The rise of fake journals
the paper and, invariably, take money from the researcher and/or his or her institution.
It may be an extreme example, but one paper that was accepted repeated the phrase “Get me off your ******* mailing list”
863 times.
Fake journals make money by charging the authors a publication fee. This could be up to £1,000 (RM5,434) a paper, perhaps even more. The researchers get little or nothing in return.
These fake journals exist to make a profit without having any regard to the scientific process. They may even plagiarise papers that have been published.
Publishing in fake journals will have a negative effect on an academic’s career. Perhaps more worryingly, it also means that the scientific community and the public could be misled as there are no checks and balances on what is being published and represented as part of the scientific archive.
Furthermore, if this so-called research is cited, it could be propagated even further and accepted as fact, even though it has never been accepted as such by the scientific community.
I am fortunate to have published almost 250 peer-reviewed scientific articles as well as been an editor-in-chief of one journal and an associate editor of nine others.
This means I have become a target and regularly see many of the ways predatory journals try to make themselves look credible.
These include using logos that are similar to more established journals, using the names of recognised academics on the advisory or editorial board (often without their knowledge) and claiming high impact factors.
They are also aggressive in marketing themselves through e-mail, often repeatedly sending the same e-mail explaining how important your previous work was and how they would like to help you publish an extension to that research.
Roger Byard from the University of Adelaide has investigated this subject and found that “There were 18 (predatory journals) in 2011, 477 at the end of 2014, and 923 in 2016 with the majority of those charging article publishing charges.”
In fact, it has been suggested that there aremore British ournal o ... based in
Fake journals make money by charging the authors a publication fee. This could be up to £1,000 (RM5,434) a paper, perhaps even more. The researchers get little or nothing in return.
Things could be about to get worse because, up until recently, the scientific community had a gatekeeper that maintained a list of predatory journals. This has disappeared.
Jeffrey Beall used to maintain a website that was a “critical analysis of scholarly open-access publishing”. The website listed more than 900 predatory journals.
An archive of Beall’s website is still available, but it is no longer updated. In fact, the original website has been taken down for unclear reasons.
There are many people in the scientific community who will miss this resource and many would argue that there is a need for a service such as this to monitor scientific integrity and enable people to find out if a reference is from a predatory/fake journal.
Until this resource is available again, the scientific community needs to be vigilant against predatory/fake journals. They add no value to the scientific community or the public and they do nothing to improve the curriculum vitae (CV) of a scientist.
In fact, it probably harms a CV. The journals are also taking money that could be used for more productive research.
Before submitting their work to a journal, scientists should check that it is legitimate. If a paper gets accepted quickly and the publisher asks for money, the alarm bell should start ringing.
This article was previously published in The Conversation.
Prof Graham Kendall is the chief executive officer, provost a d - - lor of e . it