In world of academic journals, sometimes open access for fakes

THE APPLICANT’S nom de plume was not exactly subtle, if you know Polish. The middle initial and surname of the author, Anna O Szust, mean “fraudster”. Her publications were fake and her degrees were fake. The book chapters she listed among her publications could not be found, but perhaps that should not have been a surprise because the book publishers were fake, too.

Yet, when Dr Fraud applied to 360 randomly selected open-access academic journals asking to be an editor, 48 accepted her and four made her editor-in-chief. She got two offers to start a new journal and be its editor. One journal sent her an email saying, “It’s our pleasure to add your name as our editor-in-chief for the journal with no responsibilities.”

These journals had fallen for a sting, plotted and carried out by a group of researchers who wanted to document the seamy side of open-access publishing. While those types of journals began with earnest aspirations to make scientific papers available to everyone, their proliferation has had unintended consequences.

Traditional journals typically are supported by subscribers who pay a fee while authors pay nothing to be published. Nonsubscribers can only read papers if they pay the journal for each one they want to see.

Open-access journals reverse that model. The authors pay and the published papers are free to anyone who cares to read them.

Publishing in an open-access journal can be expensive — the highly regarded Public Library of Science (PLOS) journals charge from $ 1,495 to $ 2,900 to publish a paper, with the fee dependent on which of its journals accepts the paper.

The open-access business model has spawned a shadowy world of what have been called “predatory journals”. They have similar names to legitimate journals, but exist by publishing just about anything sent to them for a fee that can range from under $ 100 to thousands of dollars.

There are now thousands of fake openaccess journals, about as many as legitimate ones, according to one of the creators of Dr Fraud, Katarzyna Pisanski, a researcher in the School of Psychology at the University of Sussex in England, and her colleagues.

While the legitimate journals rejected Dr Fraud’s application out of hand, many fake ones did not hesitate to take her on.

The investigators said they had seen young colleagues fall for the blandishments of predatory journals, not realising that the emails they received were from publications that only wanted their money.

“The emails can be very flattering,” Dr Pisanski said, telling the recipients they are “eminent researchers” and “inviting” them to contribute. When researchers send in papers, “they are published at lightning speed, often without peer review”, she said.

The researchers decided not to list any of the fake journals that they uncovered in the sting because some have names that are very close to those of legitimate journals.

Not everyone who publishes in these journals is an innocent dupe. Jeffrey Beall, scholarly communications librarian at the University of Colorado, who until recently published a list of predatory journals, said he believes many researchers know exactly what they are doing when they publish there.

“I believe there are countless researchers and academics, currently employed, who have secured jobs, promotions, and tenure using publications in pay-to-publish journals as part of their credentials and experience for the jobs and promotions they got,” Beall said.

“Examining someone’s publications now requires close scrutiny,” he added. “Merely eyeballing a CV is insufficient now.”

David Knutson, manager of communications at PLOS, said young researchers may feel relentless pressure to publish, at all costs. “These authors are shopping around their papers,” he said.

As for Dr Fraud, she got some lucrative offers. One journal suggested she organise a conference, whose papers would then be published; she would get 40% of the proceeds. Another invited her to start a new journal and offered her 30% of the profits.

Dr Pisanski and her colleagues told the journals that accepted Dr Fraud that she wanted to withdraw her application to be an editor. But it was not easy to withdraw.

Dr Fraud remains listed as a member of the editorial boards of at least 11 of those journals. She is also listed as a member of conference-organising committees. At least one journal she did not apply to also listed her as an editor.

Dr Fraud is even listed as an advisory board member of the Journals Open Access Indexing Committee. Its mission? To “increase the visibility and ease of use of openaccess scholarly journals”.

GINA KOLATA, THE NEW YORK TIMES