My notes:
The article below from Mr. Gillis is a re-post from a 2017 article he wrote. It is an excellent snapshot of the discussion at the time about 'predatory publishing' and the infamous 'Beall Lists'. I refer to it in our book and wanted to make sure it was archived. I also wanted to point out and comment on certain sections of the post by Mr. Gillis.
During the years the Beall Lists started to gain fame, I seemed alone in my questioning of how one man could be the police, judge, and jury of academic publishing. I also wondered what the real agenda was behind his actions and who benefited the most from these 'black' lists. However, then as now, questioning anything that goes against the 'divine wisdom' of the hallowed halls of academic publishing gets one branded a 'heretic'.
Early on, I questioned the Beall Lists' accuracy and legitimacy. Today I question other similar journal and author 'policing' aspects.
One example is Turnitin. Some years ago I started running Turnitin reports on papers that my students were submitting. As a handful of reports turned into dozens of reports, I began to see a very consistent and serious flaw in what the software was flagging as 'similar', with far too many editors from 'reputable journals' calling 'plagiarism' (I have their emails). As everyone is 'supposed to know', similarity and plagiarism are NOT THE SAME but they are dangerously used interchangeably now.
Years later, Turnitin continues to be deeply flawed. However, the company now says it is up the report's user to analyze the results to see what is legitimate or not legitimate. They take no responsibility for their own garbage.
Of course, in the real-world, journal staff or editor's use the report's cumulative score as a criteria for continued review. This is deeply troubling for two reasons. One is no one takes the time to review what is being flagged in these reports, and second, combined with the Beall List 'black listing' over a 1,000 journal publishers, submissions have soared for the remaining journals with the number of papers sometimes doubling yearly. This in turn, lowered the Turnitin cumulative score threshold for further consideration (from around 30% in 2019 to 15%-20% or less in 2021). With most journal editors and staff unpaid 'volunteers', their perspective is Turnitin makes their job easier, with the details of how and why unimportant.
However, the Turnitin people have amassed a powerful marketing arm which has wound its way around the jugulars of far to many academic institutions (I wish they had spent more on software developers). They have also created ridiculous new academic concepts such as 'wordsmithing'. They have also been recently been purchased for $1.7 billion. However, the fact remains that the core software 'Turnitin' returns 'similarity' reports which are pure rubbish (if one ever takes the time to see what actually gets flagged). At the same time, insiders see and understand the power that has been handed to yet another group, the Scopus Content Selection and Advisory Board (CSAB). Although not that new, their RADAR process/system took on the role of police, judge, and jury that Mr. Beall vacated in January 2017. (RADAR was started at the same time as the end of the Beall Lists). But once again, the CSAB and RADAR functions under Elsevier's Scopus umbrella leave a very big question as to who is getting targeted for the 'removal' of 'outlier journals' and who benefits most from the journal's demise?
Academic publishing is a very big business and being a monopolistic cartel is very good for business. Having tools and people to do your bidding, whether knowingly or unknowingly, assures your place at the head of the table.
C. B. Jones
academicresearchpublishing [@] gmail.com
Editor’s note, Jan. 18, 2017: Jeffrey Beall, the University of Colorado Denver
librarian behind Beall’s List of “potential, possible or probable” predatory
journals, has removed all information from his site. Retraction Watch reports
that it received a statement from the University of Colorado Denver that Mr.
Beall “has decided to no longer maintain or publish his research or blog on
open access journals and ‘predatory publishers.’” Lacey Earle, vice-president
of business development for Cabell’s International, a publishing services
company, said
on Twitter that Mr. Beall “was forced to shut down [the] blog due to
threats and politics.” As well, publisher MDPI disputes some of the claims in
the article. See their response here.
This past year, when an
undergraduate biology student at the University of the Fraser Valley approached
dean of science Lucy Lee for $2,000 to publish a paper in an academic journal,
Dr. Lee had immediate concerns about the request. She’d had a bad experience
with the journal in question, the International
Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, while doing a
review for the publication. She discovered a lack of rigour in some of the
journal’s articles, was alarmed at its many retractions and corrections, and
had concerns with the journal’s practice of publishing an “acknowledgement” issue
with a very long list of reviewers to make it look credible.
The publisher, Multidisciplinary
Digital Publishing Institute (MDPI), churns out nearly 160 scholarly journals a
year, many of them of mediocre quality, according to Jeffrey Beall, an associate
professor and librarian at the University of Colorado Denver, and one of the
world’s leading experts on what he calls “predatory” open access publishing.
Each week, MDPI and other questionable publishers hound Dr. Lee by email,
asking her to review submissions that she considers shoddy. Mr. Beall has
called this particular environmental publication a “pretend journal.” So when
Dr. Lee next saw the biology student, she alerted her to the potential problems
and redirected her to more credible scholarly publications, such as FACETS, a Canadian open access
journal.
Predatory and mediocre journals are
based on the model of open access publishing in which authors pay fees to have
their work published online.
MY RESPONSE: If the above sentence is true in 2021, which publishers now publish "predatory and mediocre" journals? Spring Nature? Yes. Taylor & Francis? Yes. Sage? Yes...........
However, unlike legitimate journals, they bombard
academics with spam emails, accept almost all submissions and overstate the
rigour of their peer-review processes. They also often conveniently neglect to
mention publication fees until late in the process.
In other cases, authors are
complicit in the scam, publishing numerous articles in these questionable
journals to earn quick and easy academic credit at their institutions. “There
are some predatory journals that specialize in that, charging only $200 or $300
for publication,” says Mr. Beall. This compares to fees of $1,500 or more for
most of the large, reputable open access publishers.
MY RESPONSE: So I guess Springer Nature's new (2020) OA fees of $11,250 per paper makes them very 'reputable'?
“If you need academic
credit, the market provides a solution,” he says, adding: “Universities are
particularly susceptible to these ethical breaches and predatory practices.”
The world of scholarly publishing is
in serious trouble. The number of predatory journals has skyrocketed in the
past three to four years, leading to a tidal wave of poor-quality research
being published. Beall’s List, the popular blacklist website compiled by Mr.
Beall, contains more than 1,200 publications and 1,000 publishers that he calls
potentially predatory. Five years ago, there were only 18 publishers on the
list.
MY RESPONSE: What is not being said here is that one man, and only one man, was the police, judge and jury in deciding if a 'publisher' was 'reputable', 'legitimate', or less than mediocre. Along the way he destroyed a significant number of the 'paywall' journals' competition, which gave them time to 'catch up' to a new way of doing business, which was 'Open Access'.
In 2014 alone, publishers launched
approximately 1,000 new journals. Distinguishing the unethical, pretend
journals from the real ones is becoming increasingly difficult as scams get
more sophisticated and publication standards fall. Bad journals range in
quality from mediocre to outright frauds, and researchers are advised to stay
away from them.
It hasn’t always been this bad.
Legitimate open access publishers, such as the Public
Library of Science (PLOS) and BioMed
Central, began about 20 years ago as the internet expanded. They contained
few restrictions on access to scholarly work, in contrast to traditional models
in which subscribers, mainly libraries, pay fees for access to journal content.
Thanks to PLOS and other big, credible publishers, open access models changed
the culture of scholarly publishing for the better, making research more
accessible. But open access models also opened the doors to scam artists and
mediocrity.
“The barriers to launching a new
operation are few and low,” Mr. Beall says. “All you need is a website and the
money starts rolling in. People are copying the model from friends and uncles,
because they see how easily they’re making profits.” Predatory journals are run
less like multinational corporations and more like syndicates, working
independently of one another but using similar models, resources and methods.
MY RESPONSE: Mr. Gillis did not go far enough in his comment about journals being more like 'syndicates' than corporations. In reality, the entire academic publishing hierarchy is more like a cartel, which is organized into clubs, and operated like a mafia. Graham Hancock, the famous author of 'Fingerprints of the Gods' also refers to the academic groups as 'gangs'.
it
is considered more prestigious to publish in North American journals
What’s more, many predatory journals
“want to use Canada’s brand value,” says Mr. Beall. Most of the world’s
scholars are based in Asia, he explains, but it is considered more prestigious
for them to publish in North American journals than those based in India or
China, for example. “People are starting predatory journal operations for those
overseas scholars, and running the journals out of their houses in suburbs of
Toronto and places like that.” For instance, a group from Pakistan runs
scientific publisher ScienceVier – a riff
on the name of the well-known, reputable publisher Elsevier – out of a Hamilton, Ontario,
apartment building.
Savvy deans such as Dr. Lee at UFV
are trying to raise awareness about these issues. “Some students and faculty …
are quite gullible,” Dr. Lee says. In her role as an executive on the Canadian Council of Deans of Science,
she invited Mr. Beall to speak at the council’s annual meeting in 2016. One of
the themes of the meeting, she says, was “the things that keep deans awake at
night.”
When Mr. Beall discovers a predatory
publisher, he doesn’t pull his punches. Titles of his blog posts denouncing
predatory journals and publishers include, “More Rubbish from Hyderabad:
Peertechz” and “>OMICS International Totally Sucks.” Mr. Beall classifies both
Peertechz and OMICS as predatory
publishers. “The warnings need to be stark to alert people,” he says.
The deans’ council was grateful for
his research and candid conclusions, Dr. Lee says. “Some deans were unaware of
the recent predatory ways in which these publishers are tricking academics,”
she says. “It was eye-opening. When we hire new faculty, we have to be very
careful to look at their CVs in detail. Some applicants list 50-plus
publications and we have to comb through each one to ensure it’s credible.”
“This
is a problem for all scholars”
Canada’s francophone academics are
not immune to the issue, even though most of these predatory journals publish
in English. “This is a problem for all scholars, irrespective of language,”
says Vincent Larivière, an expert on scholarly publishing who holds the Canada Research Chair on the
Transformations of Scholarly Communication at Université de Montréal.
Dr. Larivière notes that, in the
natural and medical sciences, francophone scholars mostly publish in English,
since topics are international in scope. However, in the social sciences and
humanities – given that history, culture and society are usually closely linked
to language – francophones are more likely to publish in French.
“But, the trend is changing because
of pressures to be more international and publish in English,” says Dr.
Larivière. “In this context, I think it is quite crucial that francophone
researchers also become aware of this issue of predatory journals. It might be
even more crucial for them, as English-language journals might not be their
natural publication venues.”
Eduardo Franco, the James McGill
Professor in the departments of oncology, and epidemiology and biostatistics,
at McGill University, says he sees many junior faculty members getting duped.
“That is a bad trend,” he says. “Older faculty members know the credible
journals, because there are only a few great journals in each discipline.”
In his role as chair of McGill’s
department of oncology, Dr. Franco oversees academic promotion, which includes
reading every CV submitted to the department. In 2014, he wrote a warning
letter to faculty about publishing in predatory journals. “Some have also
accepted roles as editors or editorial board members of these journals,” he
wrote. “If only they actually knew what passes for science in these journals …
they would immediately disallow their association with them.”
Dr. Franco has had his own run-ins
with predatory publishers. OMICS once used his name for a series of dental
conferences that had nothing to do with him and even “had the audacity to
hijack the name of one of the journals I edit, Preventive
Medicine,” he says. Preventive Medicine, founded in 1972, is
published by Elsevier; the similarly titled Journal of Preventive
Medicine is published by Insight Medical Publishing, which is owned by
OMICS.
This recent hijacking trend is
particularly disturbing, says Dr. Franco, because the fakes piggyback on real
brands and confuse even vigilant academics. Plus, shutting down these sites is
nearly impossible; when someone convinces authorities to shut one down, another
site quickly replaces it. OMICS is one of the largest scholarly publishers in
the world, running more than 700 journals, most of them of dubious quality.
It gets worse, Dr. Franco says:
OMICS is now buying legitimate publishers. At the end of September, the India-based
company made news in Canada after Rose Simpson, the former managing editor of
the Canadian Journal of
General Internal Medicine and several other scholarly journals, blew
the whistle on some of its purchases. In January 2016, she’d discovered that
OMICS was buying Andrew John Publishing Inc. of Dundas, Ontario, which owned
more than a dozen legitimate publications. She had been working for AJPI, but
was let go this past July. The company’s former publisher, John Birky, told her
that OMICS had also bought the Pulsus Group, a legitimate publisher that
managed the Canadian Journal of Respiratory Therapy and more than 30
other credible publications.
“my
spidey senses began tingling”
Ms. Simpson, who’s been an editor
and writer for 40 years, was surprised at the takeovers. “During the transition
at AJPI, the publisher never used the name OMICS and only told his clients that
there were new partners,” she says. “Even after the company was sold, very few
people knew about OMICS.”
She went to the OMICS website and
“my spidey senses began tingling,” she says. “I discovered spelling and
grammatical errors” – mistakes that any high school student could have fixed.
Still, not knowing much about OMICS,
she agreed to help in the transition at the Pulsus Group. An OMICS
representative in Dubai offered her a contract position. “Immediately after the
Dubai call, an OMICS rep contacted everyone at Pulsus and introduced me as the
new person who would solve everyone’s problems,” Ms. Simpson says. Then all
hell broke loose.
“I started getting emails from
people at the journals saying, ‘This is a disaster,’” she says. The former
publisher of Pulsus, who she suspects was duped by OMICS, sent a note to her
saying that editors at some of the Pulsus journals were vilifying him. Serious
inaccuracies and false claims began popping up on the Pulsus website, including
old contact information, references to a journal that OMICS hadn’t acquired and
references to business segments that OMICS didn’t own. One editor said he
Googled OMICS and discovered on a Wikipedia page that the U.S. Federal Trade
Commission had filed complaint against the company a month earlier.
“The editor asked me if this was
true,” says Ms. Simpson. She checked and discovered to her horror that it was.
This past August, the FTC had filed a case in the U.S. against OMICS for
deceptive publishing, stating that “consumers have suffered and will continue
to suffer substantial injury” because of OMICS’ violations. The FTC noted that
OMICS made false statements that some of its journals were included in PubMed
and MEDLINE, two reputable academic-journal indexing services. In addition, the
FTC claimed that OMICS was holding on to authors’ submissions until the authors
paid publication fees, essentially kidnapping their work. Even after receiving
requests to withdraw articles, OMICS published them in spite of authors’
objections – and continued to ask for payments.
“I thought, ‘Oh my god’,” Ms.
Simpson says. “I didn’t want to be associated with anyone like that.” She quit
not long after the Dubai call and began sending emails to the AJPI journals
where she’d worked. “Everyone just freaked out,” she says. “None of the medical
societies for whom I worked knew that OMICS had bought AJPI or Pulsus.” After
learning about the FTC case, a few editors at the bought-out Canadian journals
that were indexed with PubMed feared they would lose their status because of
OMICS.
In response to the FTC
lawsuit, OMICS lawyers submitted a rebuttal and asked that the case be
dismissed. OMICS owner, Srinubabu Gedela, also clarified that OMICS doesn’t
control the journals, just their publishing contracts.
Nevertheless, one by one, the
journals formerly under AJPI and Pulsus are now trying to break their contracts
with OMICS and turn to more reputable publishers. This past September, the
Toronto Star reported
that six of the journals, including the Canadian Journal of General Internal
Medicine and the Canadian Journal of Optometry, terminated their
publishing contracts with OMICS. In other cases, editors-in-chief are
resigning. Ten other journals contacted by the Star didn’t respond to
emails.
“The
explosion in open access predatory publishing has increased the noise in the
scientific world”
“Predatory journals are
contaminating the world of science,” says McGill’s Dr. Franco. “I have only
contempt for publishers like OMICS. The explosion in open access predatory
publishing has increased the noise in the scientific world. It’s become more
difficult to hear real signals – to hear about real, relevant scientific
discoveries.”
In an effort to alert academics, Mr.
Beall updated his Beall’s List to include both AJPI and Pulsus as possible
predators and wrote about the panic among staff and editors at many Canadian
medical journals. “OMICS International is on a mission to take over all of
scholarly publishing,” Mr. Beall wrote, saying the company is on a buying spree
around the world. “It is purchasing journals and publishers and incorporating
them into its evil empire. Its strategy is to saturate scholarly publishing
with its low-quality and poorly managed journals, aiming to squeeze out and
acquire legitimate publishers.”
Complicating the situation, OMICS
and other predatory journals use fake impact-factor companies to make
themselves appear more legitimate than they really are. The FTC mentioned this
in its case against the company. Legitimate firms count article citations and
other factors to measure a journal’s influence or impact. “There’s one
legitimate impact-factor supplier, and it’s Thomson Reuters,” says Mr. Beall.
“Most predatory journals have an impact-factor number,” he adds, but “they
either lie or hire a company to contrive one, and they use the number on their
websites and in emails to make it look like they’re authentic.”
Academics are also increasingly
facing a deluge of invitations to fake or low-quality conferences, sometimes
run by the same unscrupulous individuals who run fake or mediocre journals.
“There are a lot of conferences that aren’t really scientific but make money
for somebody,” UFV’s Dr. Lee says. Such conference organizers harvest emails
from university websites and send requests to academics, some of whom,
unfortunately, use the opportunity to take vacations. “I regularly get
invitations to attend these internationally, and they’re email scams,” she
says.
The consequences of all this can be
painful for unsuspecting academics. Dr. Franco says he hasn’t seen careers
ended, but he warns that by publishing your work in a predatory or mediocre
journal, you’ve burned that research. “You can’t republish the same research,
and the article in the predatory journal could stay on the internet forever,”
he says, risking your reputation. Given the number and sophistication of
predatory and mediocre journals – and the lack of oversight and policing in the
industry – perhaps the most reasonable advice is to assume that all new
journals are suspect, unless the journal’s criteria and content prove otherwise.
How
to identify mediocre or predatory academic journals and publishers
- Spend a few minutes searching on the following websites
for the publisher or journal in question: Beall’s List (scholarlyoa.com),
which contains blacklisted publishers and journals, as well as so-called
hijacked journals; and PubPeer, a
popular, anonymous database that allows you to search for misconduct among
individual researchers.
- Take the time to read articles in the journal that
you’re interested in and research the journal itself. There should be
absolutely no obvious spelling or grammar mistakes in the journal.
Publishers’ websites should be easy to navigate, transparent in terms of
contact names and methods, and shouldn’t crash or suffer from ongoing
technical problems. Also, legitimate open access journals are always
transparent and clear about their peer-review processes and author fees. A
short peer-review process and sudden request for fees are signs of a
predatory journal.
- Cross-industry coalitions have started ventures to
protect against deceptive journals, and universities are doing much more
with committees and codes to stop deceptive practices compared to three or
four years ago. For basic advice, refer to the site thinkchecksubmit.org (although a
default attitude of “think, check, don’t submit” might serve you better).
- Search Journal
Citation Reports, published by Thomson Reuters, to confirm claimed
impact factors.
- Avoid using journal “whitelists” because such lists and
indexes weren’t created for the purpose of conferring legitimacy. For
instance, the Directory of Open Access
Journals and the Thomson
Reuters Master Journal List (which provides a list of journals
appearing in at least one of 24 indexes) are legitimate operations, but
their lists contain many predatory journals. Ditto for Scopus, Science
Citation Index and other academic lists, citation databases and indexes.
- Don’t be fooled by a journal’s association with
legitimate businesses, codes and committees. The scholarly publishing
industry is doing a poor job of policing itself and legitimate companies,
such as firms that sell software and agencies that distribute ISSN
numbers, offer services and licenses to almost anyone, including predatory
publishers. For example, although the Committee on Publication Ethics,
or COPE, contains more than 10,000 members worldwide and provides advice
on how to handle cases of research and publication misconduct, many of its
members are from predatory journals.
PUBLISHED BY
Alex Gillis
Missing author information
SEE SIMILAR STORIES
COMMENTS
Post a comment
University Affairs moderates all
comments according
to the following guidelines. If approved, comments generally appear within
one business day. We may republish particularly insightful remarks in our print
edition or elsewhere.
https://www.universityaffairs.ca/features/feature-article/beware-academics-getting-reeled-scam-journals/#comments
