Predatory journals: academic toxins

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Indian academia is sick. It needs to detoxify. Urgently.

The context

Difference between an authentic journal and a predatory journal, put simplistically

 Researchers disseminate their findings by having them published in academic journals. Sometimes, a variety of journals related to a variety of fields are published by the same firm, and such firms are called publishing houses. These journals offer the services of having papers reviewed by experts before their publication (so the readers only get authentic science) and the distribution of papers (so everyone knows what discoveries have taken place). In this model, institutions subscribe to these journals i.e. the reader pays to read the papers. (Another noteworthy point is that researchers, after submitting their findings to a journal, also hand over the copyrights to that information to that journal.)

 The open-access movement aimed to make all knowledge free for everyone, so that researchers with limited funds could also access what others had published. The basic question was, why should the scientific community pay publishing houses for information that they were generating themselves? The open-access model obviously worked differently than before, it is the authors and not the readers who pay the publishing fee.

 With every good idea, also comes its corruption. The same happened with open-access publishing. Several open-access journals and publishing houses sprang up that offered to publish a researcher's findings, upon payment of fees. The problematic part is, this fee is akin to a bribe where the journal editor bypasses some quality checks and the researcher gets a paper to his/her credit, even if it contains substandard content.

 For example, predatory journals may have bogus editors with non existent identities or exaggerated credentials. Without a real editor on the team, there is no check on the quality of the research published in that journal.

Here is a chronologically arranged description of the development of this fraudulent practice.
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Beall (2012): Predatory publishers are corrupting open access

Dr. Jeffrey Beall is, according to me, the hero in this war against predatory journals. In 2012, he wrote to the large audience of Nature about the perils of this new kind of publishing. He went on to set up the famous blog Scholarly Open Access. This blog boldly called out several villains in the publishing business, and is unfortunately no longer available (any guesses why?). Beall talked about the characteristics of predatory journals, and how to spot them. What disturbs me the most is this observation:
"Many purport to be headquartered in the United States, United Kingdom, Canada or Australia but really hail from Pakistan, India or Nigeria."
and this statement of his:
"Perhaps nowhere are these abuses more acute than in India, where new predatory publishers or journals emerge each week."
These kind of observations are seriously embarrassing for any sincere Indian researcher. If you're inclined to think that this is yet another conspiracy to downplay ("the great") Indian science of ancient origins, hold your horses. Beall's article was the beginning of a series of investigations with devastating results.
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Bohannon (2013): Who's Afraid of Peer Review?

Bohannon sent different versions of a fake paper to 304 open access journals (he wrote a computer program to generate these different versions using the same content). 157 of these accepted the paper.
"About one-third of the journals targeted in the sting are based in India -- overtly or as revealed by the location of editors and bank accounts -- making it the world's largest base for open access publishing; and among the India-based journals in my sample, 64 accepted the fatally flawed papers and only 15 rejected them."
Bohannon offers an interactive map which shows the "tangled web" of predatory publishing, which shows threads connecting locations of editors, publishers and bank accounts of these predatory journals. While most of the map is clean, it is mortifying to see the density of spots that covers the whole of India. Apart from this, there are2 explicit references: a predatory publisher from Mumbai, another editor from Bijapur. These are not the mentions we need, but the mentions we deserve. Makes me cringe.
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Seethapathy et al. (2014): India's scientific publication in predatory journals: need for regulating quality of Indian science and education

The problem of predatory publishing was also investigated from the Indian perspective by 3 authors from the homeland, and they concluded that "it is evident that India is lacking in monitoring the research being conducted at different higher educational and research institutes." They note the criteria that specifically encourage such behavior: such as looking at how many papers published as opposed to what is published, for awards of degrees as well as tenure or promotions.


Comments

  1. w7i7June 3, 2017 at 8:40 AM

    Yes, I'm very troubled by the prominence of pseudo-science too. Don't know about the FNA lobby to comment on that yet. :(

    ReplyDelete

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