Fake Academic Journals Are a Very Real Problem 248
derekmead writes "Because its become so easy to start a new publication in this new pixel-driven information economy, a new genre of predatory journals is emerging at an alarming rate. The New York Times just published an exposée of sorts on the topic. Its only an exposée of sorts because the scientific community knows about the problem. There are blogs set up to shame the fake journals into halting publishing. There are tutorials online for spotting a fake journal. There's even a list created and maintained by academic librarian Jeffrey Beall that keeps an eye on all the new fake journals coming out. When Beall started the list in 2010, it had only 20 entries. Now it has over 4,000. The journal Nature even published an entire issue on the problem a couple of weeks ago. So again, scientists know this is a problem. They just don't know how to stop it."
Fakery (Score:5, Insightful)
They just don't know how to stop it."
Really? Because in cryptography, we solved this a long time ago: It's called a web of trust. If you find a journal that is reputable and like it, then "sign it". Except instead of using crypto in this sense, give your readers a list of trusted peers on the back page.
It's just like what we already do: We trust our educated friends to separate bullshit from genuine science... why not formalize this process?
Re:Fakery (Score:4, Insightful)
How do I trust YOUR 'educated friends'? Maybe they're scammers, maybe they're legit. If I am researching a subject that I am unfamiliar with and unfamiliar with the top echelon folks in the field, how do I break into their web of trust to find a competent journal?
Re:Fakery (Score:4, Funny)
How do I trust YOUR 'educated friends'?
Well, I bring you over to their house and you have a play date with them. And when you're done playing dress up and house, I drive you back home. And afterwords you're best friends.
how do I break into their web of trust to find a competent journal?
I suppose the same way you find a competent anything: Ask around.
It never ceases to amaze me how seemingly intelligent people can come up with inordinately complex solutions to everyday problems... it's like guys who insist on not stopping for directions... they'll drive in circles for hours when all it would have taken was to walk into a gas station and ask where to go. Of course, how do we trust the gas station attendant? He could be handing out disinformation and fake maps...
Re:Fakery (Score:4, Informative)
up with inordinately complex solutions to everyday problems... it's like guys who insist on not stopping for directions... they'll drive in circles for hours when all it would have taken was to walk into a gas station and ask where to go.
Off topic but: When I lived in the UK I used to ask for directions at petrol stations very often and always got good information. But, when I moved to the US I tried asking for directions at gas stations and never got any useful help at all. So, asking for directions at gas stations is not useful, based on my research...
Re: (Score:3)
Are you saying "head down the road apiece until you git to where the old Johnson place used to be, then stay on that road until you git to the oak tree- no wait, they cut that down- tell you what, you just go for about 10 minutes until you see a guy on a thresher and ask him," isn't good information?
It would be if I could get even that. But everyone was just totally clueless, not even any map. When I worked in a petrol station in the UK (when I was a student) we had a local map pinned to the wall because we had so many people stopping and asking for directions.
These days like everyone else I just rely on my phone for navigation, of course.
Re: (Score:3)
Gas stations in the US used to provide good information. I think that started to change as we moved towards "self-serve", though I can't really say why. Maybe because the employees were less likely to be long-term employees and also less likely to be "neighborhood local".
As far as I can tell, gas station employees are about as likely as ever to be a local. But even when they are, they're still useless at providing directions. I attribute this to the general trend in all businesses towards the bottom, trying to save money by hiring the least qualified employee, and nothing special to do with gas stations.
You can start by reading their work (Score:4, Informative)
Huh? It's very easy. If your paper is good, just submit it to a known prestigious journal .. a list would be published in mainstream journals -- and you dont really need one .. you can go by citation indexes or just *gasp* read some of the entries in existing publications and see if they are coherent. Or you can ask around by attending seminars at colleges that are reputed.
It's easy to get familiar with who the top researchers are in any field .. it really doesn't take a lot of effort. If you are in a particular field you would know, so all you have to do is find out where their publications are .. (you can find this out easily from their corporate webpage or university department links).
Re:You can start by reading their work (Score:5, Interesting)
Some fake journals try pretty hard to blur the line though. There are a lot of journals out there for publishing really boring results, especially fields that have voluminous compilations and other details results that may be important, but don't represent a break through (e.g. compilations of detail spectroscopy measurements). A lot of researchers in the same field might not even be able to name such journals despite them being respectable, useful, and completely legitimate. Then there are fake journals that seek out and solicit results that are similar, and likely to not end up in more major journals. Or I've seen cases of journals seeking out articles that look like they are from people that don't speak English as well, or are from out of the field. They are legitimate articles, that may have trouble getting into top journals due to being a bit more mundane. Then the fake journal slips in a few articles with no or pointless peer review, interleaved with otherwise decent articles.
It then comes down to a bit of luck and how much time you spend investigating the journal and other articles. I once came across one that had several detailed, articles on semiconductor material properties that seemed legit and in agreement with results our group had. But then all of a sudden there was a paper that the conclusions were based on numerology and which digits they liked better. Further investigation found that maybe one in five or one in ten articles were complete non-scientific BS (with deceptive abstracts), and equal portion of just really bad papers that probably got rejected everywhere else (but with good sounding abstracts), and then the rest was filler from legit, if unpolished, papers.
Won't work (Score:3)
If it was about the content, they wouldn't charge for a submission, but pay the person delivering them actual content. Like they used to do with newspapers, people or press bureaus would get paid if their submission got printed. This is about money and "reputable" academic journals will only print papers that will look good to their subscribers and on top of that, require a hefty fee from the person wanting to publish.
However much I hate online music sales websites, there should be at least two good online
Re: (Score:3)
This completely misses the reason why those fake journals exist in the first place -- which is usually so an industry group can point to 'science' which supports their claims.
Tobacco, oil, pharma, and political groups all have an interest in these so they can try to win public opinion.
This isn't fake journals scamming the people who submit papers, this is fake journals which are created to produce cite-able papers which
Re: (Score:2)
Not really. Well, what you would need to do is the following:
1. Establish a reputation in the field by publishing in existing prestigious journals. .. if you did Step 1 well, this wouldn't be too hard
2. Do peer reviews of existing work for prestigious journals
3. Get together with others who have established their reputation in Step #1 and start a journal
They aren't easy steps, but then how else would you get get good peer reviewers and establish a quality journal? If you have the support of existing experts
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:3)
The problem with this approach is that some scientists will rather use social engineering to increase their reputability score than improve their research methods. If a sufficiently large portion of the scientists do that, your metric will become irrelvant or even misleading. This is basically the same situation we are in right now.
Re:You can start by reading their work (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes. It will be hard. You are talking about becoming a gatekeeper of quality and trust. There should not be a short cut to make it easy.
That's kind of the point.
Re:Fakery (Score:4, Insightful)
All scientists know which the real journals are. They have to -- their jobs depend on publishing in the good ones.
The problem is that laypeople can't tell the difference, and no "web of trust" is going to solve this problem because laypeople have no clue which web of trust is trustworthy. There are lists of reputable journals, but anyone can make a fake list of reputable journals.
Re: (Score:2)
Why would a journal advertise its competition?
Re:Fakery (Score:4, Insightful)
Something similar is already formalized in academic publishing. When an author trusts an individual article, he'll cite it as a reference in his own articles. Articles that are important can be cited hundreds or thousands of times, while trivial ones may never be cited at all. If you take all the articles in a journal and see how many times they've been cited on average*, it gives you a good idea of consensus opinion of the quality of the journal. This is the basis of measures like the Impact Factor.
*You may wish to use some method of averaging other than taking the arithmetic mean, which can be skewed by a handful of highly cited papers.
Re: (Score:2)
How do you prevent the equivalent of SEO spam where they setup their own web of journals and articles that all cross-reference each other?
Re: (Score:3)
Analysis of the "connectivity matrix" between inter-journal referencing will indicate that these are in their own isolated group. What you can do is calculate Impact Factor relative to a few known "good" journals: start with, e.g., Science and Nature, and expand your list to all journals moderately frequently referenced by these two and the journals they reference. No matter how many cross-referenced links the fake journal cluster have with each other, it will show poor "connectivity" to the group of legiti
Re:Fakery (Score:4, Insightful)
Really? Because no one uses your web of trust, we all use certificate authorities which (in theory) verify the integrity for us, kind of like Journals.
Only wanna-be cryptonerds who still fail to understand why self-signed certs are next to worthless still carry on about 'web of trust' crap. Okay, so a few guys who ACTUALLY know cryptography may still be in that camp for legitimate theoretical reasons, but no one considers that acceptable for the real world. Well, okay, clearly you do, so some people do, probably the same people who don't understand why BitCoin is doomed to failure I expect.
Your standards are different than mine, your friends standards are different than both of us, so your trust and your friends trust ratings are meaningless to me. Actually, they are truly meaningless for me because I know (Safe assumption) that you don't actually have a formal standard for what you 'trust', its an ad-hoc system thrown together without thinking it through.
Re:Fakery (Score:4, Insightful)
Only wanna-be cryptonerds who still fail to understand why self-signed certs are next to worthless still carry on about 'web of trust' crap.
Your arrogance is unfounded. Multiple CAs have been cracked in the past few years and everyone who knows anything about the system knows it should be scrapped. Self-signed certs can be just as reliable as the snakeoil CAs spit out. You don't have to pay snakeoil salesmen for them either.
Re: (Score:3)
Mod Parent Up... GP is a blowhard.
Re: (Score:2)
This a thousand times over. Whether licensing, peer ratings, webs of trust, or some combination of systems, this is what needs to be done.
Can such a system be gamed? Certainly, as can -any- system given enough time and effort, but it i s still better than nothing at all.
Re: (Score:2)
Can such a system be gamed? Certainly, as can -any- system given enough time and effort, but it i s still better than nothing at all.
To be more specific, it is better than the system we have, which is easier to game. With the current system, everyone must trust the well-established venues. With the web of trust, everyone chooses their own trusted pointes to seed their web. This is very difficult to game unless you know your target's seed points in advance.
Re: (Score:2)
Except of course that unless you are an expert in a particular field your "web of trust" is really likely to just be a list of sources which support what you already believe. If you believe AGW is a crock you'll trust journals which agree with you as opposed to ones which don't.
The basis of trust in journals is peer review, that is to say it's a web of trust, but it's a web of trust generated by people who know what they're god damned talking about as opposed to a web of trust I create based on my own biase
The Journal of The Creation Research Society (Score:2)
It has come to our attention that you are looking to find an academic journal that not only presents the most cutting edge information, but one that embodies world class professionalism.
JCRS has a long history publishing innovative and informative articles that have furthered human knowledge in a number of disciplines. Among the organizations that subscribe to our journal are: Bethesda University of California, Bakke Graduate University, EUCON International College, and Pacific Isl
Bricks and mortar publishers rejoice (Score:2)
Pay your fee, publish with us and you too can enjoy true academic bliss.
FPs on this list are unacceptable (Score:4, Interesting)
Hence if a valid new journal comes up that wants to do business for less, care must be taken to ensure it doesn't end up on the dreaded "fake journal" lists.
Even worse (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Medicine and medical research suffers from two problems:
1. Inherent difficulty, both technical (huge diversity and complexity of human physiology) and ethical (can't round up people to experiment on - at least not "in principle").
2. The medical-industrial complex that is the tangled mess of big pharma, academia, and regulators with huge amount of money slushing around.
The combination makes medicine and medical research particularly toxic to conducting good science. You tell me another field that c
Re: (Score:2)
Easy: Economics. You have similar, if not greater, problems conducting controlled experiments, especially in macroeconomics, and there's even more money and politics involved. Economics winds up being closer to theology than it is to science, even though it's something that ought to be amenable to the scientific method.
Re: (Score:2)
Is it any wonder that Keynsianism - with its abysmal record of failed predictinos
Someone who reads conservatives blogs demonstrating the inverse relationship between competence and confidence.
Re: (Score:2)
Medicine and medical research suffers from two problems:
1. Inherent difficulty, both technical (huge diversity and complexity of human physiology) and ethical (can't round up people to experiment on - at least not "in principle").
2. The medical-industrial complex that is the tangled mess of big pharma, academia, and regulators with huge amount of money slushing around.
The combination makes medicine and medical research particularly toxic to conducting good science. You tell me another field that comes even close.
I remember reading a few years ago that one of the top medical journals (New England, IIRC) started letting doctors publish review articles for drugs without mentioning that they were paid by the company that sells them.
Also, most drug testing in the USA is done by the company that wants to market it, which introduces the desire to suppress results that show that a drug is dangerous and/or ineffective. Kind of like the tobacco industry back in the day...
Re:Even worse (Score:5, Interesting)
Money in the medical field is a double edged sword: it induces corruptness, but it also enables studies at a scale that are unfundable in other fields.
Re:Even worse (Score:4, Informative)
The vast majority of papers suffer from a weakness I call, "lack of robustness."
That sounds something like what Richard Feynman called "Cargo Cult Science". Researchers go through the motions and make sure to include p-values and other statistics to make it look like they've done real science. They might even think they have.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cargo_cult_science [wikipedia.org]
The problem is accedemia's culture. (Score:3)
Publish or parish. That the accedemic motto. However a lot of science needs a lot of time to complete. However they are pressured to publish, in order to keep funding. Real journals are about real science, but those fake ones are so the can blabber about some stuff to get published, add it to their site and get back to work.
Your profession in life doesn't mean you are of a higher moral caliber. A scientist will hurt the rest of science so they just work on their stuff, they will lie cheat and steal to get what they want. Just like the rest of humanity you have good eggs and bad eggs and usually their motives are complex and hard to pass easy moral judgement on.
The way to curve bad behavior is to constantly work on adjusting the culture to prevent people from manipulating the system.
Re:The problem is accedemia's culture. (Score:4, Funny)
"Don't Know What To Do" - copyright angle (Score:2)
A sleazy op is likely to make mistakes.
I'm wondering why someone can't use the copyright angle to yell at any "fake pub" that swipes professor photos. (Possibly even the name-credentials part as well)
I don't debate that most are propaganda but (Score:5, Interesting)
So it is great that the corporate shills are being outed but I would prefer some actual analysis. Look at the articles, look at who funded them. Look for real connections between those who write and those who are publishing. A great example of a superb analysis was when Encyclopedia Britannica called out Wikipedia as basically a bunch of half assed crap while they were the bastions of excellence in research. So a group of people randomly selected a bunch of articles from both, then rigorously fact checked them with the result that at the time they were basically even with Wikipedia adding articles at a fantastic rate.
A simple question that I have about Wikipedia is, what qualification did Jimmy Wales have to start Wikipedia? To be specific his job prior to Wiki was running "a male-oriented web portal featuring entertainment and adult content" Another would be Matt Drudge (love him or hate him) of the drudge report who had "a job in the gift shop of CBS studios, eventually working his way up to manager" just prior to becoming one of the single largest forces in modern journalism.
These people were about as unqualified on paper to do what they did as is possible yet they were massive forces of change. Was slashdot created by a team of experts from the leading technical universities in the world?
Then there are the failings of the best journals themselves. Bad article do slip by. Big companies get their one-sided views in print. Yet right now there is a revolution going on where institutions are sick of paying crazy prices for access to the top journals who are having trouble justifying these prices except to their shareholders.
When I read the criteria to be a "bad" journal some it is quite reasonable such as how open the whole process is, but over and over it basically says, we academics know better and had better be the gatekeepers so that we can keep our jobs. To me a bunch of crap journals are a sign of good things being in the wind. Much like how social media is changing the world with great things that Twitter can bring us it brings us tweets like, "nothin on tv, so bord, YOLO!!!!"
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
This sounds a bit like old media complaining about new media writers not being professional journalists who graduated and worked their way up from the bottom (read: aren't baby boomers).
You mean because people who've done something their entire lives get annoyed that random people who created a word press account suddenly think because they can post to the Internet that they are journalists?
I can't imagine why. I'd have absolutely no problem giving up my life long career, knowledge and wisdom so some jackass with no experience and barely the ability spell their own name comes in to take it over because the barrier to entry suddenly vanished.
'New media' aren't 'journalists'. Its not becau
Re: (Score:2)
There's also the fact that real journalists tend to be more accountable.
And that real journalists also tend to understand much better the distinction between journalism and editorialising. (One of the benefits of actually going to school for something you plan to do as a profession.)
At least, when I was in the business, I knew pretty well that if I ran something on the air that I couldn't back up with independently verifiable facts, I might be looking for another job the next day. In a different broadcast m
Re: (Score:3)
One important difference between academic journals and Britannica/"Old Media journalism" are the mechanisms for accepting new content. Britannica has its staff of writers, and then will seek out a specific expert in a field for extra information --- if they don't "find" you, then you aren't getting published in Britannica. Same for news agencies: you get published because you're already on their staff. Journals, however, are specifically set up to process articles from basically anyone who submits --- often
Re:I don't debate that most are propaganda but (Score:4, Insightful)
and it'll generally get reviewed fairly to the same standards as all other submissions.
Haaaaaahahahhaahahahahaha.
Reviewed fairly? Haaahahahhahaha.
To the same standards as other papers? Sure. By fairly? Aaaa ahahahaha.
"You didn't cite me enough"
"Why didn't your write a paper on X instead?"
"You should have used the method I'm going to make up and describe badly in the following paragraph"
"I don't believe the results and no amount of data could convince me otherwise"
"The english is bad and sentance are confuse"
"MOAR EXPERIMENTS!!1!!!11!oneONEoneleven!111!"
"Here's a long treatise on why I'm awesome and wait was there a paper I'm meant to be reviewing somewhere...?"
"I don't understand the area of maths you've used standard results from so I'm going to assume that the paper is wrong"
"The field has not advanced since 1973 and I'm resoloutely going to ignore any advances since then, therefore you're wrong."
"your wrong!1!!"
"I'm not going to let the paper in unless you increase it's length by a factor of at least 2, which will conveniently put you a factor of 2 over the longest papers allowed by this journal"
But yes the other points stands. Scientists IRL are generally nice enough and like talking about science and helping people---they are professional teachers and like every good teacher want a good, willing student. Anonymous scientists on the internet (reviewers) act like slashdot trolls with worse spelling.
Re: (Score:3)
Hey, I see you've run into somewhat dickish reviewers, too --- guess what, everyone who publishes sometimes encounters this. That's why it's doubly useful to work with a published scientist, who will be there to have a laugh with you at the reviewer (and help you shrug off the criticism and deal with the revisions, instead of sulking in rage). Probably buried in the review, there are (implicitly) a couple good points, too. For example, in your "review," it appears that --- as clever and advanced as you may
Huh?! (Score:2)
Misunderstandings (Score:5, Informative)
It seems that many posters are coming to the conclusion that the journals are "fake", but that's not fully understanding the issue.
There are apparently some organizations that go the whole fake journal/conference route, but these have always existed and are no different than the diploma mills (except at the post-graduate level). Or those places you can order "trade-rag" magazines with your picture on the cover that you can put in your waiting rooom to impress your clients. Or those fake conferences where people get their employer to pay for their vacation (or in some cases the government in the form of tax breaks). These will never be quashed because the customers are often not really victims, but co-conspirators (although they may claim to be when outed).
It appears that another part of the issue is that criminal organizations are putting up fake websites that masquarade as the official website of real, but obscure journals (that don't have a website) or a website that is confusingly similar to a well known journal and then using these websites to trick people into sending them submission fees. Often these websites have scraped academic search sites for TOC and other publically available information to fool people.
This aspect is like people putting up typosquating websites, cloning websites in different top level domains, or setting up fake websites for businesses that don't have a website (kind of like what domain tasters do, but in a more malicious manner) and doing a bit of SEO...
Sadly these two problems are conflated.
Re: (Score:2)
It appears that another part of the issue is that criminal organizations are putting up fake websites that masquarade as the official website of real, but obscure journals (that don't have a website) or a website that is confusingly similar to a well known journal and then using these websites to trick people into sending them submission fees. Often these websites have scraped academic search sites for TOC and other publically available information to fool people.
This. Unfortunately the original NYT article isn't really well written in my opinion. It starts by mentioning the naming scam (Entomology-2013 vs. Entomology 2013) but somewhere in the middle it starts talking about fake/weak journals that accept anything so that they can collect publishing money(which are the scam discussed by the Nature article) and then it goes back to the naming scam.
This aspect is like people putting up typosquating websites, cloning websites in different top level domains, or setting up fake websites for businesses that don't have a website (kind of like what domain tasters do, but in a more malicious manner) and doing a bit of SEO...
Exactly same issue. And given the niche target victims and the decentralized nature of academic conferences(every year i
Overlooking (Score:5, Funny)
Re: (Score:2)
let me explain (Score:2, Interesting)
As a PhD who was, for a brief period, a world expert in a certain obscure branch of DNA technology:
The idea that people don't know what the real journals are is ludicrous.
In any field, there are 10 or 20 to journals; most scientists spend most of their time in no more then 20 or so journals; you can easily verify this by looking at the citations in any scientific paper.
However, the are a lot of not very good and bad papers; some are sleazy efforts to promote some companies products; others are just the norm
Re: (Score:2)
The problem isn't really about journals in your field, if the journal is in your field you're more than capable of filtering the wheat from the chaff regardless of its source.
The issue is that putting "Journal of _____" as a reference adds a degree of credibility. It does so because it's supposed to indicate that a whole bunch of people who actually know what they're talking about looked at the article in question and at the very least didn't laugh. I like to believe I'm reasonably intelligent, but if I'd r
and fake conferences (Score:2)
There is a relatively recent scam of announcing fake conferences, sometimes with the name of a real one, gathering the registration fees, and disappearing. Sometimes they steal the real conference's entire web site to make it look real.
One long-running conference shut down within the last year or so because the fake clones were having such a big impact that they couldn't get enough paper submissions or registrations anymore.
It make be sketchy... (Score:4, Funny)
but the Antarctica Journal of Mathematics [domainsmoon.com] has such a great webpage.
On the downturn (Score:5, Insightful)
It would seem that scientific publishing in the current model is on the way out. Let's look at some of the problems.
Tenure and status are influenced [highly] on publication. Thus, there is an incentive to publish trivial results, to publish results using shaky statistical reasoning, and to publish erroneous and fraudulent results. (Example [slashdot.org])
Because of the emphasis on "quantity" instead of "quality", few results are independently verified. (Example [newscientist.com])
Journals demand that scientists turn over the rights of publication in order to get published. The journals, in turn, charge outrageous fees to view the work - so high, that most of the work is inaccessible to the general public. (Example [nature.com])
The fees are growing so large that smaller universities can no longer afford journal subscriptions. (Example [guardian.co.uk])
The journals do not pay for peer review, or editing, or (in the modern age) even printing and binding. So far as anyone can tell, they are rent-seekers; they provide no services of note to the scientists, their readers, or the community in general. (Example [gigaom.com])
It is entirely possible to masquerade as a scientific journal. In fact, journal quality is a spectrum that contains completely bogus, slightly spurious, mostly useful, and high quality. Being published by a notable company such as Elsevier is no guarantee of quality. (Example [wikipedia.org])
There is enormous monetary value in published papers which validate the particular positions or opinions. (Example) [thedailybeast.com]
These are just off the top of my head. I'm sure people can find other problems with the current system. Sadly, I can't think of any way to fix the current system. It has so many inherent problems that we should probably transition to a different model, but I don't know what should be.
Re: (Score:2)
the problem of fakes (Score:5, Insightful)
Additionally, in all normal research institutes and universities people will want to publish in journals that have a registered - and not negligible - impact factor, which the fakes will not have.
Also, when looking into a journal that you never published in, the first thing you look at is the IF, the second thing you look at is the organization backing it, and the third thing you look at are the members of the editorial board. All have to be at least somewhat relevant. If you can't judge it, always ask someone from your field with more experience. It's not hard to get such help.
So, while the high number of fake journals seems high, I'd say those who willingly (silly) or unknowingly (ignorant) publish in them deserve what they end up with.
As always, as a researcher, what you publish is what people will judge you by, so always be inquisitive, careful and selective.
Just curious... (Score:2)
If the journal does peer review, and has a broad collection of qualified degree'd reviewers. Is it still fake?
Or just a new entry trying to break the journal cartel that helped kill Schwartz?
No problem here (Score:3)
The only science I care about is published in reputable journals.
Like the discovery of "N rays". http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N_ray [wikipedia.org]
And the discovery of "Potassium Flares" in the spectra of stars. http://adsabs.harvard.edu/full/1967PASP...79..351W [harvard.edu]
Not to mention the discovery of Cold Fusion by Pons and Fleishmann. http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/0022072889800063 [sciencedirect.com]
Re: (Score:3)
Please consider removing Pons and Fleishmann from your list. Their problem was that they didn't publish a paper; instead, reporting results directly to the mass media. Not the same situation at all.
As a substitute, you can have the Martian canals [wikipedia.org] and Polywater [wikipedia.org]. For some of us, Polywater is still within living memory.
I'm not so concerned with "mistakes" made in the name of science. If the researcher is sincere and proven wrong - even spectacularly wrong, as in the case of N-rays - it's still the normal cours
Re: (Score:2)
Fortunately, science isn't about always being right, but how well you can correct things that are wrong. Erroneous publications --- whether from fraud or honest mishap --- get rapidly and thoroughly countered (in the same reputable journals) as soon as better scientific evidence is available. Anyone searching for these topics will immediately stumble across their later "resolution" in highly-visible journal articles.
On the other hand, the crap paper languishing in a fake journal will likely never get direct
Whitelist (Score:2)
Trying to keep up with fake or illegitimate journals sounds impossible with the potential rate they can expand. Instead create a curated whitelist of known reputable journals. Maybe to add new or obscure journals require a minimum number of votes before a review committee endorses the journal. A nice extra step would be an optional whitelisting committee and public rating of each journal as well as good summaries of focal areas.
As for the genesis of such a committee, start with offers to join to departme
I smell a rat (Score:3)
"even"? "even"? oh well then... Come on. I smell bias in this submission. It doesn't mention that Nature is owned by an academic publisher making $$$. Those publishers hate open access journals. If they accuse these fake journals of being there to make a profit, isn't that what Nature's owners are in the business for too? It may also be an attempt to smear genuine open access journals with a broad brush.
Crappy Science Journalists (Score:2)
Feed them crap (Score:2)
Find those fake journals and submit them SCIgen papers.
Only an 'exposée of sorts' as the Spelling Jo (Score:2)
Fake journals are a symptom... (Score:5, Insightful)
If you are just starting out in a tenure-track position, you have about five years to show that you are capable of pulling in funding, getting talks accepted to conferences, and publishing papers that get cited. It's easy to say that fake journals are simple to spot because "everyone" knows what the real journals are, and besides, I wouldn't waste time publishing anywhere but in the best journals... True if you are still a PhD student or postdoc, but wait until your adviser's name no longer appears on your author list. Suddenly results that you know you could have published in a top journal are being scrutinized by referees at a bread-and-butter "specialty journal" who have no reason to believe in your competence.
Now imagine you get an email from a shiny new open-access journal asking you to be on their editorial board. You think "gee, I'd like to support open-access" and hey, look at that, someone I know is already on the editorial board. Suddenly you are getting phone calls asking for the title of the talk that you have been invited to give at a conference in Vegas (for which you are certain to be billed after the fact). And you find out that your job as an editor is to submit papers to their journal. You of course don't want to, because a paper with zero citations is worse in many ways than no paper at all. But your doe-eyed grad student, who has just had a string of bad luck, really needs a paper for their CV. You feel responsible for this person's future and guilty that their project isn't producing ground-breaking papers every other week. So you let them write up a paper for this crappy journal, which is when you find out that they charge even their editorial board for "publication fees." And the best part is that, when you politely explain to them that you can't afford $3000 to publish a paper no one will ever read, they start negotiating the price with you! Classy.
Then there are the legitimate journals and conferences that are put together by, for example, a bunch of foreigners that you have never heard of. It's neigh impossible to determine the legitimacy of such things and, because of your recent experience serving on an editorial board, you are extremely skeptical. The end result is that we are right back where we started; only participating when we see other scientists who we know and respect. But, see problem above--they only need to con one person into lending their name before it cascades. (And good luck getting your name removed from their editorial board.) It creates a chilling effect for unknown/up-and-coming/young scientists to organize conferences or to try to innovate in the publication/conference sphere.
Fake journals are a symptom of a broader problem, which is for lack of a better term the "neoliberalization" of science. Each science has a few gatekeeper publishers who we all trust and who therefore has editors that we've all heard of. We read them, we cite them, and we know that any new journals they roll out will likewise be active and highly cited. If you want to have access to such journals, you must be at an academic institution that can afford massive subscription fees to thousands of journals. Papers are, however, the currency of academic science, so academics will expend enormous effort to get grant money to do research to ultimately publish a paper. These fake journals have spotted a nice opportunity to skim some of that money the same way spammers work, by relying on that 1-2% that gets duped into publishing a paper, once, or agreeing to serve on an editorial board, once, or agreeing to an "invited talk," once. And the closer they are to an industry, the worse the problem. Drug manufacturers, for example, have a profit motive to publish garbage in pseudo-peer-reviewed journals with real-sounding names.
Fake journals, the publish-or-perish model, the evaporation of research funding, the over-production of PhD scientists, etc. have combined with the power of the Internet and digital publishing to, ironically, push science back to exactly wh
Re:'fake'? (Score:5, Insightful)
Probably the difference is that "real" journals use peer review among respected and knowledgeable research in the field, and hold the papers to a high and rigorous standard. A "fake" journal would allow anything in, just to make a profit and allow anybody with money to get their work published, with a pretense of quality peer review.
Re:'fake'? (Score:5, Informative)
Or to push an agenda.
A famous example is the Australasian Journal of Bone and Joint Medicine, which published only articles favorable to Merck drugs and was paid for by Merck. There was no disclosure of the conflict of interest. Well-known scientists and doctors were added to the list of "honorary editors" without their permission.
The journal, along with several others like it, was published by Elsevier. Go figure.
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
Comment removed (Score:4, Informative)
Re:'fake'? (Score:5, Informative)
Precisely like this one. [wikipedia.org] Or should I say "Ron Paul's propaganda machine."
Ban Elsevier! (Score:5, Interesting)
That's terrible. Can someone please contact Jeffrey Beall and tell him to add Elsevier to the fake journals list.
Thank God! We nearly let that one get through!
Re:'fake'? (Score:4, Informative)
Global warming (Score:3, Informative)
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
Like global warming?
Yes exactly. There is a famous journal which blurs the distinction between a real and fake one called Energy & Environment. It's famous for it's low standards of peer review and because it explicitly pushes the "[editor's] political agenda."
"But isn't that the right of the editor?" Well no, Sonja, not for a reputable scientific journal it isn't.
Despite this E&E is listed in several respected indexing services, which ought to be the touchstone by which we easily distinguish b
Re:'fake'? (Score:5, Funny)
Which category is this one: http://www.universalrejection.org/ [universalrejection.org]
Re: (Score:3)
A solution could be simply an open forum on a site like google scholar, so that a process similar to peer review can take place after the publication.
An additional advantage would be that people are then able to ask each other questions about scientific papers, and share experiences, etc.
Re:'fake'? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:'fake'? (Score:4, Funny)
Fake journals let anything and everything in, so you can pretend you have lots of papers published. Some of them pretend to be prestigious jornals: can't get published in Nature or Science? Why not Nature and Science [sciencepub.net]?
That's genius. You can just casually drop at an interview, "And, of course, I've been published in Nature and Science," and sound like a total BAMF. What a brilliant scam.
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
The fact that just dropping that you were published in a specific journal can lead to career advancement indicates the poor state science.
Re: (Score:3)
That's very unlikely to work in academia but there's a good chance it will work on your average half-witted HR department.
Re: (Score:2)
Re:'fake'? (Score:5, Funny)
Until the interviewer asks, "Wow, that's amazing! What did you publish in there?" And it becomes obvious that your papers aren't worth paper....
Yes, if the last 20 years have taught me anything, it's that interviewers are always well-informed on basic scientific standards, ask tough questions, and demand thorough answers.
Before anyone asks, the sky in my world is purple and simply beautiful.
Re: (Score:3)
I think the difference is peer review. With a "religious science" journal all you get are confirmation bias.
Re:'fake'? (Score:4, Informative)
Some "fake" journals have peer review, but it is really a group of professors teaming up, who already hold the same opinion, or support each others non-mainstream position in the respective fields. This can be problematic because it does not provide independent, skeptical review.
That said, main-stream journals are also not fair. Payment increased by a huge fraction (4x IIRC), countries are paying triple (publishing, reviewing and accessing), which effectively blocks out a large fraction of the population. see here for a introductory video [phdcomics.com]. This leads to a big demand in cheaper publications also for legitimate research.
Re: (Score:3)
There are two different types of 'fakes' (and maybe more)
One is where a fake site is set up for a real journal, and suckers authors into submitting to it (and more importantly, paying for submission). It is basically phishing.
The other is what appears to the public (and potentially other academics) to be an academic journal that has no standards for submission other than the fee. It is good for submitting claptrap to later refer to.
Re:'fake'? (Score:5, Informative)
A third class is politically/ideologically/commercially motivated journals, like the young-earth-creationism journal in the pharyngula link, or Elsevier's fake pharmaceutical journals. These will publish "research" supporting particular unscientific bullshit that serves the interests of a particular group, so that unqualified/uniformed decision makers (think, e.g., right-wing politicians wanting justification for unregulated pollution or teaching "creation science") can be handed "sciency-looking" reference to back up their policies, so they have something "equal" to fire back with when the "other side" brings actual scientific facts to the table.
Re:'fake'? (Score:5, Insightful)
One can hope that Elsevier's "real" reputable journals will stay "clean" because (a) their own journal-level management team are actually conscientious scientists, and (b) they are constantly subject to close scrutiny by experts --- every issue they publish gets read by the top minds in the field, so they'd be in hot water fast if they tried to pull any funny business. Reason (b) is something that didn't apply to Elsevier's fake Australian pharmaceutical journals: these were not intended to attract the interest/scrutiny of researchers in the field, but to provide realistic-looking "peer reviewed research" references that the drug companies could use in the regulatory approval process or for marketing blurbs ("proven 70% more effective according to research in ...!"). Elsevier is a nasty problem in the world of publishing; they are a for-profit enterprise (unlike most other major reputable journals, which are non-profit foundations) which has (over their long history) accumulated many reputable journals, but also has amoral profiteering scumbags for their top management (the type of folks who would aid and abet drug companies in potential mass murder by shoddily-tested drugs when they think they can make a buck and get away with it).
Re: (Score:2)
I'm the editor of a journal (Score:5, Funny)
What exactly is the difference between a 'fake' journal and a 'real' journal? How much you pay?
I'm the editor of the Faux Spurious Journal. We take articles on other journals. I can tell you that it is a huge problem!
A real journal has a pear reviewed articles and other academics looking at them. We cost hundreds of dollars per year - payable in BitCoins. We accept all articles - with a small fee - because of academic
Fake journals, OTOH, only accept articles when the Editor (*snicker*) likes you. THEY cost THOUSANDS of dollars a year; which is indicative of their questionable authenticity.
Sincerely,
Heywood Yablowme, Ph.D.
University of Nigeria
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
A real journal has a pear reviewed articles and other academics looking at them.
That makes it the AppStore of the academic world, then.
Re: (Score:2)
Re:And what's non-"fake" about legacy print journa (Score:5, Insightful)
The thing is we're not talking about the idiots in the mainstream media vs the idiots with blogs, we're talking about scientific journals and the thing which differentiates the two is peer review.
Without peer review, the publication of a scientific study, no matter how well researched is no different than anything you read in the newspaper. That is to say it's just some idiots opinion. Having just some idiot's opinion come out of something which claims to be a scientific journal is a scary prospect for everyone. From a matter of practicality none of us have the expertise to personally read every scientific paper we might see referenced somewhere, let alone actually properly analyse it and try to replicate the results. We trust the reference because the journal has credibility, because it's supposed to be peer reviewed. If we can't tell the difference between peer reviewed and non peer reviewed journals then we're left essentially with the options of trusting everything we see referenced or nothing we see referenced, neither of which is good for creating an informed society.
Re: (Score:3)
Peer review addresses the consistency of the logic, and the data analysis, but raw data isn't checked; so GIGO often gets through. Data is more likely to be checked during replication, which happens less often; original research is sexy, replication is grunt work.
Re: (Score:2)
I refrain from peer reviewing that fact, thankyouverymuch.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Remember, everything you read on the Internet is false!