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The effect of this is that low-quality studies are accepted into the body of published work that future scientists, doctors and engineers use as a reference.

“Do you want your surgeon reading questionable research? No,” says Cameron Macdonald, executive director of Canadian Science Publishing in Ottawa.

“The quality of the science is abominable” in some of these sources.

Academics say most open-access journals are above board, but the number of shadowy publishers is growing fast. They take cash from desperate researchers who must “publish or perish” in the university system.

“You can do a really half-assed job and get a journal up” online, Macdonald said.

“Many of them just appear and all of a sudden they’re publishing 40 journals,” masked in academic words such as “institute” or “medical centre.”

Often they list no staff names or phone numbers, but only an email address and a PayPal account. If they do list reputable editors’ names they just lift them from a university website.

“There’s a lot of fabrication that goes on with these predatory journals,” Macdonald said.

They post articles in whatever format the scientist submits them, unedited. More crucially, they skip the review step in which journals normally send each study to independent experts to check. This allows mistakes to get through.

Some — far from all — are listed on what the industry calls Beall’s List. Jeffrey Beall is a university librarian in Denver who got sick of shoddy publications, and decided to name and shame them. His list is at http://scholarlyoa.com. He found that suspicious journals make up back issues in order to look established, usually by copying and pasting work by other publishers.

And they solicit articles in the weirdest way. Beall shows that one publisher didn’t know “Erratum” is science-speak for having to print a correction, not exactly a career highlight:

Dear Lakhtakia, Akhlesh, This is from Frontiers of Engineering Mechanics Research (FEMR). It is a great honor writing to you. We found a paper you published. It’s an excellent paper which is well matched with the Focus & Scope of FEMR. Title: Erratum: Theory of thin-film, narrowband, linear-polarization rejection filters with superlattice structure … To promote the communications in the area of engineering mechanics, we are now sending our earnest invitation for you to submit new paper to FEMR.

Science magazine’s “sting operation” by Bohannon found that 157 journals agreed to publish his bumbling work. Only 98 turned it down. There were 36 that pointed out its major mistakes, but 16 of these offered to print it anyway.

The largest proportion of journals accepting the bogus work (64 acceptances, 15 rejections) were in India, though most tried to conceal this.