Invasion of the 'Journal Snatchers': the Firms That Buy Science Publications and Turn Them Rogue (nature.com) 26
Major scholarly databases have removed dozens of academic journals after researchers discovered they had been purchased by questionable companies and transformed into predatory publications. A January 2025 study identified 36 legitimate journals acquired by recently formed firms with no publishing experience, who then dramatically increased publication fees and output while lowering quality standards.
According to information scientist Alberto Martin-Martin from the University of Granada, publishers are being offered up to hundreds of thousands of euros per journal title. Once acquired, journals typically introduce or raise article-processing charges while churning out papers often outside the publication's original scope. Scopus has delisted all 36 identified journals, and Web of Science removed 11 of 17 affected titles from its index. "As there has been significant change (different ownership), there is no guarantee that review quality is at the same level as the original journals," an Elsevier spokesperson told Nature.
According to information scientist Alberto Martin-Martin from the University of Granada, publishers are being offered up to hundreds of thousands of euros per journal title. Once acquired, journals typically introduce or raise article-processing charges while churning out papers often outside the publication's original scope. Scopus has delisted all 36 identified journals, and Web of Science removed 11 of 17 affected titles from its index. "As there has been significant change (different ownership), there is no guarantee that review quality is at the same level as the original journals," an Elsevier spokesperson told Nature.
steal everything (Score:1)
you know, if we weren't doing things the opposite of the right way all the time, we wouldn't have these constant "capitalists steal something and ruin it" headlines
because this is not enshittification, this is just outright destruction
Do away with journal-centrism (Score:4, Interesting)
Journals seem obsolete. Orgs should just publish their results on their own website, and if various journals/orgs wish to curate or critique them, they can. If a curator gets a bad reputation, they'll eventually fade.
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Re:Do away with journal-centrism (Score:5, Insightful)
Let's set aside the issue of peer review for a minute. For myself, and for most researchers, I think journals aren't worth much as information repositories for research within your own field. No matter how big the field is, if you're really doing research, you're focused on a small part of it. You get to know all the other players by reputation if not directly, and you read their papers when they go up on a preprint server like arxiv.org. The actual journal pub happens months later and just means you have to update your bibliography.
But the journals provide lots of value when you need to research something outside your expertise. I'm a high energy particle physicist, so if I need to find something on solid state, preprint servers are useless. Anyone can tell the absolutely crap submissions, but middling ones are harder to spot, and wading through all the noise takes time. But locating a handful of journals that cater to a given topic is easy, and suddenly you have a curated search set of high quality results. Journals don't cost money because they're physically hosting the papers, or at least not primarily. Even if a journal was only an index of good quality papers, who pays to keep that index updated? Either you pay to have your work submitted to the index, or users of the index pay a subscription fee. Those are the two publishing options now: pay for open access or let the journal charge readers for access. Maybe you could try letting professionals in the field, who already keep a personal database of useful papers, voluntarily maintain these indexes. Set it up with a good interface and citation generator, link it to existing bibliography tools like endnote and zotero, great! But now you've got the online marketplace problem, and you fill up with fake reviews from bots. A federated "web of trust" setup could go a long way if you're only going a few degrees of separation outside your domain, but also introduces a ton of new technical problems.
Yes, the journal system is a relic of pre-internet days and is in many ways a barrier to advancing research. Thankfully it is becoming more and more standard that government-funded research (which is nearly all of it) is required to be published open-access. But the journals still provide a useful service, and I at least have never seen a credible proposal to replace them other than with something that is basically the same thing with a different veneer.
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the journal system is absolutely necessary, when proper peer review is done to weed out the poor papers and provide helpful feedback to authors and is not obsolete at all, nor is it contradictory to the idea of publishing open-access.
To the larger point of open-access; consider that most government-funded research is DYING thanks to Orange Shitler's Regime. How do you propose open-access to proceed? Open Access is a great idea, but charging authors for the "make your article freely viewable" fee is kin
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You argue that the journal system and particularly peer review is absolutely necessary, then it needs to be paid for somehow. You could mandate that the gover
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It's not like authors are paying those fees out-of-pocket. When you submit a proposal, you have to submit a line-item budget.
Provided your research is grant-funded. See previous. Most existing students? They're having to do things themselves. Predatory journals [predatoryjournals.org] are constantly capturing desperate students who are just trying to get funded somewhere, anywhere... even if it means taking on credit card debt to get into an "open access" journal.
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Journals seem obsolete. Orgs should just publish their results on their own website, and if various journals/orgs wish to curate or critique them, they can. If a curator gets a bad reputation, they'll eventually fade.
Peer review is still valuable. Although there are occasional inclusions that a reviewer asks to have included that are not quite on-point, for the vast majority of my papers, they have been improved by going through the process of peer review. Then there's the odd case that when I read the review, I think, "no, that's absolute shite," but, perhaps months later, I get over myself and realize that the reviewer was, in fact correct.
While there are many problems with peer review, it is, on the whole, better t
This is the problem with giving unlimited money (Score:3, Insightful)
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No, you're wrong. It's not about money at all. It's about debt.
People are willing to take on jobs that require them to give up so much that life offers. They're willing to do that over growing their own food, and making their own life. Because of this basic diversion from Nature, humans are now having to put up with certain evils that they'd otherwise be protected from. Protected from such evil, by Nature itself.
This is beautifully naive (Score:2)
Nature fucking sucks. It has always sucked and we have always done everything we can to get a leg up over it. Leaving shit
Internet scams by another name (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Internet scams by another name (Score:4, Informative)
yes, we know of them, they are pretty aggressive, a quarter of my public email box is full of their "Dr. Dollar Ton, please publish with us/review for us/write a chapter for our book/show up on our free online conference" spam.
Re:Internet scams by another name (Score:4, Interesting)
I received an invitation to be an editor-in-chief the other day. My publishing output is four papers, counting very generously: two of them are in published in journals aimed at undergraduates. Something tells me I'm underqualified for anything except rubber stamping, but then that's probably all that the publisher wants.
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This is a nuisance, although it is a rather unpleasant one.
A real problem is that now every year there's a bunch of journals that somehow procure high impact factor and a Q1 or Q2 without anyone having heard of them, whereas reputable editions with long histories slide to Q3 rank and nobody blinks. And so on and so forth, I'm even tired of listing all the problems of this "peer review" and citations business.
And the people who make a living of these scams are getting more and more creative, which requires t
Re:Internet scams by another name (Score:5, Informative)
I'll buy a defunct porn site (Score:5, Funny)
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publish journals as GNU/GPL (Score:3)
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You're missing the peer-review part that is the purpose of a journal.
Publishing a paper in a journal means it has been peer reviewed. Publishing in an open repo means nothing,
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Ages ago, with journals, we got credible research information.
That day has passed.
Open sourcing can provide an improved alternative, if curated.
Curation can be accomplished by establishing review boards.
Each review board would consist of members elected by qualified peers.
The various boards would belong to a global umbrella organization.
That top organization would consist of elected administrators with organizational skills.
These boards are NOT like corporate boards furnished with plush perks.
They would be
So much for the "hierarchy of evidence" (Score:1)
Sounds like there is a simple solution (Score:2)
Don't trust the journal, trust it's owners.
When it gets sold, treat it like a new journal.