U of O, hospital among those still publishing in predatory journals

Scientists from the University of Ottawa, The Ottawa Hospital and other top-tier institutions across Canada keep publishing their results in fake science journals, tainting the work despite years of warnings.

One veteran science publisher warns all the work that produced these studies “is just thrown away.”

Until recently, the scope of the problem of “predatory” journals has been hard to measure.

Now, one giant in the fake publishing field, OMICS International of India, has improved the search engine for 700 journals.

As a result, we found hundreds of Canadian scientists publishing recently with the Indian firm — the same company that accepted this newspaper’s analysis of how pigs fly.

Here are a few recent Ottawa papers published by OMICS:

The Ottawa Hospital Cancer ■ Centre published “Endocrine Therapy in Older Women with Early-Stage Hormone Sensitive Breast Cancer.”

U of O and The Ottawa Hospital ■ published “An Analysis of Prognostic Factors in Pancreatic Neuroendocrine Tumors.”

The university and the Ottawa ■ Hospital Research Institute produced “Viral Suppression and Discontinuation Rates have Improved in HIV Patients with Modern Antiretroviral Therapies.”

The university’s School of Human ■ Kinetics published “Postural Instability in the ML Direction in Individuals with Parkinson’s Disease Before, During and When Recovering from a Forward Reach.”

Although the papers may be fine, they have not been independently reviewed — a crucial step that real journals provide but OMICS ignores. The result is like a financial report that has not been audited. People won’t trust it.

The University of Toronto and several Toronto hospitals published recent work with OMICS on brain cancer, skin regeneration and dialysis.

One McGill paper chooses a writing style that would risk being rejected by mainstream science journals:

“One Sunday night, well past midnight, while my body was motionless and my mind roamed, Naomi summoned me. I felt the urgency of her plea in the crux of my being. I sensed that Naomi was slipping into a quandary. Where was she? Her cries were loon-like. I blindly cast a lifeline into dark waters. It sank. Waves, like breath, moved in and out as they met the shore. The smell of pines permeated the nocturnal air. My heart beat startled me into wakefulness.”

In all these cities, the OMICS papers are heavily weighted to medicine and engineering.

The improved ability to search puts a Canadian face on the problem. Recent surveys, including one from the Ottawa Hospital Research Institute, have said fake journals still prey on Canadians. But now, there are visible examples. And beyond OMICS, there are an estimated 9,000 more predatory journals.

Some universities are nearly absent from OMICS, at least in recent years. Carleton University had a few papers there, but they are mainly from 2013 and earlier, when predatory journals were not widely understood.

At Canadian Science Publishing, a legitimate journal publisher, Jim Germida said he can’t believe scientists fail to understand a problem that has been so widely discussed for years.

“I couldn’t imagine how people did not see all the information,” said Germida, CSP’s executive editor-in-chief. “I chair the University (of Saskatchewan’s) tenure and promotion committee and we still see situations where young faculty and more experienced faculty find themselves caught in this trap.

“I just don’t understand why they are not paying attention.

“The interesting thing in my mind is what would the directors, the deans, the people at the top ... think if they realized the work is being published in these useless predatory journals. And in many cases, it is just thrown away.”

“Start thinking about the dollars invested and it starts to get scary,” comments Roger Pierson, a medical researcher at the University of Saskatchewan and longtime critic of shoddy publishing. “It begs a deep analysis of the funding that went into it” from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research and the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council.

The Ottawa Hospital and the University of Ottawa put out a joint statement Friday saying they “regularly provide training to help our researchers publish their work responsibly and avoid predatory journals. But no institution is immune to this problem.”

The university’s library services and hospital’s Centre for Journalology provide training and a checklist to warn of fake journals, and there’s a full-time officer to guide scientists in publishing research.

In November, a U.S. judge ruled that OMICS engages in “deceptive practices.” tspears@postmedia.com twitter.com/TomSpears1