A pending Federal Trade Commission lawsuit illuminates an information-age peril for science: predatory journals that destructively exploit the author-pays method of open access. Media reports began appearing several years ago about such publications’ deceptive and unethical practices. Recently Bloomberg Businessweek, Nature, and a few others have brought predatory journals back into the spotlight—this time with new dimensions.
The FTC lawsuit confronts the organization called OMICS and two allied enterprises, all led by Srinubabu Gedela of Hyderabad, India. OMICS boasts that it has “700+ leading-edge peer reviewed, Open Access Journals that operates [sic] with the help of 50,000+ Editorial Board Members.” The lawsuit cites a statute against “unfair or deceptive acts or practices” in leveling allegations involving author fees, peer review, manuscript withdrawal, editors’ stature, editorial board membership, and journal scholarly standing.
Inside Higher Ed reported last year that Jeffrey Beall—originator of the phrase predatory journals—considers OMICS “the worst of the worst.” But the problem extends beyond Gedela and OMICS. That’s why Inside Higher Ed also quoted FTC staff attorney Ioana Rusu calling the lawsuit “a line in the sand” for other alleged offenders.
Some alleged offenders may believe they can scorn that line. Bloomberg Businessweek reports that in India, “Local newspaper articles laud Gedela, and business and science associations give him awards.” A “special economic zone grants him generous tax breaks, and the government is handing him heavily subsidized land on which to build new headquarters.” Gedela reportedly defends his organization’s quality control and “disavows the idea that he’s motivated by profit.” Bloomberg quotes him: “I started the business to help the scientific community. We’ve never made a mistake.”
Identifying a disturbing trend
Never? Don’t tell that to Beall. He’s a University of Colorado Denver scholarly publications librarian. After he saw increasingly suspicious activity online, back when the author-pays model was beginning to proliferate, he began taking action.
One step, in August 2012, was to publish a commentary in The Scientist warning that “overzealous open-access advocates” were “creating an exploitative environment, threatening the credibility of scholarly publishing.” Beall cautioned that “bogus publishers” with “unethical practices” were threatening to “erase the line that divides science from nonscience” and that they “use deception to appear legitimate, entrapping researchers into submitting their work and then charging them to publish it.” He warned further that predatory journals omit the value that high-quality publishing adds to scholarly content—for example, copyediting, digital preservation, and plagiarism detection.
The overall problem had been fostered, Beall wrote, thanks to “a very low barrier to entrance into the learned publishing industry. To become a scholarly publisher, all you need now is a computer, a website, and the ability to create unique journal titles.” He observed that under author-pays arrangements, authors “become the publishers’ customers,” creating “a conflict of interest: the more papers a publisher accepts, the more revenue it earns.”
A month later, Beall published a comparable commentary in Nature. In those days he blogged and publicized a regularly updated list, now discontinued, of allegedly predatory publishers. In the commentary, he told of scientists sending him “hundreds of e-mails passing on spam solicitations or asking whether a particular publisher is legitimate.” He continued:
I also get e-mails from the predators’ victims. Some have been named as members of editorial boards without their knowledge or permission. Others have had an article partially or completely plagiarized in a predatory journal. Many ask me for advice on where to publish or how to withdraw an article that they wish they hadn’t submitted. As a librarian, I do my best to answer the questions I receive, but they often require expertise in the author’s field of study. So it is important that more scientists are made aware of the problem.
Beall’s 2012 Nature commentary conjectured that perhaps nowhere were the predation “abuses more acute than in India, where new predatory publishers or journals emerge each week.” But in early September 2017, Nature published a commentary undermining that conventional wisdom about the problem’s geography. It carried the subhead “Predatory journals have shoddy reporting and include papers from wealthy nations, find David Moher, Larissa Shamseer, Kelly Cobey and colleagues.”
Those researchers reported having characterized almost 2000 biomedical articles from more than 200 journals “thought likely to be predatory.” (In a Q&A with Retraction Watch, Moher expressed high confidence in the researchers’ blacklisting choices.) Among the articles’ corresponding authors, the researchers found that more than half came from high- and upper-middle-income countries. They associated nine of the articles with Harvard and eleven with the University of Texas. They also listed telltale characteristics of predatory journals, including “low article-processing fees (less than US$150); spelling and grammar errors on the website; an overly broad scope; language that targets authors rather than readers; promises of rapid publication; and a lack of information about retraction policies, manuscript handling or digital preservation.”
The researchers declared that “there are now a roughly estimated 8,000 predatory titles that collectively ‘publish’ more than 400,000 items a year.” Moher told Times Higher Education that by extrapolation, they “estimate that at least 18,000 funded biomedical-research studies are tucked away in poorly indexed, scientifically questionable journals.” He observed, “Little of this work will advance science. It is too dodgily reported (and possibly badly conducted) and too hard to find.” The “problem of predatory journals,” the researchers wrote, “is more urgent than many realize.”
Sting operations
Many, but not all—and certainly not John Bohannon at Science magazine. His 2013 sting investigation found a widespread readiness to accept an intentionally and plainly bogus paper—a readiness that exposed “an emerging Wild West in academic publishing.”
In a March 2017 Nature commentary, four scholars reported their Bohannon-style investigation. They had concocted and distributed an application for an editorial-board position from a “sham, unqualified scientist.” Forty-eight journals accepted. The investigators concluded that predatory publishing “is becoming an organized industry.”
That conclusion got implicit backing in the June article “The surge of predatory open-access in neurosciences and neurology” from the Elsevier journal Neuroscience. It reported, among other things, that “16% and 25% of predatory journals retrieved in neuroscience and neurology, respectively, are indexed in PubMed” and that “predatory journals outnumber legitimate journals in neurology (101 versus 73).”
An August article at Wired, which had previously covered the FTC lawsuit, reported that according to Katherine Akers, a Wayne State University biomedical research specialist who serves as editor-in-chief of the Journal of the Medical Library Association, “approximately half of the publishers of medical case report journals engage in predatory practices.”
At Nautilus last November, Retraction Watch founders Adam Marcus and Ivan Oransky framed the problem of predatory journals within the wider context of the gaming of science-publishing metrics. They placed it with the faking of data, peer-review fraud, and “citation stuffing” conspiracies to inflate citation rates.
But the overall problem needs wider media attention, among other things, because it’s actually even wider than metrics-gaming for scientists’ career advancement. Bloomberg Businessweek’s article late last month made public some information illustrating the problem’s pernicious expansion:
Researchers at major pharmaceutical companies, including AstraZeneca, Bristol-Myers Squibb, Gilead Sciences, and Merck, submit to Omics journals and participate in their conferences. Pfizer, the biggest U.S. drugmaker, has published at least 23 articles since 2011, including two since the FTC’s lawsuit.
It’s unclear whether drugmakers are purposely ignoring what they know of Omics’s reputation or are genuinely confused amid the profusion of noncredible journals—none were willing to discuss their involvement in any depth. Whereas academics publish to maintain their careers, pharma companies want to communicate with doctors.
Steven T. Corneliussen is Physics Today’s media analyst. He has published op-eds in the Washington Post and other newspapers, has written for NASA’s history program, and was a science writer at a particle-accelerator laboratory.
