Frontiers – Predatory Journals and Conferences

December 30, 2023

MDPI, Frontiers and Hindawi journals may be downgraded in Finland

Map, highlighting Finland and a statement about three publishers may be excluded from Finland's research assessment.

In a tweet, Veli-Matti Karhulahti said:

“Not confirmed yet but all MDPI, Frontiers & Hindawi journals planned to be erased (level 0) from Finnish academic assessment by end of 2024. Should be clear that if you’re a researcher here, a high time to stop submitting/reviewing for those journals.“

Here some things that sprung to mind when we read this.

1) It would be useful when (and if) this comes to pass that the reasons why are given. Most people will assume that it is because they are being classified as predatory journals but is that the reason? It could be that the decision makers feel that:

⭕️The APCs are too high.

⭕️There are too many special issues.

⭕️Are they considered predatory journals?

⭕️The journals are not considered predatory, but they do not feel that the journals procedures are robust enough?

⭕️Are the journals being exploited by paper mills and the Finland authorities are worried about the reputation of those journals.

You might be aware that Wiley recently acknowledged an issue with Hindawi journals (which it had bought) as they were being targeted by paper mills. We tweeted on this. You can see the Wiley statement here.

⭕️They could have carried out some detailed analysis on acceptance rates (for example) and decided that it does not meet what they would expect from publishers they are funding.

⭕️They may just been err’ing on the side of caution and have doubts about these publishers and are taking the view that “the world ain’t short of scientific journals, so why not just exclude them”.

⭕️ They may feel that the publishers are more focused on the financial returns, rather than maintaining the quality and integrity of the scientific archive.

Whatever the reason, it would be useful to know.

2) Does Finland already have a restricted list and are these publishers being added to that list, or is this a “new” list?

The obvious publisher that may be on an existing list is OMICS. Are they? Does anybody know?

3) In some of the comments we received to our tweet on this topic, some suggested that there may be a case to just restrict specific journals, rather than restricting the entire publisher’s portfolio.

Is that sensible? We add the following comments by way of context to this question.

⭕️ It could be argued that a publisher has responsibility for all the journals it publishes and, even one bad journal, is a reflection across the entire portfolio.

⭕️ It could equally be argued that the quality, processes and robustness of a journal is down to the Editor-in-Chief and if a journal is well run, should it be treated in the same way than a less well run journal from the same stable.

⭕️ If you look at the reports of the way some publishers manage their journals, there is a view that the editors (EiCs and Associate Editors) have less control than you might expect and the publishers are managing a lot of the key processes and making a lot of the key decisions.

⭕️ What, if any role, does the fact that specific journals are indexed by COPE, DOAJ, OASPA, Scopus and Clarivate have on any decision making process? Does it mean anything if a journal (or even a publisher) is reognised by bodies such as those listed? Does that feed into the decision making process?

4) We wonder whether the publisher’s themselves have been included in any discussions that have (are) taking place or whether this discussion is taking place without them?

5) It was reported a month or so ago (not sure of the exact timing) that Malaysia had banned the use of public research funds being used to pay APC’s for these three publishers (note, this is different to banning them entirely in that country).
Other universities (in China we believe) have banned submitting to these publishers.

Does anybody have a complete list of where these publishers have been banned, restricted, named as unsuitable (however you want to phrase it)?

6) Will these restrictions, should they come about, be of concern to the three publishers mentioned?

7) The report says that these publishers may be restricted by the end of 2024. Why does it take so long to make a decision?

Final comments

This is an interesting story and one we will watch with interest.
This article was originally posted as a tweet. You can see that tweet here.
If you want to see what we have been saying about MDPI, take a look at out Twitter (X) feed on this topic.
If you want to see the publishers web sites, they are available here: MDPI, Frontiers and Hindawi.

November 24, 2023

Frontiers enables you to earn points by editing a manuscript

Laptop on table with the screen showing a man editing a document.

In a Twitter post Joël Billieux posted, asked “Is this a joke ? I don’t think so … “, in reference to the fact that Frontiers were offering points for editing manuscripts that could be used as (partial) payment for future submissions. You can see the tweet here, and also in the image below.

The most striking point (in our opinion) is that you can earn points for editing a manuscript, which raises a few questions.

What does editing a manuscript actually mean? You review an article and, as a service to the authors, you edit part (or all) of the manuscript to improve it and/or save the authors having to do it?
Can you put yourself forward as an editor so that you are passed a manuscript and you edit it in line with the suggestions of the reviewers?
You earn 1,500 points for editing a manuscript. Is there a difference between editing a short paragraph and giving the manuscript a complete overhaul?
What is to stop an editor simply calling on a large language model (such as ChatGPT) to make the edits? Using these AI tools you could easily edit 10’s (if not 100’s) of manuscripts in a day.
Who checks the edits? The reviewer(s)? The Editor-in-chief? The authors?
What checks and balances in place to ensure that the editor is not (for example) adding references to their own papers?
Would the editor be invited to be an author if the edits he/she makes would normally warrant being an author on a paper?
Will the use of an editor be noted, for example, by acknowledging their contribution in the paper?

Perhaps we misunderstand what is being proposed here? Anybody know whether our understanding is wrong, or can answer any of the questions we pose?

June 10, 2023June 10, 2023

Frontiers retracted two papers: What should happen next?

This article asks what should happen if a paper is retracted? We focus on a couple of Frontiers publications, only as these caught our attention, but the same arguments can be used for many other retracted papers.

We would like to thank, and acknowledge, Nick Wise who posted on Twitter about the Frontiers’ cases we are reporting here. You can follow Nick’s Twitter account here.

The two retracted papers

The two retracted papers, that we focus on in this article are:

Commentary: Computational Analysis for ERAS and Other Surgical Processes: Commentary From Clinical Perspective. This paper was received on 18 May 2022, accepted on 25 May 2022 and published on 14 June 2022. It was retracted on 9 June 2023. The retraction notice read:

“Following publication, the publisher uncovered evidence that several false identities were listed as authors for this article. During this investigation, the publisher was unable to confirm the institutions of the authors Hilla Mills, Ronald Glassen, Susanne Klenk, Nova Tang, or Luke Cheung. This investigation was conducted in accordance with Frontiers’ policies and the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) guidelines.“

Correlation Analysis Between Required Surgical Indexes and Complications in Patients With Coronary Heart Disease. The paper was received on 20 May 2022, accepted on 3 June 2022 and published on 6 July 2022. It was retracted on 9 June 2023. The retraction notice read:

“Following publication, the publisher uncovered evidence that several false identities were used in the peer-review process. The assignment of false reviewers was confirmed by an investigation conducted in accordance with Frontiers’ policies and the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) guidelines.

The investigation also uncovered concerns about the presentation and validity of the data in the article. The authors did not respond to contact regarding the data presented in the article.“

Reviewing your own papers?

It was a good spot by Nick Wise, to note that one of the retracted papers had been reviewed by two authors of the other retracted paper. Moreover, the reviewers were two of the fake authors.

Specifically, the second paper (Correlation Analysis Between Required Surgical Indexes and Complications in Patients With Coronary Heart Disease) of those listed above was reviewed by Hilla Mills and Luke Cheung who were authors of the first paper.

This means (we think) that the human authors of one paper, proposed fake reviewers for the other paper and when these fake authors were approached, the human authors reviewed their own paper.

This is obviously wrong, on many levels.

The web page that shows these reviewers has been archived here, just for the record.

Other papers by two of the fake authors

If we accept that Hilla Mills and Luke Cheung are fake authors, noting that the retraction report says “… the publisher was unable to confirm the institutions of the authors Hilla Mills or Luke Cheung“, which is slightly different to them not existing, we looked briefly at these authors.

Hilla Mills, has an ORCID profile, that shows 25 works (archived here). We could not find a Google Scholar profile. Searching Scopus, using the ORCID ID and author name, returned three articles by Hilla Mills.

Luke Cheung has an ORCID profile that shows 31 works (archived here). We could not find a Google Scholar profile. Searching Scopus, using the ORCID ID and author name, returned the same three articles by Luke Cheung, which were returned for Hilla Mills.

It is outside the scope of this article, but this is worthy of further investigation, as there seems to be a few authors in common with the three papers.

What should happen now?

It is good to see that these two papers have been retracted but should that be the end of the story? We think not.

Frontiers in Surgery (ISSN: 2296-875X), are members of both the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) and the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ).

The publisher (Frontiers) is a member of the Open Access Scholarly Publishing Association (OASPA).

Frontiers in Surgery is indexed by Scopus (4,135 papers (10 June 2023), current CiteScore = 1.1) and Web of Science (4,105 papers published (10 June 2023), current Impact Factor = 2.568).

Given that one of its members has retracted a paper and clearly explained the reasons why, would it be reasonable for COPE, DOAJ, OASPA, Scopus and Web of Science to write to the journal/publisher asking them to provide further details about the retraction and ask i) what are they doing to stop this happening again and ii) what they are doing to check if there are other violations like these that need to be addressed.

Of course, these discussions may be going in, in the background (we are unaware of how these organizations operate). We do note that OASPA did look at Frontiers in 2015 when it issued a statement (archived here) saying that

“We are aware that concerns have recently been expressed about the publisher Frontiers, which is a member of OASPA.

We have discussed the situation with Frontiers, who have been very responsive in providing us with information on their editorial processes and explaining their procedures. In light of these responses, the Membership Committee remains fully satisfied that Frontiers meets the requirements for membership of OASPA.“

If there any discussions going on, we welcome that. It would be useful (in the spirit of open science) to make the findings and follow up actions publicly available, not just for this case, but any others that arise.

Final Thoughts

One of the questions we are often asked is “What can we do about it?“, where “it” refers to paper mills, predatory publishing, inappropriate citations, selling of authorships etc.

It is often the case that there is no higher body who can take action but, in this case, there are organizations that have a role to play in policing what is published in the scientific literature.

We hope, that when there is something that can be done, that the opportunity is taken and that all stakeholders work together to stop unethical behaviour.