Who will keep predatory science journals at bay now that Jeffrey Beall’s blog is gone?

Michael J. I. Brown, Monash University

For aficionados of bad science, the blog of University of Colorado librarian Jeffrey Beall was essential reading. Beall’s blog charted the murky world of predatory and vanity academic publishers, many of which charge excessive fees for publishing papers or have dysfunctional peer review processes.

I’ve seen rubbish on chemtrails, alien life, climate, HIV-AIDS and vaccines appear in these (unintended) parodies of academic publications. Although, to be honest, they can be a guilty pleasure of sorts. Perhaps I’m like a film buff getting a kick out of Ed Wood’s “Plan 9 from Outer space”.

But recently all of the content on Beall’s blog was wiped without any warning. While much of Beall’s blog is archived, it had been charting the evolution of predatory academic publishing, including conferences and the purchasing of existing journals. With Beall’s blog gone, it will become harder to keep track of the underbelly of academic publishing.

Changing face of scientific publishing

Traditionally, academic journals have been sustained via subscriptions, particularly those charged to academic libraries. Libraries would pick and choose which journals to subscribe to, in large part based on the requests of academics.

Subscriptions provided some incentive to maintain quality but also limited the readership of academic papers, effectively excluding the broader pubic (whose taxes often funded the research).

As the internet enabled the easy sharing of information, this is now extending to academic publications too. The “open access” model is increasingly popular, where authors are charged publication fees and the resulting papers are freely available online.

In principle, I like open access, as I believe science should be disseminated to the broadest audience possible. But there are perverse incentives. Will a publisher reject a manuscript that is manifestly rubbish, and forego the fees it would charge the author? In some cases the answer is “no”.

Furthermore, the shift from printed journals to online publications has facilitated predatory and vanity academic publishers. Computers and websites have replaced printing presses and bound volumes. One publisher on Beall’s list, Zant World Press, is run from a Melbourne suburban house.

An archive of Beall’s site maintains the most recent list of suspect journals.

Beall’s blog charted the explosion of predatory publishers exploiting the open access model. His list grew from just 18 publishers in 2011 to 1,155 publishers in 2017!

I, along with many others, found Beall’s list an incredibly useful resource. Suspicious scientific claims could often be traced back to journals associated with publishers on the list.

For example, in 2015 many newspapers printed claims that chocolate helped weight loss, but it was all a hoax, which included publishing a paper in the International Archives of Medicine, which was on Beall’s list.

I recently became aware of another prank, played at the expense of a predatory publisher. Astronomer Dominique Eckert submitted the joke paper “Get me off Your F@#^ing Mailing List” to IOSR journals. The paper consists of “get me off your f@#^ing mailing list” repeated hundreds of times.

While one cannot fault the paper for clarity of expression, it isn’t suitable for an academic journal. But less than a week after Eckert submitted the paper, it was accepted for publication. The “reviewers comments” were “quality of manuscript is good”. Manuscript handling charges were US$75 (A$100).

Remarkably, this isn’t the first time a predatory publisher has accepted “Get me off Your F@#^ing Mailing List”. Peter Vamplew played the same prank in 2014.

Beall planned a post on Eckert’s prank for Thursday January 12, 2017, but it never happened. By then, all the content was wiped from the blog.

Why this happened isn’t yet clear. The University of Colorado says it was Beall’s personal decision. However, Lacey Earle, who has been working with Beall, tweeted that Beall “was forced to shut down blog due to threats and politics”.

Certainly there are many publishers and individuals who are no fans of Beall, and legal threats have been made in the past. Without a doubt, the blog has hurt some publishers’ reputations and bottom lines.

Indeed, Beall’s work certainly facilitated the US Federal Trade Commission charging OMICS Group with deceptive acts or practices in August 2016. OMICS has responded and described the allegations as “baseless”.

Changing times

A few years ago, predatory publishing often consisted of websites with stock images and poor grammar. Sometimes journal “editors” were revealed to be identities stolen off the web.

But, increasingly, predatory publishers are running academic conferences in countries around the globe, including the US and Australia. Often the conferences do not live up to their hype, as Radio National’s Hagar Cohen found when she attended an OMICS conference in Brisbane in 2015.

Predatory publishers are also buying existing journals in developed countries. Recently the Australasian Medical Journal’s contact details shifted from Melbourne to London, and it now shares the postal address of iMedPub, an affiliate of OMICS.

Beall had been reporting this changing landscape of predatory publishing, and I suspect this is where the loss of his blog will have the greatest impact. That said, Beall’s archived list will long remain a valuable resource. And perhaps most importantly, he made the community aware of the threat of predatory academic publishing.

Michael J. I. Brown, Associate professor, Monash University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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Article history

Where an article has been updated since first being written, we provide a history of the changes. Why? Why not :-).

The original article was published on 16 February 2020.
The article was updated on 04 August 2023. We removed profanities (at least, putting in special characters) we we felt that search engines did not like it. It was actual in the title of papers, so the profanities should have remained, but we felt it better to remove them.

December 3, 2022January 21, 2023

Flattering emails will get you everywhere, except when they’re from junk journals

Simon Chapman, University of Sydney

I wrote last year about junk research journals and conferences when I explored the intriguing case of a Philip Morris employee speaking at one of these conferences in Brisbane.

Every researcher I know receives dozens of gushing emails every week from the organisers of these conferences and editors of the journals.

There is barely any sub-specialist field in science, business, engineering or you-name-it that hasn’t reached out to me with these breathless invitations to write articles, attend conferences as a delegate, keynote speaker or panellist, or become a member of the editorial board.

Not only do you get the initial invitation, but also imploring, obsequious follow-ups, with ever-increasing saccharine coatings. Everyone I know instantly deletes these. But I go a step further and mark each email with “block sender”. When they often continue to come, this suggests the senders use multiple email addresses to avoid going immediately into spam.

Colleagues derive great amusement from sharing the more bizarre ones and I had such an experience recently, giving me insights into how these outfits operate.

We’d be honoured if you’d write for us

On January 23, I received an email from a John Behannon, managing editor of the Journal of Bioequivalence & Bioavailability. You’ll understand as I am a social scientist, this is naturally not a journal perpetually at my bedside, yet I read on.

John wrote:

I wonder if you can write a short review or commentary on the topic “Biosynthesis of Taxadiene in Saccharomyces cerevisiae : Selection of Geranylgeranyl Diphosphate Synthase Directed by a Computer-Aided Docking Strategy”. If it is not possible to submit by February 15th, 2017 kindly let us know your feasibility regarding the submission of the article. Anticipating positive response!

This request seemed to be in the very top tier of junk mail, so I thought I’d have some fun with it. I wrote immediately to Mr Behannon:

I know less than absolutely nothing about this subject, but imagine this probably doesn’t matter to you. Can you confirm you would still like me to write something?

Overnight he replied:

Thank you for the prompt response! The Journal was seeking for an article having similar study as I have mentioned earlier. Your name was mentioned in that article and hence thought of contacting you with the hope of receiving a quality work piece. Kindly, let me know if I can get such an article for the next upcoming issue!

So I tell him I know less than absolutely nothing about the subject and he still holds the door wide open.

I donned my sleuthing outfit and pasted the “topic” of his invitation into Google. There I found a paper with the exact title by Chinese authors published in the accredited (indexed) and peer-reviewed journal PLoS One in 2014.

The original paper had received a modest number of readers and only nine citations since publication, so why would another journal be in the least bit interested in publishing a commentary on it?

PLoS One welcomes commentaries from readers, which is the normal route scientific responses take. So the rank odour of predatory publishing began to increase.

I then searched the PLoS article for my name. And sure enough there was “Chapman” in a reference to a 1991 book, the Dictionary of Terpenoids, published by … are you ready for this … Chapman & Hall, London.

So I got back to John:

I’m sorry, I have looked at the paper you say my name was “mentioned in” [here I linked to the PLoS One article]. Quite obviously, as I do not work in any area remotely associated with that paper, my name is NOT mentioned in the paper. Can you clarify why you have asked me to write on this subject please?

He then replied:

I apologize for the inconvenience brought to you, as there might be some technical error! It was an automated mail. Have a nice day!

The plain “technical error” was a webcrawling bot scooped up my surname from the PLoS One article and had no way of understanding I was not the same Chapman whose name is behind the English book publisher Chapman and Hall. This match then would have populated an automated invitation email (to, in this instance, probably all researchers in the world named Chapman, regardless of research field).

A business model based on spam

Behannon’s journal is published by OMICS International. The publisher’s business model probably involves sometimes many thousands of people in my situation getting such totally irrelevant spam. All other authors referenced in each bot-mined article would also get invitations. I also get many similar emails from junk journals to write about areas where I do have a track record.

Only a tiny fraction of those invited to write for such journals end up doing so, albeit after paying a fee to publish. The huge majority, like me in this example, find the invitations bizarre, immediately recognise them as the commercial fishing trips for desperate authors that they are, or both.

Those who respond are sadly often wildly naïve and inexperienced in research publishing, which is why their targeting has been dubbed “predatory”. All experienced researchers understand that at the very bottom of the food chain in journal selection are those that tick many of the predatory publishing criteria.

Publishing company OMICS is subject to a court action by the United States Federal Trade Commission. The defendants are accused of having been “deceiving academics and researchers about the nature of its publications and hiding publication fees ranging from hundreds to thousands of dollars”.

Keeping up with predatory publishers

OMICS has been described as a predatory publisher, which the company denies.

US university librarian Geoffrey Beall has spotlighted predatory publishers in the much-lauded Beall’s List, which included over 1,000 such publishers. In January Beall took down his list from the web and has not explained why. One rumour is another publisher is planning to take over and continue the list, which would be very welcome in the global research community. In the meantime, recent editions are available on the wonderful Wayback Machine.

Am I part of an experiment?

I Googled “John Behannon”, the OMICS journal managing editor. The search also returned John Bohannon, who coincidentally or not is an investigative journalist at the Berkeley Institute for Data Science and has published work on the problem of fake peer review and fake science journalism.

I’m now wondering whether I have been picked as a subject in an experiment to see how researchers respond to bot-generated overtures from publishers.

Simon Chapman, Emeritus Professor in Public Health, University of Sydney

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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October 29, 2021December 16, 2021

Paying commission to academics reduces the value of research

Sioux McKenna, Rhodes University and Dr Evelyn Muthama, Rhodes University

Many universities around the world pay academics to publish their research. Our recent study in South Africa, though, suggests they should be cautious of such practices.

The country’s Department of Higher Education and Training funds public universities for every article published in academic journals on any of six accredited lists. The lists include journals that meet various quality indicators such as peer review. The idea is that funding will drive the country’s participation in the knowledge economy through its contribution to research.

Universities in these cash-strapped times have used this funding incentive to maximise their publication counts and therefore their income. But they have often done so in ways that could be considered to be gaming the system.

For example, in response to this national funding structure, many universities now offer pay commission to academics for articles published in accredited journals. That’s despite the Department of Higher Education and Training warning them not to do so.

All universities offer indirect incentives, in that publications are a key feature in promotion criteria. In addition, many universities pay bonuses to academics who bring in such funding. The money goes either into their research accounts or into their salaries.

Our research, based on surveys and interviews with academics from seven South African universities, tracked some of the consequences of these direct incentives.

Incentives drive quantity but not quality

Arguably, the country’s massive increase in research output from 7,230 units in 2005 to 18,872 in 2015 was in response to this commission payment process. Except that the two universities, Rhodes University and the University of Cape Town, that don’t pay direct incentives to their staff enjoyed an equally sharp rise in outputs.

All around the world the pressure to publish has led to a focus on the exchange-value of academic publishing. Publication is seen to be exchangeable for promotion and bonuses. The use-value, that is knowledge contribution, can be undermined as a result. The idea that sharing research should be useful in building a knowledge field or solving a problem is set aside when publications are framed as currency to be exchanged for private benefits.

Many of the academics we interviewed saw “publication in an accredited journal” as the measure of an article’s worth and not whether it made a “knowledge contribution”. But others were worried that the article’s content and readers seemed to matter less than whether it “counts” in the accreditation system. The unintended consequences of this include wasted time and resources spent on worthless research.

This has led to a glut of poor-quality papers overwhelming the editorial process. It happens through a practice known as “salami slicing”, where a piece of research that merits a single article is sliced thinly into multiple publications. National funding is rewarding such practices because of the bluntness of the quality indicator for knowledge dissemination. All it requires is that the journal should be on an accredited list.

Predatory publishing

The exchange-value conception of publication was clearly implicated in the enormous rise in predatory publications. As academics rush to get published, so predatory journals move into the sector. Predatory publications are journals which are entirely profit driven and don’t implement peer review, copy editing and other quality criteria.

The Department of Higher Education and Training has attempted to stamp out predatory publishing, especially on the national list of accredited journals. But these remain a serious problem across the country and the continent.

Universities that have low research output and which have instituted strong exchange–value cultures are particularly vulnerable to such charlatans. Academics in such universities get the message that what is desirable is publication of anything and in any journal. This thinking is communicated through incentive systems and institutional policies that highlight the need to publish but don’t say why.

Academic resentment

Our research data also suggested that universities which were focused on increasing subsidy income through publishing may foster resentment between academics.

Some senior staff were protected from heavy teaching loads because their publications generated significant income. These researchers got both lighter teaching loads and cash bonuses. Junior staff found it difficult to establish their own research profiles in this context.

The Department of Higher Education and Training has, since 2015, warned universities against “directly incentivising individual authors as this practice is promoting perverse behaviour in some cases”.

The recent independent assessor’s report on the University of Fort Hare showed that millions of rands were paid to individual researchers. It spoke of the “obvious risk” that academic quality was sacrificed for quantity.

There’s a need for a more nuanced system to drive the continent’s participation in the knowledge economy: one that focuses on the use-value of research.

By aspiring to scholarship of an internationally high standard at the frontiers of the field, academics can make a worthwhile contribution. Many universities are making this less likely by consistently indicating to academics that publication is about getting commission.

Sioux McKenna, Director of Centre for Postgraduate Studies, Rhodes University and Dr Evelyn Muthama, Postdoctoral Fellow, Rhodes University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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June 29, 2021October 29, 2021

Vanity and predatory academic publishers are corrupting the pursuit of knowledge

by Michael J. I. Brown, Monash University

Radio National’s Background Briefing recently presented a grim academic tale of identity theft, shambolic conferences, exploitation, sham peer review and pseudoscience.

Presenter Hagar Cohen provided an eye-opening introduction to predatory academic publishing and conferences, with a particular focus on the publisher OMICS Group. It was also a very human story, including researchers travelling across the globe only to find they’re attending an imitation of an academic conference.

Why do predatory and vanity academic publishers and conferences exist? Why are they flourishing now? And what can they tell us about the failings of academia?

Publish

“Publish or perish” is a simplification of academic life, but contains an element of truth. There’s little point undertaking research if you don’t tell anybody about it, and this has been true for centuries. Four centuries ago, astronomers such as Copernicus, Galileo and Kepler discussed their observations, calculations and methods in books.

Understandably, academic publications, citations of publications and conference presentations have become metrics for academic performance. One can (and should) argue about the legitimacy of such metrics, but they are a fact of modern academic life.

Peer review of manuscripts by academics is also critical to academic publishing. Does the manuscript add to the body of knowledge? Does the manuscript accurately discuss previous work? Are there significant errors in the manuscript? Does the manuscript clearly communicate relevant methods, results and arguments? Are the conclusions of the manuscript justified?

Peer review is imperfect, but prevents many dubious manuscripts from being published. It effectively excludes authors who are unwilling or unable to meet the standards of mainstream academic publishing.

Vanity and predators

Both vanity and predatory academic publishers exploit opportunities created by legitimate peer review and academic performance metrics. In particular, they allow authors to publish articles that would never survive legitimate peer review.

Vanity academic journals have existed for decades, and these imitations of legitimate journals often promote particular (discredited) ideas or have strong ideological biases. For example, the Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons may sound respectable, but publishes pseudoscience including HIV-AIDS denial, climate contrarianism and anti-vaccination scaremongering.

*Evidence for alien life or vanity publishing? University of Sheffield*

More recently, there has been an explosion of predatory journals, which seek to make large profits by publishing (for a fee) virtually anything that comes their way. While predatory publishers claim to peer-review articles, this is often a sham.

For example, on Background Briefing I discussed “Discovering the Total Contents of the Universe”, which was published in an OMICS journal. This article was supposedly peer-reviewed, but isn’t based on observations nor a scientific methodology. Instead, it makes claims about aliens based on “ancient Indian scriptures” and “a mathematical language, which has long been forgotten by mankind”. To be blunt, it is nonsense.

While most academics ignore dubious journals, such publications have an impact beyond academia. The vanity Journal of Cosmology often publishes bogus claims of alien life, which sections of the media credulously repeat.

I’ve also seen activists reference studies from predatory journals in an attempt to bolster their arguments.

Exploitation

Predatory publishers often exploit the goodwill of legitimate academics. Being invited to present at a conference or edit a journal is usually evidence of being held in high esteem by your peers. It can be an opportunity too good to miss, but with predatory publishers there’s a sting in the tail.

Predatory publishers often invite academics to join editorial boards, giving journals an air of legitimacy. However, they often ignore academics’ feedback on manuscripts or even use academics’ names without permission.

Similarly, predatory outfits will invite academics to present at conferences, for a hefty fee, but those conferences may be pale imitations of real conferences. Background Briefing attended a shambolic conference in Brisbane with fewer than 30 attendees. Many of the speakers listed on the program did not attend. One has to wonder if the missing speakers even knew they were on the conference program.

Online explosion

University of Colorado librarian Jeffrey Beall maintains a list of hundreds of potentially predatory publishers, which produce thousands of dodgy journals. Most of these publishers have appeared in the past decade.

This proliferation is an unfortunate side effect of online open access publishing. Online publications do not have the overheads of printed journals, as they require only a website and correctly formatted PDF documents. Conference venues across the globe can be booked online with a credit card. Since this requires only a computer, many predatory publishers operate from modest offices or suburban houses.

Zia World Press operates from a Melbourne suburban house.
Screen shot/Michael J. I. Brown

Traditionally journals have been available via subscription only, often at considerable expense to institutions. Open access publications are available to everyone instantly, which potentially unlocks academic knowledge, but requires fees from the authors (or funding agencies) to remain viable. This opens the door for predatory publishers seeking to prise money from authors, resulting in thousands of new suspect journals.

Lessons

Can the vanity and predatory publishers provide lessons for academia? Clearly, no sector of the community (including academia) is free from shonky online operators.

Homeopathy Journal — *Why does Elsevier publish homeopathy?*

While it would be cute to assume there are just good and bad publishers, sometimes the practices of the dodgy operators can be found elsewhere. Springer and IEEE have published gibberish produced by a computer program. Elsevier publishes Homeopathy, despite homeopathy having no scientific basis. Academics must strive to maintain and improve academic standards, including at major publishers.

It would also be wrong to assume that functioning peer review is a simple arbiter of right and wrong. There is a spectrum of peer review, with quality varying from journal to journal. Peer review is only a quality-control process that can sometimes fail, even at the best journals.

That said, those who knowingly avoid peer review by submitting to vanity and predatory publishers are effectively avoiding scrutiny and rigour. They are deliberately avoiding what is needed to advance knowledge and understanding.

Michael J. I. Brown, Associate professor, Monash University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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