If they are publishing everything that is submitted without any type of peer review or adherence to scope of stated fields then it is fair to argue that they are fake journals. An "alternative" journal would be something like PLOS One as opposed to, say, the New England Journal of Medicine.

Re:They are not fake, just alternative

[pr0fessor]

If a restaurant makes food that sucks, has piss poor service, and eventually get's fined or closed down by the health department it's not a fake restaurant it's just a really bad restaurant.

If a journal has little to no piss poor review but still manages to publish the journal and organize conferences then it's a really bad publisher. If they are taking money and not making the journal or organizing the conferences then yes they would be Fake. (of course there are other things to consider also which weren't included in tfa)

Re:They are not fake, just alternative

[Nidi62]

If a restaurant makes food that sucks, has piss poor service, and eventually get's fined or closed down by the health department it's not a fake restaurant it's just a really bad restaurant.

If a journal has little to no piss poor review but still manages to publish the journal and organize conferences then it's a really bad publisher. If they are taking money and not making the journal or organizing the conferences then yes they would be Fake. (of course there are other things to consider also which weren't included in tfa)

Incorrect analogy. A shitty restaurant is, as you say, just a shitty restaurant. But a journal that doesn't provide any type of peer review or curating of submissions is like a restaurant that doesn't actually serve any food: they aren't really what they purport to be because they aren't providing an expected, essential service for their industry. Therefore, they are fake.

Re:They are not fake, just alternative

[pr0fessor]

TFA says they did review them and published with only a few changes even though the paper was bull so their review system is complete crap but isn't nonexistent. Basically it's a crap publication with little standards but it is real even though it produces a crappy substandard product.

     

Peer review vs. fake science

[sinij]

Peer review process is insufficient to guarantee scientific rigor is practiced. For example, you have whole disciplines, like gender studies, going off the deep end and into mysticism, unfalsifiable claims, and politically-driven demagoguery and peer review does nothing to curtail even the worst of these excesses.

So how are these pay to play journals are categorically different from, for example, a "legitimate" journal of Feminist Studies?

Re:Peer review vs. fake science

[Brett Buck]

Peer review can easily *enforce* all these ridiculous political biases. Essentially, you submit a paper to the very people who came up with the biases in the first place for their approval. Almost anything outside the 3 fundamental hard sciences is subject to this effect.

Re:Peer review vs. fake science

[Errol backfiring]

You mean like any publication in the economics field?

Re:Peer review vs. fake science

[sinij]

More so, even if you set out to disprove a paper - publishing "unable to duplicate findings" paper is even harder than methods paper. Almost nobody is interested in doing this, almost nobody would publish your results, and as such questionable papers go unchecked. This leads to "body of knowledge" poisoned by bad data.

Re:Peer review vs. fake science

[lgw]

Almost anything outside the 3 fundamental hard sciences is subject to this effect.

String theory says hi.

The bigger problem seems to be papers that contain no reproducible studies to begin with. Gender studies journals could, hypothetically, be full of good statistical research and reproducible measures and analysis.

Meanwhile, over in the world of bio-chem, people just make up synthesis steps (well, they try something resonable, it doesn't work, but they claim it does to make quota). At least those results are hypothetically falsifiable: some auditing has been done to show that maybe half of the work is fake, but at least it's possible to audit.

Re:Peer review vs. fake science

[Anonymous Coward]

Nah, the so-called hard sciences are hardly immune to herd effects. How could they be; we scientists are after all humans (at least as far as I know) and have human minds. We are, at the core, tribal hominid apes. Forming self-policing groups is very deep in our psyche.

I am not saying we should accept all the problems that derive from our ancestry. Of course not. I can be mitigated to a degree.

It would be interesting to see what happened if the switched from a peer review model to a, hmm, non-peer academic review model. Currently reviewers are usually chosen from a (usually small) pool of experts on the particular topic covered by the manuscript. Choosing at least one reviewer from non-related field might put more focus on methodological problems and clarity of expression, two common problems in academic papers.

I admit it would be quite difficult to do in practice. As an editor, I have some idea of who to turn to for reviews within my own field. But if I had to find, say, a medical researcher to review a biology paper, I would be quite at a loss.

Re:Peer review vs. fake science

[Anonymous Coward]

Funding biases results. Contentious studies are simply not funded.

Re:Peer review vs. fake science

[Anonymous Coward]

Climate science?

[ducking and running]

Re:Peer review vs. fake science

[Brett Buck]

String theory is a different issue, mathematically sound and objectively consistent with all observations - but intrinsically indistinguishable. That's a lot different from something like sociology where it is inherently subjective.

Re:Peer review vs. fake science

[lgw]

I don't see an objective difference. You do know there are papers published in string theory journals full of philosophical rambling and not an equation to be seen? "Mathematically sound and objectively consistent with all observations" is not sufficient to be science, let alone good science (nor is it, strictly speaking, necessary). Making specific, falsifiable, predictions about observations, however, is necessary, and string theory never delivered. What a tremendous waste of genius.

Sociology is not inherently subjective, either. Just because the current state of the field is dismal, doesn't mean it can't be done with scientific rigor. There are statistically valid measures in the soft sciences, and correct techniques to validate those measures and any asserted predictive power they may have. People choose not to insist on that rigor, since, after all, it would mean more work a fewer papers published. Plus they tend to be kinda dumb.

One Day...

[Anonymous Coward]

...Academics, Scientists, etc. will realize that their little slice of the world is just as fucked up, fraudulent, and illegitimate as most other disciplines.

Seriously, being smart doesn't mean you have common sense.

Re: One Day...

[Anonymous Coward]

"Will"?? We already know from a long time ago that the academic publishing industry is bollocks.

Mostly thanks to "publish or perish". Of course, people will rather cheat than just accept "perishing".

Re:One Day...

[AutodidactLabrat]

"Common sense is just that set of prejudices inculcated in the minds of the majority by age eighteen" said no one we can identify.
Still true though.

Lack of oversight makes it happen

[timholman]

Every week, I get one or more solicitations inviting me to be a keynote speaker at a conference, serve as an editor of a journal, or submit an invited paper, all from conferences and journals that I've never heard of before. In the grand scheme of things, I am far from being an academic superstar. I can only imagine how much worse it must be for some of my colleagues.

What is surprising to me about this story isn't that some researchers are padding their CVs with publications in bogus journals, but that they aren't being called on it. If I were to list such a publication on my own annual report, my department chair would have me in his office in an instant, demanding to know why I was trying to damage the school's reputation with such idiocy.

So the question is this: why isn't this oversight also taking place at Harvard, Yale, and Stanford? Is there really so little departmental supervision that researchers at those schools can actually get away with this?

Re:Lack of oversight makes it happen

[Archtech]

Perhaps nowadays reputation is increasingly taking second place to money. Without money, reputation is not considered valuable. With money, who needs reputation?

Re:Lack of oversight makes it happen

[Anonymous Coward]

Are you this Tim Holman ? http://tholman.com/ AWESOME STUFF!!!

Re:Lack of oversight makes it happen

[m00sh]

Every week, I get one or more solicitations inviting me to be a keynote speaker at a conference, serve as an editor of a journal, or submit an invited paper, all from conferences and journals that I've never heard of before. In the grand scheme of things, I am far from being an academic superstar. I can only imagine how much worse it must be for some of my colleagues.

What is surprising to me about this story isn't that some researchers are padding their CVs with publications in bogus journals, but that they aren't being called on it. If I were to list such a publication on my own annual report, my department chair would have me in his office in an instant, demanding to know why I was trying to damage the school's reputation with such idiocy.

So the question is this: why isn't this oversight also taking place at Harvard, Yale, and Stanford? Is there really so little departmental supervision that researchers at those schools can actually get away with this?

Who cares anymore? You can just put a PDF up somewhere of your work.

Peer reviews are a joke. It's a waste of time trying to satisfy some random person's demand that some completely non-related issue be resolved. With the communication system of 1 message back and forth every 2-3 months, it takes years to get something done. Unless you know your peers and then the whole thing is just a formality.

Respected journals and conferences have as much garbage as the next. 99% of the papers are only good for their introduction and related work since the papers are accepted from universities with more resources so they have access to more interesting problems. Their solutions most of the time are mostly awful and badly explained.

What makes a publication "fake"?

[mi]

the team analyzed over 175,000 articles published in predatory journals and found hundreds of papers from academics at leading institutions, as well as substantial amounts of research pushed by pharmaceutical corporations, tobacco companies, and others. Last year, one fake science institution run by a Turkish family was estimated to have earned over $4 million in revenue through conferences and journals.

What's the criteria used in determining a publication "fake" and/or "predatory"?

Is it the accuracy and reproducibility of the results? That's been a known problem for years.

What else? "High" fees? Why would that be a reflection of "fakeness"? TFA cites susceptibility to fakes, but that too has been very well known problem, you can even generate your own CS "paper" online.

Seems like TFA is just a salvo in the war of some magazine-publishers against competitors... Slashdot editors have been duped into posting it...

Re:What makes a publication "fake"?

[bsDaemon]

If, after they publish you, they ask you to buy copies... like those pay-to-be-published "literary journals" that publish whatever crap poem someone who buys 5 copies submits. -- I'd definitely say that's a fake journal.

Re:What makes a publication "fake"?

[mi]

If, after they publish you, they ask you to buy copies...

The words "ask", "buy", "copies" and "copy" aren't present in TFA...

I'd definitely say that's a fake journal.

That may — or may not — qualify as "predatory", but certainly not "fake"...

like those pay-to-be-published "literary journals" that publish whatever crap poem someone who buys 5 copies submits

What, I guess, you are trying to say, is that a publication funded by the published authors rather than readers/subscribers is "fake".

I would agree with this definition, yes, but I don't see this even claimed by TFA, much less proven there...

Re:What makes a publication "fake"?

[pr0fessor]

I would argue that just because Beatrix Potter had to self publish the first printings of Peter Rabbit doesn't make the publisher she paid any less legitimate or Peter Rabbit any less a classic.

There is a difference between crappy poor quality publisher and a fake publisher one being that the published material never materializes.

The literary collections that publish poetry for someone who buys a copy is called a vanity publisher they are no less a publisher and some of them publish best sellers also.

   

Re:What makes a publication "fake"?

[mi]

Maybe, we can conclude, that such submitter-funded publications, while not necessarily "fake, can not be treated as evidence, the author is a "real" scientist (or writer, or poet). Because being established as such requires paying customers. So, Ms. Potter could not claim being a writer when publishing her book at her own expense on account of simply having been published — but only on the merits of the contents.

Which takes us back to TFA: if what its authors recognize — based on contents — as "real" scientific works was published in the supposedly fake journals, just what is it that makes those publications fake?..

Re:What makes a publication "fake"?

[pr0fessor]

In this case it's the difference between a disreputable publication and reputable publication. Even a real scientist can be duped into publishing in a disreputable journal.

Re:What makes a publication "fake"?

[mi]

difference between a disreputable publication and reputable publication

You replaced "fake" with "disreputable" — still without explaining, what that means... What is it, that makes a publication "disreputable"?

But ...

[Anonymous Coward]

Cause I like humping your mommy
and getting caught by your dad.
If you're not into poota
and you have half a nad.

If you like humping butts at midnight
in the smooth anal gape.
Then i'm the one that you searched for
come to me and assrape.

-Helen Gurley Brown

(Helen Motherfucking Gurley Brown!!!)

usa

[Anonymous Coward]

cant keep there word , lie , cheat and basically show no sign of change....neither side of politics is gonna do it.
never trust anything american

They spelled their name wrong...

[Anonymous Coward]

World Academy of Science, Engineering and Technology (WASET)
don't you think that should be:
World Academy of Science, Technology and Engineering (WASTE)

Hackaday now has a journal

[Okian Warrior]

What's the answer then? I don't know. Nobody does. BioXiv (and others like it) offer an interesting possibility but that isn't without pitfalls (not the least of which is that a paper there that gets rejected in a journal is somewhat more difficult to resubmit elsewhere).

Hackaday has started its own journal

It's free, and it wants to become an actual journal with all the rigor and benefits of the mainstream journals.

It also wants to navigate away from some of the problems we see with current journals, such as publishing negative results (which is allowed), citation inflation, and so on.

It currently has one issue with one paper, and has an open call for more papers.

It targets citizen science, and we're seeing a lot of that in the hacker community, but would welcome and accept submissions from more mainstream researchers.

There's an opportunity here to start something new and avoid all the pitfalls we keep hearing about.

Anyone who would like to join that community, get in on the ground floor and help make a better type of journal can contact the editors.

(Disclaimer: I'm one of their reviewers. I'm particularly interested in structural rigor such as statistical methods: logical fallacies such as p-hacking, reversed conditional errors, and so on.)

Re:Hackaday now has a journal

[mnemotronic]

What's the answer then? I don't know. Nobody does. BioXiv (and others like it) offer an interesting possibility but that isn't without pitfalls (not the least of which is that a paper there that gets rejected in a journal is somewhat more difficult to resubmit elsewhere).

Hackaday has started its own journal

...{snipsnip}

There's an opportunity here to start something new and avoid all the pitfalls we keep hearing about.

A noble effort. How do you avoid the challenge of accepting, certifying or publishing inaccurate works when a majority of the reviewers are bots or paid button-clickers? By "majority" I mean enough "peers" to control what gets accepted as truth? When enough peers agree with a paper that says "2 + 2 = 5" then it becomes the accepted standard.

Re:Hackaday now has a journal

[xvan]

"peer", is science, insn't every random Joe, but another member of academia versed enough on your field to understand your paper. You could easily have a credit system, where users earn reputation for publishing and reviewing works but loss reputation for passing works with glaring errors. Once a work is published it can still be criticized by the public community with arguments on issues with the paper right next to the article (a'la wikipedia talk).

Re:Hackaday now has a journal

[mnemotronic]

The bots are smart enough to correctly peer-review irrelevant papers and accumulate reputation points over time. When the bot-herder wants to publish a bogus paper, then there's the possibility that the majority of selected reviewers will be under their control. If they don't like the odds then they can withdraw the paper and resubmit it later with modified title until they get a favorable number of their reviewer-bots appointed as peer reviewers.

The "public community" is useless as that is even more easily overwhelmed with automation-driven artificial accounts.

The only way to assure the actual existence and uniqueness of every single reviewer is in-person, face-to-face with an ID check, fingerprints and blood test. That could be prohibitively expensive and dangerously intrusive. After you've done that you need to review and verify academic credentials, and those can be forged. Someone says they have a doctorate in chemical oncology from Trump University or Al Qasim School of Medicine in Iraq. Or they accumulate fake purchased credentials until they can get enough to overwhelm anyone trying to verify them. I'm not trying to be an asshole here. I wish there was an easy fix. It just seems to be a really difficult nut to crack.

Foreign agents and the Religious Right

[Rick Schumann]

I wouldn't at all be surprised if the above are what are really behind this sort of shenanigans. The former just want to disrupt the U.S. as much as possible; the latter sincerely believes that all science is evil and of Satan, and would love nothing better than to discredit all of it. We're talking the anti-vaxxers and the like, here, as well as out-and-out Dominionists, real facts, real truth, and encouraging people to think for themselves are all diametrically opposed to their agenda.

Elsevier: one of biggest frauds

[Anonymous Coward]

Perhaps the biggest fraud in plain sight is Elsevier, based on the most incriminating evidence of all "the sheer scope of the disciplines it publishes."

I've always suspected Elsevier was a racket, and now we know.

Hate the Term Post Truth

[DatbeDank]

Let's call it for what it is: Post Truth means having an opinion that runs contrary to what monied interests desire you to have.

And that's a good thing because it means you aren't being manipulated to make someone richer.

That's what you get...

[bettodavis]

When the amount of published papers become a performance metric.

People will fulfill it, regardless if they are good papers.

Re: Retarded anti-science Republican trashminds

[Anonymous Coward]

Bill Nye is a better dancer than you - and he'll fuck your mom to 5 sigma. Deal with it Republitards.

if it quacks like a duck, its a duck

[Anonymous Coward]

If it has conferences, and publishes a journal, is it really "fake"?

Re:Retarded anti-science Republican trashminds

[Anonymous Coward]

Seems that someone hit a nerve.

Just watched a short segment of Jordan Peterson today discussing the Arrogance of Intellect. Bottom line is that you can be as smart as a whip, but still be a useless piece of shit.

Sounds like you.

It's not hard to detect

[physick]

I get dozens of requests a week to submit papers to obviously fake journals or attend fake conferences. It is not hard to establish that they are, in fact, fake. If people submit to these places without doing any due diligence on where they are submitting, how can I trust their scientific results?

Scepticism is fundamental to science. This should also apply to where you choose to publish.

Re:It's not hard to detect

[Anonymous Coward]

I get dozens of requests a week to submit papers to obviously fake journals or attend fake conferences. It is not hard to establish that they are, in fact, fake. If people submit to these places without doing any due diligence on where they are submitting, how can I trust their scientific results?

Scepticism is fundamental to science. This should also apply to where you choose to publish.

It can be hard to detect, especially for an aspiring academic just trying to enter high-quality levels of the trade. The first time I was invited to one of these, it took me at least an hour of browsing around and an email to one of the academics listed on the program board (as it turned out without his consent!) to conclude it was a junk conference.

If you are trying to bootstrap your career from one of the universities that have no funding for good research (the majority of world universities fall into this category), your options are somewhat limited. I have seen actual junk publications in CVs of successful candidates for positions in my lab. That alone of course did not get them hired, but it did show they were making all possible efforts under their circumstances.

Then, there isn't a clear-cut threshold between "junk" and "real" conferences and journals. It is rather a continuous quality spectrum. For any scientist, it is their judgement call where to draw a line.

Of course we all know

[bizitch]

Most of the fake science was generated!

https://pdos.csail.mit.edu/arc...

This just in

[Anonymous Coward]

Corporate sysadmins posing as journalists are not scientists and it should not be a surprise to you that there are parts of the scientific field that you weren't previously privvy to.

Science is specifically designed to deal with these idiots. Find your headline elsewhere.

"science itself"? Terrible journalism.

[Anonymous Coward]

"science itself"? Terrible journalism.