After 350 years in the slow-moving world of print, Nature magazine notes that scientific publishing has been thrust into a fast-paced online realm of cloud computing and ubiquitous sharing. The result has been an era of ferment, as established practices are challenged by new ones- most notably the open-access model in which the author pays publication fees upfront. (1)
Jeffrey Beall, an academic librarian and researcher at the University of Colorado in Denver, has become a relentless watchdog for what he describes as 'potential, possible or probable predatory scholarly open-access publishers', listing and scrutinizing them on his blog, Scholarly Open Access. Open-access publishers often collect fees from authors to pay for peer review, editing and website maintenance. Beall asserts that the goal of predatory open-access publishers is to exploit this model by charging the fee without providing all the expected publishing services. (2)
The open-access movement has spawned many successful, well-respected operations. PLOS ONE, for example, which charges a fee of $1,350 for authors in the middle-and high-income countries, has seen the number of articles it publishes leap from 138 in 2006, to 23, 464 in 2012, making it the world's largest scientific journal. (2) Other promising journals are the Journal of Medical Internet Research and Biomed Central.
Open-access journals helped to inspire a social movement that has changed academic publishing for the better, lowered costs, and expanded worldwide access of the latest research, says Jeffrey Beall. But, he adds, “Then came predatory publishers, which publish counterfeit journals to exploit the open-access model in which the author pays. These predatory publishers are dishonest and lack transparency. They aim to dupe researchers, especially those inexperienced in scholarly communication. They set up websites that closely resemble those of legitimate online publishers, and publish journals of questionable and downright low quality. Many purport to be headquartered in the United States, United Kingdom, Canada or Australia but really hail form Pakistan, India, or Nigeria. Some predatory publishers spam researchers, soliciting manuscripts but failing to mention the required author fee. After, after the paper is accepted and published, the authors are invoiced for the fees, typically US $1,800.” (3)
Many new open-access publishers are trustworthy. But not all. Anyone with a spare afternoon and a little computer savvy can launch an impressive-looking journal website and e-mail invitations to scientists to join editorial boards or submit papers for a fee. The challenge for researchers, and for Beall is to work out when those websites or e-mail blasts signal a credible publisher and when they come from operations that can range from the outright criminal to the merely amateurish. (2)
Beall's list is growing each year. The 2013 list included 225 publishers, and this year's list has over 477. There were 23 in 2012. (4)
Other publishing issues:
The publishers Springer and IEEE are removing more than 120 papers from their subscription services after a French researcher discovered that the works were computer-generated nonsense. Over the past two years, computer scientist Cyril Labbe of Joseph Fourier University in Grenoble, France, has cataloged computer-generated papers that made it into more than 30 published conference proceedings between 2008 and 2013. Sixteen appeared in publications by Springer and more than 100 were published by the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE). Both publishers, which were privately informed by Labbe, say they are now removing the papers. (5)
Then there is the long history of journalists and researchers getting spoof papers accepted at conferences or by journals to reveals weaknesses in academic quality controls—from a fake paper published by physicist Alan Sokal of New York University in the journal Social Text, to a sting operation by John Bohannon published in Science in 2013, in which he got more than 150 open-access journals to accept a deliberately flawed study for publication. (1)
Couple this with evidence that quality control is a serious issue in reliable journals and it makes one want to pause and reflect before accepting 'new ' scientific evidence. Is all of this a 'spamming war at the heart of science' in which researchers feel pressured to rush out papers to publish as much and as quickly as possible? Even reports in 'serious ' journals often can't be duplicated.
Some examples:
Pharmaceutical companies find that test results favoring new drugs typically disappear when the tests are repeated. Bayer found that two-thirds of such findings couldn't be reproduced, and Amgen scientists, following up on 53 studies that at first glance looked worth pursuing, could confirm only six of them. (6)
In almost all research fields, studies often draw erroneous conclusions. Sometimes the errors arise because statistical tests are misused, misinterpreted, or misunderstood. And sometimes sloppiness, outright incompetence, or possible fraud is to blame. But even research conducted strictly by the book frequently fails because of faulty statistical methods that have been embedded in the scientific process reports Tom Siegfried. (7)
A leading computer scientist thinks that three-quarters of papers published in his subfield are bunk. In 2000 to 2010, roughly 80,000 patients took part in clinical trials based on research that was later retracted because of mistakes or improprieties. (8)
References
“The future of publishing: a new page,” nature.com, March 27, 2013
Declan Butler, “Investigating journals: the dark side of publishing,” nature.com, March 27, 2013
Jeffrey Beall, “Predatory publishers are corrupting open-access,” nature.com, September 12, 2012
Jeffrey Beall, “List of predatory publishers 2014,” Scholarly Open Access, January 2, 2014
Richard Van Noorden, “Publishers withdraw more than 120 gibberish papers,” nature.com, February 25, 2014
Jack Dini, “Questioning Science Research,” Canada Free Press, December 27, 2013
Tom Siegfried, “Science's significant stats problem,” Nautulus, Issue 4, August 22,2013
“How science goes wrong,” The Economist, October 19, 2013
Jack Dini is author of Challenging Environmental Mythology. He has also written for American Council on Science and Health, Environment & Climate News, and Hawaii Reporter.
