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Fake paper highlights predatory publishers

When a fake paper is accepted by 157 open access journals it shows that all that is gold does not necessarily glister, writes Paula Callan.

An article by John Bohannon in the latest issue of Science describes a sting operation in which variants of a fake scholarly paper were submitted to 304 open access journals to test the rigour of their reviewing processes.

Bohannon wrote the paper under the fake name of 'Ocorrafoo Cobange' supposedly a biologist at the Wassess Institute of Medicine in Asmara, which does not exist.

The papers were carefully crafted to be superficially credible but contained major flaws which competent reviewers should have been able to spot. It is disappointing that 157 of the journals (52 per cent) accepted the paper for publication; in many cases without any evidence that the paper had actually been read by anyone. In only 36 cases were the flaws identified and commented on. Alarmingly, nearly half of these were later accepted by the editor in spite of the reviewers' negative comments.

The term 'open access' in scholarly communication generally refers to the practice of providing online access to peer-reviewed research articles without requiring payment or passwords.

Where the article was published in a subscription journal, the author can provide an open access copy by placing a peer-reviewed final draft version online via an open access repository held by their institution or a national repository such as PubMed Central — this is known as 'Green' open access.

Alternatively, the author may choose to publish the research article in a 'Gold' open access journal.

Gold open access journals are free to readers but, in some cases, the author must pay a fee (article processing charge). While Gold open access is favoured by some sections of academia, others fear that author-side payments could undermine peer review as it creates an incentive to accept substandard papers.

Bohannon's article confirms this fear.

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Predatory publishers

It is a sad fact that a number of unscrupulous opportunists are currently exploiting the pressure on academics to publish and the willingness of some authors, research funders and universities to pay article processing fees by creating fake scholarly journals that are really just money making ventures.

The trouble is, on the surface, they can look quite convincing and many researchers have been sucked in by these 'predatory publishers'.

In some cases, there is no mention of a fee until the author receives an invoice with the acceptance letter. Many claim to be peer-reviewed and indexed when they are not. So, how do you spot potentially bogus journals?

Jeffrey Beall, a librarian at the University of Colorado in Denver maintains a list of Potential, possible, or probable predatory scholarly open-access publishers on his Scholarly Open Access Blog. The blog also includes detailed criteria for identifying other predatory open access publishers.

There is a risk that predatory publishers could undermine confidence in the integrity of all open access scholarly journals. However, it is important to understand that that they represent less than two per cent of the 9,900 open access journals currently available.

The majority of open access journals are run by not-for-profit scholarly societies, university presses, academic departments and geographically dispersed groups of academics. Generally, they receive subsidies from the host institution which allows the journal to be free for both readers and authors.

Some relatively new journals may have difficulty recruiting sufficient numbers of reviewers resulting in patchy quality control processes in the early days. The rigorous peer-review conducted by some established open access publishers such as Biomed Central and Public Library of Science illustrates the fact that an open access business model can foster quality.

In a touch of irony, in the Science investigation, the Public Library of Science's mega journal; PLoS ONE, which has been criticised in past for its light touch peer review process, was found to have subjected the bogus paper to the most thorough review of all.

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'Green' open access

I would suggest that the findings from the Science investigation reinforce the view held by many that institutional and funder mandates should favour Green open access.

The recent report by the UK House of Commons Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS) Committee "calls on the Government and RCUK to reconsider their preference for Gold open access during the five year transition period, and give due regard to the evidence of the vital role that 'Green' open access and repositories have to play as the UK moves towards full open access".

Subscription journals are not immune to problems related to quality and ethics. Back in 2009, it was reported in Nature's NewsBlog that one of the major multinational subscription-based publishers admitted publishing six fake journals. The publications were made to look like peer reviewed journals when they were, in fact, compilations of papers commissioned by pharmaceutical industry clients.

It was at least acknowledged in the article in Science that it was entirely possible that the fake articles would also have been accepted by bottom tier subscription journals. It is a shame this was not tested.

The transformation of scholarly communications will be a long and, at times, bumpy road.

There are certain parallels with the transition from hard-copy letters to email communication which gave rise to a plague of email-based scams and fraud. Nobody would suggest that scholars should stop using email. The strategy for dealing with the email scammers has been to develop filters and to become more skilful at recognising potentially fraudulent emails.

About the author: Paula Callan is the scholarly communications librarian and the Queensland University of Technology. She has been involved in open access advocacy locally and internationally for over ten years, and established QUT's very successful open access publications repository in 2003. She is a member of the Australian Open Access Support Group which was established in 2012.



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