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."
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.
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, 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.
Even worse (Score:4, Insightful)
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:'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: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:I don't debate that most are propaganda but (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 because its on the Internet, its because signing up for an account on some web site and spewing your incoherent thought at the rest of us on your blog does not make you a journalist.
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.
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.
Re:'fake'? (Score:2, Insightful)
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: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:'fake'? (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.
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: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: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.