There’s a new scientific journal you might not have heard of called the International Journal of Earth and Environmental Sciences. It says it “supports scientist who sweats for the real innovation & discovery”.



If that’s a little too sweaty for you, then how about another new journal, also called the International Journal of Earth and Environmental Sciences?

Or, if you’re a discerning (and sweaty) scientist looking for a publisher that “endeavours to provide a notable and discern forum to publish” then maybe the International Journal of Research in Earth and Environmental Sciences is the notable forum for you?

No? Just one more. There’s also the International Journal of Environmental Sciences which “expecpt high quality research articles” that are free from plagiarism, but maybe not typos.

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These journals, and hundreds more like them, are mostly based in the Indian subcontinent or China and are part of a ballooning online industry offering to give academics a place to publish their work in return for a fee and minimal, if any, quality control.

Some have been identified as “predatory” because of the way they target academics, often through spam emails, without properly disclosing fees or claiming to provide a peer review service that would give their research the scrutiny needed.

Journals that are “open access” make their money by charging academics or institutions a fee for peer reviewing and checking submitted academic manuscripts, and then publishing them. There are many reputable publishers working this way.

But this murky world has a predator of its own – climate science deniers looking to take advantage of the questionable quality controls in return for getting their work published in what the publishers claim are “peer-reviewed journals” but that, in reality, are not.

One climate science denier has targeted at least six journals for his research claiming that sea levels around Fiji and other Pacific islands are not rising.

[None of the research] would have passed the reviewing process for more reputable journals Prof Kurt Lambeck

The author of the research, Dr Nils-Axel Mörner, has acknowledged that the work was paid for by the CO2 Coalition, a climate science denial group that has links to the US president Donald Trump’s administration (coalition member Kathleen Hartnett-White is Trump’s pick to head the White House Council on Environmental Quality and a director, Prof Will Happer, has been touted as a potential chief science adviser to the president).

According to Prof Kurt Lambeck, a geophysicist and sea level expert at the Australian National University, none of the research “would have passed the reviewing process for more reputable journals”.

One journal targeted by Mörner was the Bangalore-based International Journal of Earth & Environmental Sciences which describes its mission thus: “We encourage authors, who always have shown more interest to publish his work in the prestigious journals, and avail them the freely to the scientific community.”

Another of the publishers used by Mörner, known as Juniper Publishers, was one of those to be caught in a hoax in 2017 when it accepted a “Dr Doll” on to its editorial board. Dr Doll was a fake veterinary surgeon created by Curtin University’s Prof Mike Daube with a profile based on his dog, a Staffordshire terrier.

Daube told the Huffington Post he had orchestrated the hoax “to expose shams of this kind, which prey on the gullible, especially young or naive academics and those from developing countries”.

The US government’s Federal Trade Commission has brought deception charges against one of the world’s biggest “open access” publishers, Omics International. The FTC has accused the Hyderabad-based Omics Group of what amounts to deceptive marketing practices among the more than 700 “open access” journals it publishes and the 3,000 “conferences” it organises.

Among the accusations, the FTC alleges that Omics fails to carry out genuine peer review, uses the names of academics without their consent and uses other academics names to promote conferences when those academics have not agreed to appear. Omics has denied all charges.

Omics also took on a climate science denier to be the editor-in-chief of its journal Environment Pollution and Climate Change, which published a handful of odd papers arguing that climate change wasn’t being caused by humans.

Prof Steve Sherwood, director of the University of New South Wales Climate Change Research Centre, described one of the papers as “laughable”.

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Dr Arthur Viterito, a retired college geography professor, is also a policy adviser to the notorious Heartland Institute – famed for its billboard campaign comparing people who accepted human-caused global warming to a serial killer. To be fair, it did issue an important qualifier that, “of course, not all global warming alarmists are murderers or tyrants”.

Viterito told me via email earlier this month that he had “agreed to assume the role as editor-in-chief for one year and my year was up” and that he would now go on to concentrating on his research.

Omics and its associated companies also organise hundreds of meetings and conferences each year.

Mörner managed to organise one meeting, through Omics, in Rome in October 2017, and then load the program with fellow climate science deniers.

One email sent to several Australian climate scientists by Omics company ConferenceSeries LLC was designed to entice them to attend the Rome conference. Here is the how that irresistible word salad read:

Climate Change 2017 is specifically premeditated with a unifying axiom providing pulpit to widen the imminent scientific creations. The main theme of the conference is ‘Today’s Progress and Tomorrow’s Climate Challenges’ which covers a broad array of vitally key sessions.

While all the serious Australia climate scientists seemed bemused by this “unifying axiom” the meeting did go ahead and, according to the estimates of two people who attended, there were between 80 and 100 people in the room at the start (somewhere short of the “more than 500” that Omics had said in its marketing that it expected).

I was appalled by the first speaker, who was indeed a climate denier, much to my surprise Prof Joseph Tomain

In an interview posted on YouTube, Mörner said the conference had been a great success and expressed his delight at being able to expose junior academics to the views of deniers. “Everybody left happy,” he said.

Prof Joseph Tomain, a law professor from the University of Cincinatti, didn’t leave happy. He left shortly after the first tea break.

Tomain was the second speaker at the meeting but accepted he should have checked the credentials of the organisers more carefully before agreeing to travel.

“I was appalled by the first speaker, who was indeed a climate denier, much to my surprise,” Tomain told me via email. “At the break, I spoke with other attendees who were clearly in the same camp. Quite honestly, it was not my cup of tea and after that break I decided to enjoy Rome rather than stay stuck at a Holiday Inn on its outskirts.”

Dr John Hunter, a sea level expert at the University of Tasmania, told me there was a “systemic problem” in academia where younger scientists were being pushed to publish more papers which had “lowered the standards of submitted papers”.

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“There has been an explosion of online journals, and also the ability to publish hardcopy journals far cheaper than previously. As well as producing good journals, this has led to a proliferation of ‘predatory’ and ‘vanity’ journals with poor reviewing standards.”

But the effort to target these journals is also a neat way to sidestep the legitimate and valid criticism levelled at deniers that many have little to no history of publishing research in peer-reviewed journals.

Now, anyone can publish anything in a journal with a name that sounds official but in fact offers none of the checks and balances of legitimate journals.

That’s how a paper with the title Get Me Off Your Fucking Mailing List can be accepted for publication in the International Journal of Advanced Computer Technology, or the Urology & Nephrology Open Access Journal published by MedCrave (another publisher targeted by Mörner) can be easily hoaxed with a paper about a non-existent condition based on a 1991 episode of Seinfeld and written by Dr Martin van Nostrand (let’s Google that for them).

That’s also how papers that dismiss the well-established science linking between fossil fuel burning to dangerous climate change can get published in an “international” and “peer-reviewed” journal.