Predators still on the prowl

“MALAYSIAN academics among the top in ‘fraudulent’ publications found in global database”, cried the headline of an online news portal recently. A chorus of mainstream media portals followed.

Malaysians are rightly concerned about the fact that their hard-earned tax ringgits are allegedly being abused by a small group of unscrupulous academics in public universities by publishing their research results in fraudulent journals.

This issue is not new, as it was raised several years ago. To their credit, Malaysian universities have taken significant steps to stem the practice, including rejecting the papers in the annual assessment of the errant academics. However, papers by Malaysian academics continue to appear in predatory journals, albeit on a smaller scale than before.

Many senior academics acknowledge that publication in predatory journals is still being practised by some unscrupulous individuals who are under intense pressure from their management to publish the required number of journal papers per year (KPIs) to earn the annual rise in salary or promotion.

The KPI on publications was hatched by a previous higher education minister who had an ambitious plan to transform Malaysian universities from “jaguh kampung” to worldclass standards, ostensibly to make the country a global hub for higher education and innovation.

But universities in the United Kingdom who are at the top of their league appear to be unaffected by the publication KPI bug. My daughter didn’t publish any paper before her PhD viva voce at Newcastle University in 2017. Her professor told her to focus on doing the scientific work well rather than on the publication of half-baked science.

She repeated her experiments hundreds of times to make sure the results were reliable and repeatable. She only published her first paper from her PhD thesis two years later, not in just any journal but in Nature Communications.

It pays to do good science very well and get published in highly reputable journals. Our academics should therefore not be harried by their supervisors to prematurely publish partial results that might not be reliable or repeatable and would end up in predatory journals.

I didn’t publish anything before my PhD viva voce at Cambridge University 40 or so years ago. I only published the first paper from the thesis two years later.

That practice in UK universities hasn’t changed very much in my daughter’s time.

Perhaps the current higher education minister should review the transformation plan and put a moratorium on MYRA 2.0, the auditing tool used to rank Malaysian universities, until a better system is developed to prevent publishing in predatory journals.

Avoid “bean counting” and focus on the “bean quality” instead. There is no point counting “rotten beans” if they smell to high heaven.

But, as one professor colleague told me, my advice will probably fall on deaf ears.