Peer review counted on to catch dubious science

Organizations that hand out funding don’t see ‘predatory’ journals as big issue

The federal agencies that distribute $3 billion a year for university and hospital research are counting on academics to police each other and prevent colleagues from publishing in “predatory” journals that print anything for cash.

The Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council (NSERC), Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) and Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) give research grants to professors and doctors.

They say they don’t take any direct action if work done with this money is published in one of the 10,000 fake science journals that can help scientists desperate to publish papers — of any quality — as a career move.

Instead, the granting agencies are counting on academics to be careful for the sake of their professional reputations.

Kevin Fitzgibbons is executive director of corporate planning and policy with NSERC, and is on a working group formed by the three agencies.

“Our biggest filter for this type of thing ... comes through a peer review system,” he said this week. This means that when Professor Smith wants federal money, he or she has to pass a review by others in the field. And if Smith has been publishing in a shady journal, those doing the review will catch it.

So far, Fitzgibbons said this has not happened much.

“From what we can tell, there has been very, very little, or very minor examples, of predatory journals showing up” in these reviews.

CIHR says that in seven years, it has not yet identified any of its funded researchers publishing in a predatory journal, but it believe it happens. (A five-minute search by this newspaper immediately found two University of Ottawa examples — one thanking CIHR for funding, the other funded by NSERC.)

But there are no direct repercussions for scientists who publish this way.

“I don’t think it’s in the best interest of the scientists themselves in terms of being able to access more funding,” Fitzgibbons said.

In other words, their reputations will suffer if they publish in shady journals, and this is enough.

“Our policy isn’t so much directing what journals to publish in ... but to look into the actual science,” and judge each research proposal on its own, he said. There is no obligation to publish results anywhere; they can simply be put in an unedited “repository” at a university.

“The only recourse that we could have would be through the peer review (for funding) the second time around if they want to come,” or if someone makes a formal complaint about “irresponsible conduct of research,” he said.

This, however, has never happened over a predatory journal question.

There are two separate issues, said Susan Zimmerman, executive director of the Secretariat on Responsible Conduct of Research, which serves all three agencies. “One is: Can crappy science get published?”

But the funding agencies generally ask a different question, she said. “Our concern as (funding) agencies is: Is good science going to be disseminated appropriately?” This means there has to be transparency and accessibility to the results.

Fitzgibbons said another layer of defence is the universities’ system of checking people’s records when they want promotion or tenure. “Again, it’s not in (researchers’) best interest to be publishing in dubious journals.”

Roger Pierson of the University of Saskatchewan, a medical researcher and frequent critic of predatory journals, said it’s time for more oversight by these granting councils because taxpayers should not pay for studies that can only get into journals of last resort.

If the three agencies don’t take control, then “you’re counting on professionalism to be the driver,” he said.

“In any profession, the first goal is to do no harm, and to do good with the resources that you have, for the public. That is what scientists are hired for.”

But he said “careerism” and the pressure to publish more and more research can upset this course.

As well, when scholars review each other’s performances, all kinds of personal rivalries and grudges can and do get in the way, he said. (Pierson has sat on these committees for CIHR.)

He also noted that websites of shady journals are difficult to search, so a person can publish there and not have this widely known by colleagues. He called the claim that CIHR hasn’t found such studies using its own funding “a difficult comment to accept because there has been no analysis that I know of. I would think that this begs a very deep dive” into where these funded papers are being published.