AI spies questionable science journals, with some human help About 1,000 of a set of 15,000 open access scientific journals appear to exist mainly to extract fees from naive academics. A trio of computer scientists from the University of Colorado Boulder, Syracuse University, and China's Eastern Institute of Technology (EIT) arrived at this figure after building a machine learning …
Some years ago, although not an academic, I had a role in an education-adjacent field with a very modest public profile. I was regularly receiving e-mails inviting me not only to contribute to some very questionable publications, but also to become an "editor" - a role which appeared to be indistinguishable from salesman. If a publication track record is one of the conditions of your research funding (and you can't get cited until you've been published), then ways to get published will be found or offered for a price.
I was an academic (and later promoted to department manager), but I still publish as a co-author with students, primarily at national conferences.
The number of "offers" I receive by e-mail is mind-boggling, mostly using this template:
<tt>We were deeply impressed by your paper Title of a paper in a specific field such as remote sensing and our editors want to publish it in our journal Title of a journal on a totally unrelated field such as Latin American Sociology. The publishing fee is around 90 USD dollars.</tt>.
Usually, they scan the conference pages and obtain the names of the papers and the authors' contact information, and then it is Happy SPAM Time.
Sometimes I get bored and scan the journal's editors' lists and e-mail them asking if they are comfortable knowing that they are the editors of a predatory journal without any criteria for the invitations. Only once did I get a reply from an irate editor telling me that "it is the industry's practice" and the journal is "top quality".
Checking the CVs of the editors and associate editors of those journals is also revealing. I found one "researcher" who is editor of three journals of similar quality, and has dozens of articles published in the same journals..
Yes, my reaction to ‘identifying 1000 journals’ was (unfortunately): That's pretty easy, just make a list of those that e-mail me weekly.
I do not understand who publishes there. Even if you are desperate to publish something, papers in such ‘journals’ will not help you. It will make you an academic pariah as soon as people find out.
> "it is the industry's practice"
Great way to break an illusion!
The academics, individuals every one of them, chasing dreams - and finding out, is it still your dream by the time you've finished the PhD? During your postdoc, as "publish or die" kicks in? Whilst you spend the days drafting grant applications, looking wistfully over at the lab machinery you've not been able to spend time with for months now?
Then the journals - especially the predatory ones - responding like that.
There is nothing wrong with "industry" per se - we all rely on it, it has many great people in it and it is (should be) symbiotic with research and academia - but sending that message was really on the nose: the owner of the factory with the giant rotating knives emailing the long pig standing on the conveyor belt.
The institutions where the research is carried out could take the matters into their own hands. Instead of papers sending a new paper to a journal the author(s) submit it to their libraries. A library then decides on its merit, probably by consulting the department head or maybe the institution has a publishing committee. If it's OKed it goes on the library's website. The journals are cut out completely.
It might cost the libraries to do that but it's offset by the saving on journal subscriptions.
Unfortunately, in several cases, it is not about the publication of results, but the prestige of appearing in journals...
And with the lack of control of some publishers, as soon as a truly open paper is published by an institution's library, someone is going to change the authors' names and republish it somewhere else.
As soon as institutions stop counting the number of papers as a metric of quality, "Publish or Perish" will perish (except for vanity publishing, that is an unkillable monster).
"A questionable journal is one that violates best practices"
With "best practice" being a link to a site that's supposed to tell me about best practices. Blazoned across the bottom of the site's front page is "This website uses cookies to ensure you get the best experience. Learn more about DOAJ’s privacy policy." with a button to click. It's not even an opt out option. Somehow I lack confidence in their notion of what might constitute best practices.
The great trick of the original Cookie Law wasn't its failure to stop tracking, but its wild success in training an entire generation of users to click 'Agree' on anything just to make the banner go away. This conditioned reflex was the crucial groundwork for GDPR, where this casual click is now laundered into "freely given consent." It gave companies the explicit legal basis they desperately needed to legitimise their data trade, moving it from a legal grey area into a defensible business practice. 'Opt out' would really be nothing but cope and the whole thing is just hokey cokey.
"...but its wild success in training an entire generation of users to click 'Agree' on anything just to make the banner go away."
Firefox has several addons to auto-reject cookies. Alas, I don't think they exist in Firefox mobile.
It is fun to see it working to deep dive reject cookie "settings".
There is another breed of questionable journals, which peddle pseudoscience. A bunch of likeminded fruitloops, who happen to have academic careers, band together to form an editorial board and launch their Journal of [Our Special Pseudoscience]. They write articles and peer-review each other. Further content is elicited from likeminded students, whom they again mutually peer review, and who can now turn their newfound pseudoscience into a career progression. Even the great journal publishers such as Elsevier can sometimes be taken in.
And of course, there are the ones where words such as "advertorial" and "sponsored" crawl everywhere around the small print.
To murder a Latin proverb, Caveat lector.
"About 1,000 of a set of 15,000 open access scientific journals appear to exist mainly to extract fees from naive academics."
Is that all? I would guess closer to (and probably over) 70% for a randomly selected sample of such "journals".
Fortunately it's easy to filter out the drek ... usually a quick thumb-through is all it takes. Either it's good, or file it in the mental circular file/bit bucket under "Don't Bother".
The biggest problem of the commercialisation (or state control) of journals is the selection of papers / articles according to commercial pressures, which means sponsors and advertisers direct the publication. Not good for science, the advancement of the field or the public. Even worse is people just accepting it.
