Two of Canada’s most prestigious publishing houses for medical journals have been quietly bought up by an international publisher that is being sued by the U.S. government to stop it from printing what amounts to junk science for profit, a CTV News/Toronto Star investigation has learned.

The takeovers have sent shock waves through the medical research community and put more than a dozen journals at risk of being delisted on PubMed, the gold standard for trustworthy, peer-reviewed scholarship.

Even worse, doctors worry that Canada’s good name could be hijacked to lend credibility to bogus research papers, riddled with typos and inaccuracies, that have proliferated on the Internet in the age of “open access” academic literature.

“I am scared not just for science but also genuinely scared for the whole notion that publishing should be done by credible journals run by credible associations (with) credible editors. These predatory open access journals have nothing in them that is credible or authentic,” said Dr. Madhukar Pai, who holds the Canada research chair in Epidemiology and Global Health at McGill University.

OMICS Group, an online publishing house for academic journals based in Hyderabad, India, purchased the Canadian medical publisher Andrew John Publishing last winter and added a second, Pulsus Group, in June.

The company’s owner, Srinubabu Gedela, says OMICS does not exert any control over the Canadian medical journals.

“Most of the journals hosted by these companies are monitored by reputed medical societies of Canada,” he said in an email in response to Star and CTV questions. “There is no control on content and editorial practice.”

Of the 16 Canadian journals affected by the takeover, six — including the Canadian Journal of General Internal Medicine and The Canadian Journal of Optometry — have terminated their publishing contracts with OMICS or stated their intention to do so. The 10 others did not respond to Star emails.

OMICS is being sued by the U.S. Federal Trade Commission for deceptive publishing practices. Filed last month, the government lawsuit claims the company uses mass spam emails to solicit articles from academics, which are then published without any peer review by experts in their field.

While the authors pay to have their article published, a standard practice for open access academic articles available free online, OMICS attracts submissions by falsely stating that their journals are widely cited in related literature and listed in vetted academic databases, the FTC alleges in its lawsuit.

The lawsuit also claims PubMed, an index of reputable medical journals maintained by the U.S. National Library of Medicine and the National Institutes of Health, does not list any OMICS publications. In 2013, the U.S. Department of Health sent OMICS a cease-and-desist letter demanding the company stop claiming its journals are listed by PubMed.

When contacted by the Star, PubMed representatives were not able to say what will happen to the Canadian medical journals now published by OMICS.

“(OMICS) used false promises to convince researchers to submit articles presenting work that may have taken months or years to complete, and then held that work hostage over undisclosed publication fees ranging into the thousands of dollars,” said Jessica Rich, director of the FTC’s Bureau of Consumer Protection, in a press release.

In a response filed in U.S. Federal Court, OMICS argues that the FTC has provided no evidence to prove its business practices are unfair or deceptive and has not demonstrated that anyone has suffered irreparable harm.

“This act of the FTC amounts to an abuse of process of law as well as damage to the reputation of the defendant,” states its submission.

In its filing, which seeks to prevent the FTC’s request for a preliminary injunction of OMICS publications, OMICS says many of its journals are included in PubMed and attaches letters from numerous professors, including ones at the University of Calgary, the University of Manitoba and Dalhousie University, requesting that its journals be included in PubMed listings.

However, Dr. William Jia, an associate professor at the Brain Research Centre at University of British Columbia, who wrote a letter included in OMICS’ legal filing, says he has no knowledge of the company’s practices.

“I have no relationship with the OMICS Group at all,” said Jia, who is listed on the editorial board of Surgery: Current Research, published by OMICS. “I’ve never reviewed any article for them.”

“They invited me to be an editor and there are hundreds of editors there. It’s a new journal . . . and they needed editors, so I said, ‘Oh sure, I’d be happy to do that.’ But that doesn’t mean that I give any credit to that journal.”

“If now there’s a problem with peer review, I’d like to remove my name from that editorial board, of course. I don’t want to be associated with that,” said Jia. “In my opinion as a researcher, if they publish a paper that is not peer reviewed, then it is not legitimate.”

In an interview with the Star and CTV from Hyderabad, Gedela refuted the FTC’s allegations, saying that open access journals are a “noble cause” because they create free scientific literature.

“All the allegations we are getting from western countries, and from a few publishers as well as their agents (are motivated by the fact that) we are disrupting their business by making scientific information open access,” Gedela said.

“Open access publications, the cost is less and maintenance is less and at the same time . . . scholars from around the world have access to scientific literature with less money,” he said.

“We started with just 10 journals in 2009; we have about 700-plus journals now,” said Gedela. “In the next three to four years, more than 50 to 60 per cent of publications are going to be (in the) open access category. And we are going to do the same in Canada.”

Dr. Pai, who holds the Canada research chair at McGill, says the Canadian government should intervene.

“It saddens me and upsets me that Canadian journals are being bought out by these companies and I think we need to do something so this doesn’t happen,” said Pai. “I think the government needs to step in like the American government stepped in.”

The employees of Andrew John and its affiliated medical associations were not told who had bought the publishing house. After the sale, Andrew John and Pulsus kept their brand names and their staff. The mailing addresses on their websites now point to an office in London, England.

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It took an insider, who was laid off in July, to blow the whistle on the sale, after she became suspicious and Googled the new owners.

“They’re presenting themselves as a Canadian company and hoping no one will check,” said Rose Simpson, the former managing editor of four medical journals at Andrew John. “They’re using our name to cover their business.”

Simpson, who was already in contact with many of the medical societies whose journals are published by Andrew John, reached out to other associations, and soon realized that OMICS had purchased Pulsus Group as well. She says staff there were led to believe they were being purchased by Andrew John. Simpson made it her mission to set the record straight.

“They didn’t know,” she said. “They were duped.”

The Canadian Society of Internal Medicine (CSIM) only found out that OMICS had taken over as their publisher in September.

“We have moved to terminate our contract,” said Dr. Stephen Hwang, president of the CSIM. “The journal remains under our control and with full scientific integrity.”

Hwang is concerned about the growth of predatory publishers worldwide and the negative impact this could have on scientific research.

“People need to be aware that previously reputable journals could be taken over and become zombie journals. Their scientific integrity is dead but they keep shuffling along, publishing papers and they may no longer be the journals they used to be.”

Dr. Ralph Chou, editor-in-chief of the Canadian Journal of Optometry, said that the Canadian Association of Optometrists has also cancelled their contract with OMICS and will be finding a new publisher by the end of the year.

“All of us in the scientific world are concerned about rogue publishers,” Chou said. “It seems like your name is used as bait to entice other people to submit an article or participate in a conference. . . . What would happen to our academic reputation? It’s guilt by association.”

“Our publishing industry is not very large. To have these people coming in with bags of money and scooping things up, it’s generating a great deal of concern among the editors because we don’t want our publications being taken advantage of and we don’t want our associations being roped in either.”

John Birkby, former president and publisher of Andrew John, did not respond to requests for comment.

The former owner of Pulsus, Robert Kalina, said he started up the publishing company in 1984 to provide Canadian doctors with an alternative to American journals. But the small budgets and narrow distributions of the journals meant that no one was interested in purchasing them when he decided to retire earlier this year.

“We hired a broker who cast his net far and wide and could not find another publisher who would continue our noble cause,” Kalina wrote in an email. “OMICS realizes that they are on the predatory publishers list and had made a commitment to us to change their ways.”

Predatory publishing is a relatively recent phenomenon that rides the changes brought to academic publishing by freely accessible online journals.

Jeffrey Beall, an associate professorat the University of Colorado at Denver, says when he first started compiling a list of predatory publishers in 2010, there were only 18. That list, kept up to date on his blog, now has more than 1,000 entries.

“When OMICS International takes over a journal, it is basically the end of the journal as an honest scholarly journal,” said Beall. “I think scientists should be extremely worried. . . . They will continue, I think, to exploit people and to harm science because the articles that they do publish don’t go through the proper peer review. They are not scientifically vetted and this threatens science and it threatens researchers as well.”

Meanwhile, OMICS has added a dozen recently acquired titles to its roster of journals at Pulsus, including Neuropsychiatry. This journal’s previous publisher, Future Medicine, has posted an announcement on its website informing researchers that it no longer publishes a half dozen journals and listing their last issue.

“Any subsequently published content has not been handled by Future Medicine, and we therefore cannot guarantee that the same standards were applied.”

Correction – September 29, 2016: This article was edited from a previous version that misspelled Jeffrey Beall’s surname.