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From: Shittu, Aminu <ameen_vet@yahoo.com>
Date: Mon, Sep 16, 2013 at 12:37 AM
Subject: [nigerianbiomedicalandlifescientists] Predatory publishers are corrupting open access
To: Nigerian Scientists <nigerianbiomedicalandlifescientists@yahoogroups.co.uk>
From: Shittu, Aminu <ameen_vet@yahoo.com>
Date: Mon, Sep 16, 2013 at 12:37 AM
Subject: [nigerianbiomedicalandlifescientists] Predatory publishers are corrupting open access
To: Nigerian Scientists <nigerianbiomedicalandlifescientists@yahoogroups.co.uk>
"Perhaps nowhere are these abuses more acute than in India, where new predatory publishers or journals emerge each week. They are appearing because of the market need — hundreds of thousands of scientists in India and its neighbouring countries need to get published to earn tenure and promotion." - Jeffrey Beall
When e-mail first became available, it was a great innovation that made communication fast and cheap. Then came spam — and suddenly, the innovation wasn't so great. It meant having to filter out irrelevant, deceptive and sometimes offensive messages. It still does.
The same corruption of a great idea is now occurring with scholarly open-access publishing.
Early experiments with open-access publishing, such as the Journal of Medical Internet Researchand BioMed Central, were very promising. Set up more than a decade ago, they helped to inspire a social movement that has changed academic publishing for the better, lowered costs and expanded worldwide access to the latest research.
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 from Pakistan, India or Nigeria.
Related stories
Some predatory publishers spam researchers, soliciting manuscripts but failing to mention the required author fee. Later, after the paper is accepted and published, the authors are invoiced for the fees, typically US$1,800. Because the scientists are often asked to sign over their copyright to the work as part of the submission process (against the spirit of open access) they feel unable to withdraw the paper and send it elsewhere.
I monitor predatory publishers on my blog, Scholarly Open Access, which has become a forum in which scientists can raise their concerns over the practice. They send me hundreds of e-mails passing on spam solicitations or asking whether a particular publisher is legitimate.
I also get e-mails from the predators' victims. Some have been named as members of editorial boards without their knowledge or permission. Others have had an article partially or completely plagiarized in a predatory journal. Many ask me for advice on where to publish or how to withdraw an article that they wish they hadn't submitted. As a librarian, I do my best to answer the questions I receive, but they often require expertise in the author's field of study. So it is important that more scientists are made aware of the problem.
"Scientific literacy must include the ability to recognize publishing fraud."
The predatory publishers and journals often have lofty titles that make them seem legitimate in a list of publications on a CV. Scholarly publishing's traditional role of vetting the best research is disappearing. Now there is a journal willing to accept almost every article, as long as the author is willing to pay the fee. Authors, rather than libraries, are the customers of open-access publishers, so a powerful incentive to maintain quality has been removed.
Perhaps nowhere are these abuses more acute than in India, where new predatory publishers or journals emerge each week. They are appearing because of the market need — hundreds of thousands of scientists in India and its neighbouring countries need to get published to earn tenure and promotion.
Here, the problem is not just with the publishers. Scientists themselves are also to blame. Many are taking unethical shortcuts and paying for the publication of plagiarized or self-plagiarized work.
Honest scientists stand to lose the most in this unethical quagmire. When a researcher's work is published alongside articles that are plagiarized, that report on conclusions gained from unsound methodologies or that contain altered photographic figures, it becomes tainted by association. Unethical scientists gaming the system are earning tenure and promotion at the expense of the honest.
The competition for author fees among fraudulent publishers is a serious threat to the future of science communication. To compete in a crowded market, legitimate open-access publishers are being forced to promise shorter submission-to-publication times; this weakens the peer-review process, which takes time to do properly.
To tackle the problem, scholars must resist the temptation to publish quickly and easily. The research community needs to use scholarly social networks such as Connotea and Mendeley to identify and share information on publishers that deceive, lack transparency or otherwise fail to follow industry standards. Scientific literacy must include the ability to recognize publishing fraud, and libraries must remove predatory publishers from their online catalogues. The worst offenders can usually be discovered without too much effort: their websites are littered with grammatical errors and they list bogus contact details. The borderline cases are more difficult to spot — here, we need open-access zealots to open their eyes to the growing quality problems.
Conventional scholarly publishers have had an important role in validating research, yet too often advocates of open access seem to overlook the importance of validation in online publishing. They promote access at the expense of quality: a shortcoming that tacitly condones the publication of unworthy scientific research.
- Nature
- 489,
- 179
- (13 September 2012)
- doi:10.1038/489179a
Related stories and links
From nature.com
Europe joins UK open-access bid
17 July 2012Britain aims for broad open access
19 June 2012US seeks to make science free for all
07 April 2010
Author information
Affiliations
Jeffrey Beall is Scholarly Initiatives Librarian at the University of Colorado Denver.
Corresponding author
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9 commentsSubscribe to comments
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Richard Van Noorden•2012-12-04 05:44 PM- <em>Nature</em> has closed this World View to further comments. Some comments were being posted under false names, violating our Community Guidelines by impersonating others. We removed comments that we could verify as impersonations.
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Stevan Harnad•2012-12-04 05:05 PM- ----THE DARK SIDE OF OPENNESS: PREDATORY PUBLISHERS ALSO POST FRAUDULENT COMMENTS IN OTHERS' NAMESIf the inarticulate English didn't give it away, then the incoherent content falsely attributed to me (and to Peter Suber) should be apparent to everyone with any familiarity with open access and with our views.But the Fool's-Gold scam journals are going beyond just spamming to solicit authors, editors and referees: They are now doing fraudulent postings to counter criticism. This is the dark side of openness and begins to sound like the Nigerian fee scams.Congratulations to Jeffrey Beall whose work becomes ever more important, as this sad development illustrates.(<em>Nature</em> needs to check its poster authentication software.)See:
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Maria Hrynkiewicz•2012-10-05 02:59 PM- Thank you for your article. It has been eye opening for me. But then again – the whole notion of predatory still requires some clarification. The thing is – it is difficult to pinpoint predatory open access publishers merely on the grounds of unsolicited emails being sent to scientists. I this case it is the biggest ones in the industry who are probably the worst offenders but we wouldnt consider them predatory anyway. Open access publishers may be very competetive – but as long as they safeguard the quality of the content and follow the best practices in terms of peer review, copyrights and funding mandates – they contibute to the better dissemination of science.
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Moshe Vardi•2012-09-24 06:58 PM
john turner•2012-09-21 09:52 AM- The mandatory Open Access system, even apart from the incursion of alleged criminals, poses a serious threat to the openness of scientific publication.The Finch report proposals (see Nature 486, 439; 2012) under active consideration by the Minister for Science, will if implemented have the consequence, perhaps unintended, that in making access to the scientific literature open to the readers, they significantly abolish open access for the authors. The imposition of submission fees equal to the cost of an investment bankers’ lunch will convert publication in the refereed Gold Standard journals into a privileged zone exclusively for government (and Wellcome) funded scientists. The wide constituency of those disbarred will include beginners, doctors in clinical practice, mid-career scientists who are between grants, free-lancers and amateurs (see Nature 487, 432; 2012), theoreticians (who tend not to need grants: see Nature comment #47296; 2012), those working for the smaller charities, and senior scientists who have formally retired but remain active.These will have instead to archive their work in the second-division Green Repositories (see Nature 487, 302; 2012), still barely-existent databanks designated primarily for the filing of the supplementary material of the Gold Standard papers.This flies in the face of the widespread perception among scientists that archiving does not constitute publication in any understood form, and that the Gold Standard for publication should be set by the quality of the work (judged largely by peer review), not by the size of the grant. The proposals are divisive, splitting scientists into two divisions, and, given that many of The Unfunded are working out of dedication rather than for pay, are contrary to the government’s policy on voluntarism.It is also unhealthy for science: The Unfunded will find it hard to publish reviews, or challenge the findings of the Gold Standard scientists; truly original and unorthodox work, which can limp for years without hope of funding, will be further marginalised.Finding a solution will require first, that those in authority recognise that there is a problem.
This comment comes from (reverse alphabetical order)R Alan Wilson, Centre for Immunology and Infection, Department of Biology, University of York, York
John R G Turner, Institute of Integrative & Comparative Biology/Department of Modern Languages & Cultures (French), University of Leeds, Leeds LS2 9JT j.r.g.turner@leeds.ac.uk
Jerome R Ravetz, Institute for Science, Innovation and Society, University of Oxford, 64 Banbury Road, Oxford
Jeremy J D Greenwood, Centre for Research into Ecological and Environmental Modelling, University of St Andrews, St Andrews
Richard Field, School of Geography, University of Nottingham, Nottingham
Roger L H Dennis Institute for Environment, Sustainability and Regeneration, Staffordshire University, Stoke on Trent Department for Biological and Medical Sciences, Oxford Brookes University, Oxford
Laurence M Cook, Faculty of Life Sciences, University of Manchester, Manchester
Daniel Corcos•2012-09-18 12:18 PM- @ Bart Penders.
I am no quite sure that impact factor and citation counts will help in distinguishing fake from real publishers. Predator publishers just need to select papers on fashionable fields and to promote them by inciting authors to cite papers from the same publisher. One can even think of a predator publisher network which will guarantee you a certain number of citations. Would it lead to worse science ? Not necessarily, because the papers in these journals do not need to contain fabricated data to be accepted, like a growing number do in high profile journals, and because plagiarism is easily detected nowadays. For the libraries, there will be no problem, as the papers are on the web in Open Access. Therefore, the main trouble will be for the evaluators, who, just like literature critics, will have only one way to evaluate papers : read them.
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Bart Penders•2012-09-18 11:10 AM- Predatory publishers threathen to limit or undo the credibility that comes with being published – both for the author(s) and the claims in the article. I fear that in an attempt to restore that credibility, impact factors and citations counts will further rise in prominence.
Patricia Boksa•2012-09-14 06:45 PM- Legitimate open-acess journals are not necessarily forced to promise shorter submission-to-publication times. For example, the Journal of Psychiatry and Neuroscience has managed to increase its impact factor from 2.5 to 5.3 over a decade, even though it never sacrifices the quality of review for speed of review. This seems to be a formula to that appeals to many good researchers.Patricia Boksa, Ph.D., Co-Editor in Chief, Journal of Psychiatry and Neuroscience
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Jim Woodgett•2012-09-12 01:47 PM- Kudos for your excellent blog and listings of predatory journals and publishers! Greater awareness of these misleading and fake publishers will suck the oxygen out of their trade. How many of the journals are listed in PubMed, Google Scholar, etc? If they are not visible, they'll wither. Clearly, part of the problem is also with unscrupulous authors who are fully aware of these scam journals. The pressure/expectation to publish can be corrupting at several levels.
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