Rise of the Predators
Business is booming in the murky global market of
suspect and sham publishers and journals
By Bryn Nelson, PhD
Edited By Terence J. Colgan, MD
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O ne Russian-owned journal
that may or may not be based
in Warsaw, Poland, appears to
have a fake editorial board and
a bogus impact factor. Another publisher
and prolifi c spammer with a posted
address in Wilmington, Delaware, but
a more likely base in Hyderabad, India,
has closely copied the scope and aims of
legitimate medical journals published by
Amsterdam-based Elsevier.
A third publishing company based in
Delhi, India, recently launched with 61
journal titles. The only journal with articles
published as of mid-February falsely
claimed to be a member of the respected
Committee on Publication Ethics and
included 4 articles and a review, all coauthored
by its editor-in-chief.
The Scholarly Open Access blog,
fueled by tips from readers around
the world, reads like a curio cabinet of
questionable publication practices. As
recounted by blogger Jeffrey Beall, associate
professor and scholarly communications
librarian at the University of Colorado
in Denver, some e-mail requests to
submit manuscripts have the awkward
wording of a document run through
Google Translate. Others suggest a more
sophisticated attempt to deceive, and a
few publishers and journals have even
copied the names and logos of reputable
counterparts to fool unwary researchers.
Beyond his blog, Mr. Beall compiles
lengthy annual lists of shady publishers
and stand-alone journals. In a broad
sense, he says, they all share 3 traits:
they lack transparency, use deception,
and do not adhere to industry standards
for scholarly publishing. More specifi -
cally, “Beall’s List of Predatory Open-
Access Publishers” is based on roughly
2 dozen criteria (with another 2 dozen
practices refl ecting poor journal standards).
Among them, Mr. Beall cites the
absence of an editorial or review board,
the excessive use of spam e-mails to solicit
manuscripts, insufficient or hidden
information regarding author fees, and
false impact factors to feign international
standing.
Why the subterfuge? “It’s all about
money,” he says. And business, by
most accounts, is booming. Based on
Mr. Beall’s criteria, Finnish researchers
Cenyu Shen and Bo-Christer Björk recently
estimated that predatory journals
poured more than 420,000 articles into
the scientifi c market in 2014, compared
with only 53,000 in 2010.1
A Growing Problem
Mr. Beall’s efforts have put him on a
fi rst-name basis with a university lawyer
due to the legal threats he receives, and
a detractor in Serbia once sent him a
menacing picture of a knife. Other critics
have raised more measured concerns
with his methods, his outspoken skepticism
of open-source publications, and
the feasibility of his blacklists.
However, interviews with researchers,
editors, and transparency advocates
in multiple countries have suggested that
more awareness is desperately needed to
counter a mushrooming trend in unethical
publishing that is only likely to get worse.
At an October 2015 meeting of the
World Association of Medical Editors in
New Delhi, India, Jocalyn Clark, PhD,
gave a talk describing predatory journals
and their potential impact on authors,
institutions, and the scientifi c culture.
Attendees were so concerned that they
repeatedly raised the issue thereafter,
says Dr. Clark, who was then the executive
editor at icddr,b, a global health
research organization in Dhaka, Bangladesh,
and was recently named executive
editor of The Lancet. “It felt like it was
almost like a cry for help,” she recalls.
A symposium on aligning publishing
incentives with research transparency
and integrity, held during the American
Association for the Advancement of
Science annual conference in Washington,
DC, in February 2016, offered a
far different view of predatory publishing.
In response to a question about how
to combat the problem, Science editorin-
chief Marcia McNutt, PhD, expressed
surprise that anyone would confuse a
predatory journal with a legitimate one.
“I’m not sure where the rocket science is
here,” she said.
However, as sham and suspect journals
continue their upward trajectory,
Dr. Clark, Ms. Shen, Mr. Beall, and other
observers say many vulnerable researchers
in developing countries lack suffi cient
resources to distinguish real from predatory.
Rather than a mere nuisance, Dr.
Clark says, the rapidly growing “Wild
West” of deceptive journals is threatening
to become a full-blown crisis.
Spammers and Scammers
According to Ms. Shen and Mr. Björk’s
analysis, India alone accounts for 27% of
predatory publishers, with another 12%
located in the rest of Asia, 18% in North
America, and 9% in Europe. Researchers
could not determine the location of more
than a quarter of these publishers. The
distribution of corresponding authors
was more highly concentrated: approximately
35% were from India, 26% from
the rest of Asia, and 16% from Africa,
together accounting for more than 3 in
4 journal authors.
Ms. Shen, a doctoral student at the
Hanken School of Economics in Helsinki,
Finland, says she believes the geographic
concentration of authors partially refl ects
how researchers are evaluated for their
academic positions. In some countries,
“international” publishing is required
or highly rewarded, but without consideration
of the journal’s quality. “At the
same time, academics from those countries
have problems getting their articles
accepted in traditional journals from big
Anglo-American-Dutch-German publishers,”
she says.
Dr. Clark puts more of the onus on a
research culture that has exported an
intense publish-or-perish mindset to
India, Bangladesh, and other emerging
countries and created a huge new pool of
scientists desperate to be authors. “But
we’re not necessarily providing the level
of training and mentorship and support
that a lot of scientists get in more developed
settings,” she says. The result is
fertile ground for exploitation.
In 2015, David Moher, PhD, a senior
scientist at the Ottawa Hospital Research
Institute in Ontario, Canada, analyzed
the 311 e-mail solicitations he received
over a single year. Nearly 80% were from
journals on Mr. Beall’s list.2 The remainder
shared many of the same traits, he
writes, but the journals were likely too
small or too new to be discovered.
Dr. Clark conducted her own weeklong
trial and counted twice as many
predatory journal spam e-mails sent to
her Bangladesh account as were sent to
her account at the University of Toronto,
where she is an adjunct assistant professor
of medicine. The 2:1 ratio is no aberration,
she says. Another recent study
suggests that most authors published in
predatory journals are young, inexperienced,
and from developing countries.3
As part of their sales pitch, Mr. Beall
says, predatory publishers are essentially
hijacking the gold open-access business
model, in which a journal fi nances all or
part of its publishing costs by assessing
article processing charges upon acceptance
of authors’ manuscripts (Cancer
Cytopathology, which is published by
Wiley on behalf of the American Cancer
Society, uses a hybrid OnlineOpen model
in which authors can choose to make
their articles open access for a fee). In
abusing the model, Mr. Beall says, predatory
publishers often promise rapid
publication and conduct little or no peer
review after collecting the fees.
Mr. Beall has attracted controversy
himself through his criticism of the openaccess
movement and what he views as
weaknesses contributing to the exploitation
of vulnerable researchers. Dr. Clark,
a former senior editor at open-access
journal PLOS Medicine, cautions that
Mr. Beall’s bias and lack of independent
review could lead to the erroneous tarring
of legitimate journals as predatory.
Mr. Beall responds that few other
transparency advocates have volunteered
to help monitor suspicious publications
(although the Directory of Open Access
Journals maintains its own “white list”
of high-quality journals). “I get e-mails
almost every day from people who
have been victimized by one or another
publisher,” he says.
If some naive researchers are being
hoodwinked (and based on blog accounts,
more than a few researchers in the United
States and Europe are among them),
others are knowingly using the shortcut
to gain an “imprimatur of science,” as one
South African researcher told Mr. Beall. At
a recent conference on academic misconduct,
University of California at Davis law
professor Mario Biagioli suggested that
rather than preying on authors, predatory
journals may be co-conspirators peddling
“counterfeit goods.”
Either way, the shadowy entrepreneurs
face a low startup barrier: after
creating a Web site, they can use a
template to create a fleet of journals
with unique titles and send out spam
solicitations to scientists. “It’s a really
easy and fast way to make a lot of money
with almost no investment, and everybody’s
copying it right now,” Mr. Beall
says. Despite their differences, he and Dr.
Clark agree that it is a fl ourishing business
model the global scientifi c community
can no longer afford to ignore.
Reference
1. Shen C, Björk BC. ‘Predatory’ open access: a longitudinal
study of article volumes and market characteristics.
BMC Med. 2015;13:230.
2. Moher D, Srivastava A. You are invited to
submit…. BMC Med. 2015;13:180.
3. Xia J, Harmon JL, Connolly KG, et al. Who publishes
in “predatory” journals? J Assoc Inf Sci Technol.
2015;66:1406-1417.
DOI: 10.1002/cncy.21717
I get e-mails almost every day from people
who have been victimized by one or another
publisher. —Jeffrey Beall
©
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