Category: Survey

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What does ChaptGPT say about Frontiers Media?

A recent tweet by Mark A. Hanson posed the question “What is your opinion of Frontiers Media as a publisher?” The survey allowed one of four answers:

  1. Very reputable publisher
  2. Reputable publisher
  3. Quasi-predatory publisher
  4. Predatory publisher

The survey was posted on the 27 Jan 2023, and ran for (we believe) seven days.

 

Before showing you the results of the survey, we thought it would be an interesting exercise to see what ChaptGPT said about this publisher, just to see if there is any correlation between the Twitter survey and ChatGPT.

What is your opinion of Frontiers Media as a publisher?

This was the question that was asked in the twitter survey. We thought we would ask ChaptGPT the same question. The question was asked on 31 Jan 2023. The response from ChaptGPT was as follows.

 

“As a language model AI, I don’t have personal opinions or biases. However, Frontiers Media is a large open-access publisher that has been in operation for over a decade, and has published many high-quality research articles across a wide range of academic disciplines. Some researchers and academics consider it to be a reputable publisher, while others have raised concerns about its business model and the peer review process. Ultimately, the reputation of a publisher, including Frontiers Media, depends on the individual perception of the research community and the quality of the articles it publishes.“

 

We should note that this question was posed in a “new” ChatGPT. That is, ChaptGPT was not given access to its previous answers, so that it did not answer questions in the context of previous answers.

Is Frontiers Media a predatory publisher?

After starting a new chat, we posed the question above (31 Jan 2023). The response was as follows:

 

“Frontiers Media has received some criticism and allegations of being a predatory publisher, however, the company has denied these claims and states that it follows rigorous peer-review processes. The definition of a predatory publisher is still subject to debate and it’s important to consider multiple sources before making a conclusion.“

Would you have any advice for a researcher who is thinking of submitting a research paper to Frontiers Media?

Without starting a new chat, we posed the question above. ChatGPT responded as follows:

“Here are a few tips for a researcher considering submitting a research paper to Frontiers Media:

  1. Check the reputation and publication standards of the specific journal within Frontiers Media you are considering submitting to, as the quality of journals can vary within the same publisher.

  2. Look for information about the peer-review process, editorial board, and publication fees.

  3. Check for any warnings or red flags on websites like ThinkCheckSubmit or Cabells blacklist.

  4. Consider the impact factor and citations of the journal and previous articles published in the same journal.

  5. Consult with your colleagues and mentors to see if they have any experience or insights on the journal.

  6. Read the author guidelines carefully, including information on open-access publishing fees and copyright policies.

  7. Make an informed decision based on your own research and professional judgement.“

 

What did the Twitter survey say?

After the Twitter survey had closed, we took a look at the results (see figure below).

 

Results of a Twitter survey which asked "What is your opinion of Frontiers Media as a publisher?"

We should note that the survey is a small sample size (42 responses) and the results must be read/interpreted in that context.
The figures in red and the actual number of responses, which we give in addition to the percentage figures that are reported.

Other information sources

We don’t often cite Wikipedia (for all the well-known reasons around not being peer reviewed, subject to change etc.) but it is a go-to place for many people so the Wikipedia Frontiers Media page might be worth a look, with all the caution that should be exercised when looking at this resource.

 

Kendall (2021) mentioned Frontiers in his paper on Beall’s legacy. That paper drew on Schneider (2017), which itself drew on Basken (2017). The presented evidence would suggest that Beall adding Frontiers Media to his list, ultimately led to him taking down his list.

For the interested reader, we would recommend that the above three papers are worth taking  a look at. Frontiers Media has been subject to previous scrutiny and have always strongly defended their position.

Some of the papers that have mentioned Jeffrey Beall and Frontiers Media

Conclusion

It is interesting to see that the Twitter survey broadly agrees with the views given by ChatGPT. Of course, this all has to be taken with a pinch of salt. The survey sample is relatively small and could be biased in a number of ways (the audience that is likely to see it, the responses are anonymous so could be open to people who are conflicted taking part etc.).

The ChatGPT comments should also be treated with caution. Where ChaptGPT gets it information from is unknown, there are no references to support its views and ChaptGPT does not have information more recent that 2021.

 

Our advice: We cannot do better than ChaptGPT which says “Make an informed decision based on your own research and professional judgement.” It is important that, as researchers, we learn how to find journals and publishers that we are comfortable with. There is lots of information, advice and colleagues out there and it is beholden on us to draw on those resources, to decide which journals are deserving of our research.

 

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A traffic light system for predatory publishers?

Introduction

One of the challenges our community faces is identifying predatory publishers, in a way that everybody agrees upon. Is it possible to come up with a way where we can definitively state whether a given journal or publisher is predatory? Moreover, would everybody agree with the classification of a given journal/publisher?

In this article, we discuss some of these issues and ask if there is an alternative way of classifying a predatory publisher/journal and, at least, start a discussion as to how these ideas could be developed.

Binary Classification of predatory journals by Beall

If you know about Beall’s List (and if not take a look at our article), especially the reason for it being taken off line so abruptly, you will know that part of the reason is that Beall had a binary classification. Either a journal/publisher was predatory (and was on his list) or it was not (and was not on his list).

The fact that Beall was the only person making the decision as to whether a journal/publisher was predatory or not was (in hindsight) unhelpful as Beall was a lone voice, and when somebody disputed whether the journal/publisher should be classified as predatory, it was difficult to defend.

If Beall had a support team around him, perhaps his list may have lasted longer than it did, but the fact he was a lone voice, and it was a binary classification, both contributed to its ultimate demise.

Do we need to be definitive whether a journal is predatory?

 Do we really need to be definitive about whether a journal/publisher is predatory or not?

Or do we just need to be able to say “buyer beware” and suggest to others that they may want to carry out their own checks and balances before deciding whether to submit to a given journal.

Indeed, you may also want to check before citing a paper from a possible predatory journal, but that is digressing from the main points we want to discuss in this article.

So, it could be argued that we are not concerned with being absolutely certain whether a journal is predatory or not. We only need to have an element of doubt so that we can simply look for another journal in which we have more confidence, or we can carry out our own checks if we are really attracted to that journal.

Multiple points of view

One of the issues that Beall had, was that he was the only person making the decision whether a journal/publisher was predatory or not.

It might be more helpful if more people were involved in that decision, if nothing else so that the classification of a journal is the view of many people, which might be seen as a better indicator than just one person making the decision.

There are a few ways this could be done, for example:

  • Wisdom of the Crowds: This asks the opinion of as many people as possible, drawn from different sectors (such as authors, readers, editors, publishers etc.). The main idea is to get a range of views and as the number of people contributing increases, the results get more and more accurate. If you have never heard of wisdom of the crowds (or crowd sourcing), take a look at this article or this book (The Wisdom of Crowds). You might also want to read where it all started, with Francis Galton visiting a country fair in 1906.
  • Surveys on social media: Many platforms now enable the use of surveys, which is a type of crowd sourcing, with Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook being the obvious ones.
  • Peer review articles:This is not something that has been done very much, but we would like to see it done more often. That is, a review of a publisher, or a journal, that is subject to peer review and which becomes part of the scientific archive.
    This has the benefit that more than one person has looked at the evidence and the conclusions drawn and it also provides a data point in the scientific literature which might be useful to other researchers.

Traffic light system for predatory publishers

Two of the main points we mention above are:

  1. A suggestion that we do not require a binary decision as to whether a publisher/journal is predatory or not. Rather we just need some warning signs that it may be, so that further action can be taken.
  2. The classification should not be down to just one person, but should involve as many people as possible.

We expand on each of these points below.

Classification

Rather than classifying publishers/journals using a binary classification (it is predatory, yes or no?), why not use a system with more categories; say a traffic light system where green says a journal is not predatory, red says that it definitely is and amber says that the jury is out and further investigation is necessary?

Of course, not even that is ideal, not even if we extend the range of the classification options to give us a little more latitude (say a five category system). The main problem is that the red (definitely predatory) and green (definitely not predatory) will still not be agreed by everybody, so there will be a tendency to push more towards amber than one possibly would like. Even if we extend to more categories (say five) the end points will suffer from the same issue.

However, we still argue that a non-binary system is better than a binary classification.

More than one viewpoint

As already mentioned, Beall was the only person deciding whether a publisher/journal was predatory or not.

We have already suggested as to how this could be expanded (wisdom of the crowds, surveys and peer review).

Of the three, we favor peer review. This may not get as many viewpoints as a survey but at least we know who wrote the article and (at least the editors do) who reviewed the article. The evidence that supports the conclusions drawn are also part of the scientific archive and it can be referenced by others.

Leave it with us

We would like to say “Leave this to us, we’ll implement something that enables a traffic light system to be assigned to each publisher/journal.“

However, we are realistic enough to recognize (at least) two issues with this.

  1. If we try and do something like Crowd Sourcing (Wisdom of the Crowds), we are not drawing from a diverse enough population (as the people that follow our Twitter feed and read our blog are probably biased; not in a bad but they are likely to think as we do). We may also struggle to get a large enough sample size.
    Our preferred option are peer reviewed articles, but this is not something we can do on our own, but we would encourage you to join us in this ambition.
  2. Given the large number of predatory publishers/journal there are (Cabells say (23 Nov 2022) “The searchable Journalytics database includes 18 academic disciplines from more than thirteen thousand international scholarly publications.“), we do not have the resources to look at all possible journals in realistic timescales.

Call to action

If you agree (or even disagree) with the points we make in this article we would welcome your thoughts. We would also encourage you to consider how the classification of predatory publishers/journals could be done, which improves on current methodologies.

How can you help us?

We would welcome comments on this article (in fact any article) via our Twitter accounts.

You may have noticed that we do not enable comments on our blog posts. This is due to the spam that this attracts and also the fact that we would have to moderate those comments and this takes a lot of time and, we know from personal experience, that the author of those comments would like them to appear instantly and, when they do not, it can cause frustration.

You can email us as admin@predatory-publishing.com. We don’t monitor that account on a daily basis, but we do read everything that is sent, even if we do not respond.

We would also ask you to consider supporting us as a patron. It would really help us to continue, and develop, the work that we do.

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Who should pay the APCs?

On our Twitter account, we recently ran a poll which asked who should pay the Article Processing Charges for a paper.

We gave four choices:

  1. University
  2. Research Funder
  3.  Publisher
  4. Author

We ran the poll for seven days (27 Jun 2022 to 4 Jul 2022). We are slightly disappointed that we only received 18 responses. Ideally we would liked to have gotten into the realm of statistical significance, but we know that we are a long way from that.

But, the results are interesting, even if we cannot say that they are conclusive in their views.

The results can be seen in the image below and the result on Twitter can be seen here.

Twitter poll result asking about Open Access

What can we say about these figures? Not much, as the sample size is so small but it does appear that nobody thinks that an author should pay the APC, but they should be paid by one of the other stakeholders, with the majority believing that the research funder should bear the burden.

We find it surprising that anybody thinks that the publisher should pay. Whilst it would be nice, they are essentially a company that has to return a profit to their shareholders. If they funded the APC’s (indeed, they charge them), there would be no income stream.

Of course, and in the context of what we focus on this web site, there are publishers around, so called predatory publishers, who are only in business to make money from APCs. They do not have any regard for respecting the integrity of the scientific archive and they are certainly not interested in helping fund APCs.

Anyhow, it was an interesting poll. It’s a shame that more people did not participate but we do plan to run more polls in the future.

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Should an Editor-in-Chief’s email address be available?

One indicator of whether a journal is predatory or not is to check the editorial board. This might include checking whether any editors are actually listed, whether those that are listed actually know they are listed, whether the editors contact details/affiliation are mentioned and whether the editors can be contacted.

In this article we focus on one aspect of the editorial board, the editor-in-chief (EiC), and ask whether an EiC should make their email address available?

To get the view of others, we carried out a Twitter survey. In this article we give the results of that survey, as well as give your our view which we only do now, after the survey has closed.

We should emphasize that the editorial board is just one indicator of a possible predatory journal and it is far from definitive, especially if looked at in isolation. The editorial board information has to be considered alongside other indicators before an informed decision can be reached whether a journal is predatory or not.

 

Where are these checklists?

We mentioned that the editorial board is just one indicator, suggesting that there are others. In fact, there are many, such as time taken to review the paper, the journal sending spam emails to solicit papers, the quality of the journal’s web site and whether the journal claims that it is indexed, when it is not, or the indexing service itself is questionable.

There are several papers that provide checklists for ascertaining whether a journal is predatory or not. We have recently seen this one by Cukier et al. 2020 (see Figure 1). Table 1 in that paper lists 53 checklists to guard against predatory publishing.

 

Figure 1: Table 1 from Cukier et al., 2020 (DOI:10.1186/s12916-020-01566-1)

The full paper, which is open access, is available here – https://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s12916-020-01566-1.

We will not go into any further details in this article, as that is not its focus.

The survey details

We recently ran a Twitter survey, which focused on a very specific question, with regard to editorial board members. We asked:

“Should an Editor-in-Chief make their email address available on the journal’s web site so that potential authors can contact him/her directly?“

Figure 2 shows the survey question as it appeared on Twitter.

Figure 2: The Twitter survey as it originally appeared

The survey ran for seven days from about 17 August 2021 to the 24 August 2021.

We promoted the survey by pinning it to our profile and also by trying to alert various Twitter users that we thought that they might like to either participate in the survey and/or promote it by liking it/retweeting it.

The Survey Results

Figure 3 shows the results of the survey.

The survey attracted 64 votes, with 79.7% (51 votes) saying that EiC’s should provide an email address. 20.3% (13 votes) said that it was not necessary.

Figure 3: Results of the Twitter survey

Caveats

In carrying out a survey such as this, we have to note a few caveats.

  • The sample size (64) is not that large. Whether we could take this result as being representative of a much larger sample size, is open to question.
  • Given that the survey is carried out on our Twitter account there will be bias in the results as our followers are likely to hold a different view to a more random sample of the population.
  • We recognise that those that wish to participate in the survey are probably more likely to vote “Yes”, rather than “No”.

Our view

We ran this survey, rather than giving our views straight away, as we were genuinely interested in what others thought.

The results do not surprise us. We assumed that the majority would hold the view that you should be able to contact the EiC of a journal.

We also hold the view that the EiC should be contactable (but we did not vote). Indeed, we would go further than that and say that their email address should be their professional email address (e.g. their institution), rather than a generic ‘editor@THE_JOURNAL’ email address where you do not actually know where it is going and who is going to respond to it.

In our view, the editor-in-chief takes on the responsibility for the academic integrity of the journal. As such, (potential) authors should be able to reach out to them to check things like aims/scope, whether they believe that a review in unfair; indeed, anything to do with the journal of an editorial nature.

If that is denied and you either have to contact an editorial assistant, use a general ‘editor’ email or fill in a web based form, this would raise significant alarm bells for us.

This is not only so that you can contact the editor easily, but if you do not have an email address, it makes it more difficult to check their credibility or check whether they actually know that they are listed as the editor-in-chief.

As we said at the start of this article, not having an email address for the EiC, or any lack of details about the editorial board, is not a definitive indicator that the journal is predatory but it should raise a red flag that suggests that further due diligence should be done.

Please consider supporting us by becoming a patron

Thank you for reading this article. If you would like to support the work we do, please consider becoming one of our patrons.

With your support, it will enable us to deploy some of the ideas that we have, and will also enable us to work more closely together. As an example, we will look at journals and/or publishers that you propose. You can read more here.

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Should proof reading be acknowledged in scientific papers?

We recently ran a survey asking if an acknowledgement is required if somebody proof reads your paper. The results revealed that 55.6% said that no acknowledgement is required, with 44.4% saying that an acknowledge should be provided. However, these results come with some caveats, which we explore in this article.

The survey

The question we posed was:

“If somebody uses a proof reading service (which might include adding refs, changing the structure, correcting grammar etc.) do you think they should acknowledge this in the paper, on the basis that the reader/employer/supervisor has a right to know that they received help?“

The answers that could be chosen were “Yes acknowledgement reqd.” and “No need to acknowledgement“.

The survey ran for about seven days (11th August 2021 to 18th August 2021).

Figure 1 shows the survey as presented on Twitter.

Figure 1: Survey as presented on Twitter

Survey results

The survey attracted 36 responses, with 16 people (44.4%) saying that that an acknowledgement is required 20 people (55.6%) saying that there is no need to acknowledge. These results can be seen in Figure 2. The Twitter result can also be seen here.

Figure 2: Results of Twitter survey

Comments on the survey

We provide our thoughts on the survey below.

Survey size

We recognize that a survey size of 36 people is not that large, so we have to bear that in mind when drawing any conclusions.

Survey demographics

In any survey, it is important that we draw our responses from the right demographics. This is often a random set of people from a given subset of the population.

In this survey, this was not possible for a number of reasons.

Firstly, those that participate in the survey are those that follow (or see) our Twitter account. This means that they have an interest in predatory publishing and do not represent the entire scholarly population which, ideally, is where we would like to draw our respondents from.

Secondly, both those that answered yes and no could have ulterior reasons for answering that way. For example, we could have got responses from those that charge for these services and would prefer not to be acknowledged. We could have got responses from supervisors who would prefer their students to acknowledge them.

Thirdly, we could have got duplicate responses from the same person who have more than one Twitter account.

For these reasons, we cannot take the survey too seriously, or at least draw any concrete conclusions.

Survey question

We know that the question was not ideally worded. You can only say so much on a Twitter survey.

However, in hindsight, we should have made the question a little clearer. There is a difference between ONLY proof reading paper, when compared to restructuring, adding references etc. We may run another survey, sometime in the future, where the question will be a little more targeted. 

What do we think?

Now the survey is over, we can give our view.

If a proof reader (service provider, whatever you want to call them) does anything above and beyond simply proof reading then we believe that the person(s) who helped should be acknowledged, if not be an author, if the contribution is enough to warrant it.

We also believe that if an author employs a proof reader, then that should be acknowledged. Our argument is that the person reading the paper has the right to know if the author (especially in the case of single authored papers) received help. It is not so much for the scientific/technical/contribution elements of the paper (the reviewers should see to that) but it is for potential employers, promotion panels etc. where the people looking at the paper have an interest whether the person can write good English, rather than having to have it corrected by somebody else, possibly using a paid service.

 

Figure 3: Is There a Role for Publication Consultants and How Should Their Contribution be Recognized?

One of the reason we carried out this survey is because of a paper that asked “Is There a Role for Publication Consultants and How Should Their Contribution be Recognized?” The conclusion of this paper said:

 

“Readers of academic papers have the right to know who contributed to the paper, whether this is by the list of authors, by the acknowledgments or by the work that is cited. Any help, not represented by the list of authors, should be acknowledged. This is often done by recognizing the funding agency, the efforts of colleagues, software providers etc. This acknowledgment should also extend to publication consultancy services, where assistance has been provided, albeit via a paid for service.“

We thought we would see what others thought.

Twitter Comments

As this poll was running it got a few comments. We have shown some of these below. You can see them on the Twitter post, but this just saves you having to click through to Twitter.

  • “I think if you’re being evaluated on the things the service provides, then supervisor/employer should be informed. Otherwise a brief acknowledgment of assistance is nice/thoughtful/completist, but it’s absence IMO wouldn’t be ethically disqualifying.“
  • “If the proof-reading would suggest me in the comments to change structure or add some references, I would acknowledge that.“
  • “I think there is no immediate answer here. Just proof-reading or correcting grammar needs no acknowledgment if done on a contractual basis, but adding references, changing the structure, etc., is a different thing. And this is not the proof-reader’s job either.“
  • “Agreed (sortof), the problem arises when it goes beyond proof reading. We say sortof as does a reader not have the right to know if the author can write fluent English if (say) they were looking at the paper for a job application?“
  • “I would say no when it comes to academic papers (but yes for jobs, even though an interview would help sort out the matter in extremis). Otherwise you are placing native speakers at an implicit advantage. After all, as a reader, why would I care about who did the language edit?“
  • “An editor doesn’t usually get credit for a novel or other work of literature. Many editors when have a policy that they do not want to be mentioned.“

 

Please consider supporting us by becoming a patron

Thank you for reading this article. If you would like to support the work we do, please consider becoming one of our patrons.

With your support, it will enable us to deploy some of the ideas that we have, and will also enable us to work more closely together. As an example, we will look at journals and/or publishers that you propose. You can read more here.