Anna O. Szust is not a real person. She is, literally, a fraud: oszust means “fraud” in Polish. Nonetheless, Szust has been appointed as an editor at 40 bogus academic journals. After sending out her fake application for an editorial role, the researchers responsible for the world’s nerdiest sting operation began to receive responses almost immediately. “Four titles immediately appointed Szust editor-in-chief,” report Piotr Sorokowski and colleagues in Nature this week.

At legitimate journals, editors play an important role in quality control. They decide whether a paper is worth sending out for peer review, and, if so, who is best qualified to review it. Then they decide whether to publish it, based on the advice of the reviewers. A high-quality journal has rigorous editors who work to ensure higher-quality science, which helps to stop bad science—ranging from the silly to the truly dangerous—from getting the approval stamp of publication and peer review.

Predatory journals

Bogus, predatory journals, on the other hand, are not concerned with quality; they’re concerned with making a buck or ten thousand. They take advantage of legitimate open access scientific journals, which often charge a fee for publication in order to cover their costs; papers are then made available without a subscription.

Predatory journals invite researchers to publish in the journal, also for a fee. Except the papers go out without proper editorial oversight or peer review. To make this work, they “aggressively and indiscriminately recruit academics to build legitimate-looking editorial boards,” write Sorokowski and colleagues.

Many academics treat these kinds of recruiting e-mails as a kind of weird, niche spam, but they represent a pretty big problem. Predatory journals may fool young or isolated researchers who don’t have proper mentorship or guidance. These researchers pay money to publish in a journal that ultimately does their career little good, while the journals spew out poor-quality research and stomp on the reputation of open access as a whole. By 2014, nearly half a million articles had been published in journals like these.

Just as problematic, the public often can't tell the difference between legitimate scientific publications and the junk published in predatory journals.

The sting

The point of the sting operation was to shed some light on how journals like these function. Anna O. Szust was a pretty half-hearted fake, and no journal worth its salt would have brought her on as an editor. Her CV listed degrees and book chapters, and she had social media profiles but no published academic articles, no experience with peer review, and no previous editorial roles. Sorokowski and colleagues sent her CV to 360 journals, 120 of which had been blacklisted as predatory, 120 of which were traditional, and 120 of which were open access.

The responses from the 40 predatory journals that accepted the application were eye-popping. “One journal spotted that Szust’s cover letter stated that becoming an editor would allow her to obtain a degree that she had listed as already having obtained,” the authors write. “That journal nevertheless appointed Szust as an editor.”

Many of the journals that did accept her application did so on condition that she pay them or publish her own papers with them (paying the accompanying fee). Some offered to share the profits of new journals or conferences with her, while some wanted her to recruit new researchers to publish in their journals, like some kind of scientific pyramid scheme.

Perhaps even more disconcertingly, eight of the 120 “legitimate” open access journals accepted Szust’s application. These eight journals hadn’t been blacklisted as predatory. Sorokowski and colleagues report that as of this month, when they submitted their write-up, six of the eight remained on the whitelisted Directory of Open Access Journals, despite a large-scale purge of whitelisted journals that turned out to be predatory or otherwise unethical.

This points to a big part of the problem: it sometimes isn’t immediately obvious whether or not a given journal is a scam. Existing whitelists are helpful, as are other online tools like the Web of Science, but ultimately, it’s up to researchers to check on the reputation of a journal before they publish in it. With pressure to publish at fever pitch, it’s unsurprising that predatory journals have such a strong grip.

Nature, 2016. DOI: 10.1038/543481a (About DOIs).