Junk science publisher ordered to stop deceit

But experts are questioning how much impact U.S. court ruling will have online

A U.S. federal court has ordered an Indian company accused of publishing junk science for profit to stop “deceptive practices” that lead the public to believe its online journals contain legitimate research.

OMICS has been ordered to remove all misleading claims from its websites that include displaying the names of prominent scientists who never agreed to join the editorial boards of its journals, stating the research is peer reviewed when it is not and claiming its journals are included in PubMed, the gold standard for trustworthy, peer-reviewed scholarship, according to the written judge’s ruling.

The temporary injunction was granted in Nevada in response to a lawsuit brought by the U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) last year.

“Absent such an injunction, the Court finds it likely that Defendants will continue to engage in deceptive practices,” chief judge Gloria M. Navarro wrote.

OMICS was the subject of a joint Toronto Star/CTV News investigation last year that revealed the company had quietly bought more than a dozen respected medical journals in Canada, causing leading researchers to worry that their reputations were being hijacked to lend credibility to bogus research papers, riddled with typos and inaccuracies.

Based in Hyderabad, India, OMICS is an online “open access” publisher that started out with 10 scientific journals in 2009 and has grown to control more than 700 publications, according to its owner, Srinubabu Gedela.

Gedela says the lawsuit is motivated by traditional academic publish- ers in the West whose business models have been disrupted by online open-access publishing. Instead of charging universities and research labs subscription fees to receive copies of a journal, open-access publishers ask researchers to pay to publish their work, which is then made accessible online for free.

“Open-access publications, the cost is less and maintenance is less and at the same time . . . scholars from around the world have access to scientific literature with less money,” Gedela told the Star and CTV News last year.

Some open-access journals have no standards at all, having published “scientific” papers that claim to prove the existence of aliens, or even pages of gibberish submitted by professors in “sting operations” to prove they’ll publish anything for a fee.

OMICS declared $11.6 million (U.S.) in revenue and about $1.2 million (U.S.) in profit in 2016, according to a Bloomberg report. The same report alleges that pharmaceutical companies have fuelled OMICS’ rise by using its journals to publish subpar research.

The FTC’s lawsuit doesn’t hinge on bad science, but on consumer protection. It zeroes in on an aspect of OMICS’ business that led to allega- tions it is a “predatory publisher” that fools young researchers into submitting their work under the impression that it will be published without charge.

The FTC’s complaint alleges that OMICS does not reveal “significant publishing fees” that authors must pay before their work is published.

After a paper is submitted, OMICS’ journals “often do not allow authors to withdraw their articles from submission, making their research ineligible for publication in other journals,” according to a statement put out by the FTC after the injunction was granted.

OMICS says the FTC’s case has dragged on for two years because there’s no merit to it.

“FTC made allegations based on the ‘fake news,’ ” Gedela told the Star after learning of the injunction.

“The intention behind court’s order . . . is to stop misrepresentation and to get the required information from us, but not to halt any of our operations in the United States,” Gedela wrote in an email. “We are pretty sure FTC will not be able to prove any of the allegations against us.”

The injunction was cautiously celebrated by academics who have been complaining of OMICS’ spam emails soliciting papers for years.

“I was happy to see the U.S. injunction, but doubt that it can stop predatory publishers based in India,” wrote Dr. Madhukar Pai, the Canada research chair in Epidemiology and Global Health at McGill University.

The FTC lawsuit also alleges OMICS organizes dubious conferences, promising the participation of leading scientists to lure young academics to pay conference fees. But those academics aren’t even aware their names were on conference materials and don’t show up.

Jeffrey Beall, an associate professor at the University of Colorado at Denver, said going after a single predatory publisher may save some academics some money but it doesn’t address the perverse incentives built into the open-access publishing model.

“The model has that conflict of interest where the more papers you accept, the more money you make,” Beall wrote in an email. “The temptation is always there even for ethical publishers to accept papers that are marginal or slightly flawed just so they can increase their revenue.”

Traditional academic publishers would have their subscriptions cancelled if they started publishing subpar work. But there’s no check on online open-access journals.