11 ms·

Why I published in a predatory journal

292 points by robwwilliams 10y ago

lostgame 10y ago
With all this hubbub about 'fake news' - 'fake science' may be even more dangerous.
- jurie 10y ago
  This has got to be how anti-vaxers obtain their "peer reviewed", "scientific" studies...
  - ocfnash 10y ago
    Unfortunately Wakefield's paper that essentially kicked off the "MMR vaccine controversy" was published by the Lancet. They eventually retracted but enormous damage was done (including deaths apparently).
    - SOLAR_FIELDS 10y ago
      For the unknowing, the Lancet was at the time this paper was published considered to be a top-tier medical journal; the equivalent of Nature or Science for medicine. I cannot speak to its prestige now, however. I'm sure that its reputation was somewhat damaged by publishing this paper but I imagine it's still considered a "good" journal.
emeraldd 10y ago
I can't help but remember: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlanta_Nights https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlanta_Nights https://www.amazon.com/Atlanta-Nights-Travis-Tea/dp/1411622987 https://www.amazon.com/Atlanta-Nights-Travis-Tea/dp/14116229...
- mrkgnao 10y ago
  In addition to the more well-known https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokal_affair https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokal_affair although that had different goals.
  - TuringNYC 10y ago
    And once you've read about that, make sure to have a laugh with the Postmodernism Essay Generator (http://www.elsewhere.org/journal/pomo/ http://www.elsewhere.org/journal/pomo/)
    - beaconstudios 10y ago
      but if you like the generated ones, you'll love the real, and really absurd, ones: https://twitter.com/realpeerreview?lang=en https://twitter.com/realpeerreview?lang=en
  - dkbrk 10y ago
    It's not precisely analogous, but I am somewhat reminded of the Ern Malley affair: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ern_Malley https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ern_Malley > In the decades that followed, the hoax proved to be a significant setback for modernist poetry in Australia. Since the 1970s, however, the Ern Malley poems, though known to be a hoax, became celebrated as a successful example of surrealist poetry in their own right, lauded by poets and critics such as John Ashbery, Kenneth Koch and Robert Hughes. The poems of Ern Malley are now more widely read than those of his creators, and the affair has inspired works by major Australian writers and artists, such as Peter Carey and Sidney Nolan. American poet and anthologist David Lehman called Ern Malley "the greatest literary hoax of the twentieth century".
- folli 10y ago
  Perhaps I'm missing some of the context, but I don't see the problem of publishing low quality fictional literature. In contrast to science publications, where the reader expects that some scientific quality standards have been met, I'd assume that the market demand will be enough to wipe out low-quality entertainment publications.
Jedd 10y ago
I've spent basically zero time in academia. I've heard the phrase 'publish or perish', and I know the evils of Elsevier, and the popularity of sci-hub - but that's about it. How are these guys making money? Is it just the 'editing fees' for people trying to publish? Presumably advertisers are savvy enough to not throw money at these types of journals? Proper scientists / researchers are (hopefully) also not easily fooled - and whoever peer reviewed this article (assuming it actually was peer reviewed, as claimed) won't want their name attached to the publication. These stories come up often enough to suggest it's a well known problem, and the culprits are easy enough to identify. But that these stories do keep coming up suggests there's good money being made somehow, and attempts to thwart these publications are failing.
- slashcom 10y ago
  Real publishers make a good chunk of their profits from selling subscriptions of their journals to libraries. These allow anyone at a university to read the journal, but the fee can be many thousands per year (per university). These are legitimate businesses, problems aside. Fake ones like this make it off the $800 publishing fee. Since it's "open access" they just put the PDF online and call it a day. $800 isn't bad for a few hours of proofreading and updating one web page.
  - colah3 10y ago
    Note that there are plenty of legitimate journals, like PLOS, that charge a fee to publish. It's a common business model for open access journals. Usually they have some mechanism for waiving the fee if an author can't afford it. Also, allegedly many of these journals actually have per-paper expenses in the hundreds of dollars (!!), mostly from editor time spent soliciting and managing reviewers. That seems crazy. In contrast, major ML venues like NIPS handle all the review management in a mostly automated way and are run by volunteers. But then again, the average review quality at ML conferences seems to be pretty poor, at least compared to what I've heard about in some other fields.
- wsxcde 10y ago
  Yes, it is the editing fees. Nth-tier universities in many countries are pushing faculty members to publish more. This is all done with the best intentions -- we all want faculty at the cutting edge of research. So many of these universities offer financial incentives of various sorts to faculty who publish more. For instance, they may tie pay hikes or promotions to the number of publications. There's often grant money available for research (and publication) to support these activities. This has led to the inevitable unintended consequences. Most of these faculty members do not have the resources or the ability to publish in "real" journals, nor do they even understand what a good journal is. So they publish in whatever venue that accepts their paper. If it requires them to pay, then so be it. And thanks to the beauty of capitalism, a bunch of predator journals have emerged to lighten the purses of these poor folks.
theprop 10y ago
Wow! There are multiple wars against science, exploiting "science". There seems to be a strong need for some service that can flag fake news, fake research, etc. in facebook, google and others. The government which funds the vast majority of scientific research should insist that real research is freely accessible not in these gated journals that are ridiculously expensive (as much as $25k/year for a single subscription)...so that there was an easy way to access real scientific research. Incidentally a similar stunt was pulled with a humanities journal several years ago and the gibberish paper got published...but this was in something a lot more like a real journal.
- beaconstudios 10y ago
  I believe you're referring to the Sokal affair: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokal_affair https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokal_affair
- a_bonobo 10y ago
  But who gets to say what's fake news and fake journals, who gets to be the gatekeeper? A few years ago the Beall-list added the Frontiers journals to its list of predatory journals, which generated quite the backlash: http://www.nature.com/news/backlash-after-frontiers-journals-added-to-list-of-questionable-publishers-1.18639 http://www.nature.com/news/backlash-after-frontiers-journals... There is quite a bit of 'regular' research published in Frontiers and they do have peer review, but also a lot of crap (a similar point can be raised for Nature's new Scientific Reports, but also for PLOS ONE, which all cost money to publish in). The border between 'predatory' and just 'kinda crappy' journal is hard to set. The big difference between most predatory OA journals and Frontiers is that Frontiers at least responds to criticism. Edit: Some similar criticism on Nature Scientific Reports: http://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2016/06/15/more-on-scientific-reports-and-on-faked-papers http://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2016/06/15/mor... and for PLOS ONE: http://www.omnesres.com/blog/plosone/ http://www.omnesres.com/blog/plosone/
  - palunon 10y ago
    >who gets to say what's fake news and fake journals, who gets to be the gatekeeper? That's not how reputation works. There isn't a single institution who gets to say "This is good science, but this isn't", but scientists as a body can. An institution can of course choose its own standard regarding specific journals, but it cannot impose them unto others.
MichailP 10y ago
What people don't realize is that it is YOUR responsibility to make your research any good. Peer review won't significantly improve your research, and btw it is very rarely constructive criticism, and it certainly doesn't make you feel you and reviewer are in the same team (but you should be in a perfect world). So what the author of original article confirmed here is that he can falsify results, his name, etc. But that's ON HIM!
19eightyfour 10y ago
To complete the expose of broken peer review, there ought to be a kickstarter / crowd funding for the $799 fee. Cash for publication. Sad state of science. Terribly irresponsible that this is medical science. I'm not emphasizing blame for the individuals involved...I think the way the system operates incentivizes things that don't work to produce solid results. A new peer review system that does work to reliably generate reproducible results would be a significant technological innovation that improves basic publicly funded STEM research.
lutusp 10y ago
Quote: "My long-term goal—an ambitious one, I know—is to stop the production of predatory journals altogether." I salute your energy and your objective. Having observed individual scientists over a period of decades and noting the degree to which a modern scientist's professional life is ruled by "publish or perish", I think some very basic changes would have to take place to eliminate phony journals. On the one hand, phony journals, and corner-cutting episodes like the recent retraction of 107 cancer research papers from otherwise legitimate scientific journals[1], only show the desperation in the lives of many scientists and pseudoscientists. On the other hand, freedom of the press allows pretty much any nonsense to be put on paper and online, and efforts to stop phony publications often collide with a very permissive attitude toward printed expression, including those that walk a thin line between fact and fiction. To me, the central problem is that publishers make too much money from technical and scientific publication -- it invites cheating and exploitation. Maybe in the future there will be some kind of publication arrangement that is (a) beyond reproach and (b) not undermined by absurd access prices. 1. http://retractionwatch.com/2017/04/20/new-record-major-publisher-retracting-100-studies-cancer-journal-fake-peer-reviews/ http://retractionwatch.com/2017/04/20/new-record-major-publi...
GrumpyNl 10y ago
Its all about greed. As long as you pay, or say you have the intention to pay the 799, your paper will get published. The system is rotten.
frozenport 10y ago
Nobody is suprised that there are con-artists who will take your money. The real problem is similiar behavior from supposedly legitimate journals.
eecc 10y ago
I've been drafting a P2P app to (legitimately) share publications without intermediaries. Authenticity and traceability of all data - including metadata such as tags to represent peer approval - are supported using PGP cryptography. If anyone is interested to at least provide a critique to the code (it's my pet project so it's also rife with "let me try this new framework" syndrome) please give me a ping. If you want to contribute yay!
- Mediterraneo10 10y ago
  Peer approval at respected journals is anonymous: the writer doesn't know who the reviewers are. Sometimes the reviewers don't even know the identity of the author. How does your system allow for that? PGP signatures do not permit anonymity.
  - lmm 10y ago
    PGP keys can be used with any authentication mechanism or none. A PGP signature is always associated with a particular key, sure, but a key ID is just a random number.
    - Mediterraneo10 10y ago
      How would a PGP signature from a certain key lend any prestige to the paper it signed, unless that key were linked to some respected identity?
      - lmm 10y ago
        Whatever your model is, you can implement on top of PGP. E.g. if you want pseudonymous reviewers selected by the editors of the Foo journal (the current model), there could be a key that's publicly linked to the Foo journal and you could use that key to sign short-lived pseudonymous "review keys" for "approved reviewer of paper xyz" which could sign their reviews.
  - rocqua 10y ago
    There was an article on HN a while ago from someone whom decided to start signing his reviews. To me, that seemed like a decent initiative. The only real downside I see is that it allows the authors to contact and potentially bias the reviewer to affect a potential review of the written material.
glangdale 10y ago
There's a expose like this every couple of years, but nothing ever changes. My adviser told me entertaining stories of pranksters putting fake articles into CS journals from "The Austrian Naval Academy". I suspect one reason things don't change much is that the publishing game is shades of grey all the way up to the best publications - a third-tier journal won't publish complete gibberish, but you certainly might be able to get some pretty shallow stuff into it and I would be very surprised if anyone, say, checked the references or reality-tested the results.
- searine 10y ago
  This is mostly due to the audience. Scientific journals are written for a scientific audience. For the most part, scientists get very adept at identifying good articles from bad, even in well regarded journals. Thus the system polices itself, by rewarding good articles with citations and letting bad or trivial articles wither. Unfortunately, the general public lacks that inherent skepticism, leading them to cite spurious articles from the East-Austrian Journal of Ass-scratch.
  - arcanus 10y ago
    ^ This. Peer-review is not a magical panacea that guarantees anything. The way to judge the impact of a scientific paper is through its citation count, perhaps normalized by a typical count for that particular field.
    - kardos 10y ago
      Until the sham articles start citing each other to game that approach
      - JorgeGT 10y ago
        Or the classic... "Reviewer #1: Nice paper, but seems authors have missed this recently published work by TotallyNotReviewer1 et al. which could add..."
    - 10y ago
sytelus 10y ago
Can't websites like Google Scholar help here? There should be some algorithmic way to identify such journals. One way could be to use PageRank for a paper to create a PargeRank of journals. Then take the bottom of journals and use either wisdom of crowd or human editors to de-list them or flag them. If publications from bad journals stops showing up (or at least get flagged) in search results and/or Google Scholar, they practically don't exist.
- jonathanstrange 10y ago
  This would to more harm than good. Using automated methods to evaluate science can only make things worse. Hiring committees and funding authorities already rely on way too many automatic indicators such as impact factors and citation indices anyway, despite the fact that nobody has ever been called a great scientist because he or she published a lot, and, even worse than that, in the humanities people often get quoted a lot and make a career because they published a really bad article that somehow made it into a good journal. Everybody tries to correct them, they publish a few even more outraging and stubborn follow-ups and pronto - they've got their tenure. I've seen that more than once. Besides, whether journals show up in search results or not is also not that important. This is important to find readers and followers, but what counts more for many individual researchers nowadays is whether or not publications show up in their CV. To fix the problem, universities and funding authorities must return to putting a higher emphasis on the scientific evaluation of the actual work of scientists, evaluate their results, their approaches and how promising their line of research is, instead of bean counting. There is no other way to ensure quality other than evaluating on the basis of quality rather than quantity.
- dragandj 10y ago
  That is irrelevant. Anyone who is remotely competent to read any scientific article will recognize predatory journal with a quick glance. I doubt that predatory articles have even a couple of reads. The problem is something else: those articles are used to beef up the CV of the "scientists" who are then promoted on their jobs over honest candidates. That may be rare in USA (but I am not sure) but it is rampant in developing countries (of that I am sure).
- 10y ago
dragandj 10y ago
When we're here, I have to jump in with my own: https://www.scribd.com/doc/167706815/EVALUATION-OF-TRANSFORMATIVE-HERMENEUTIC-HEURISTICS-FOR-PROCESSING-RANDOM-DATA https://www.scribd.com/doc/167706815/EVALUATION-OF-TRANSFORM... The whole sting is later analyzed in a serious scientific journal: https://sci-hub.cc/10.1007/s11948-014-9521-4 https://sci-hub.cc/10.1007/s11948-014-9521-4
chestervonwinch 10y ago
The current system for publishing needs to be overhauled. This is difficult because those early in their careers have to establish themselves, and publications are the de facto metric for doing so. However, number-of-publications is not necessarily an accurate surrogate for the quality of a person's work since all journals do not have equally rigorous review processes (or any review process as shown by this article and many others). Long term solutions for this problem often focus on (1) new systems for reviewing/publishing scientific work as a means to make number-of-publications a more accurate quantifier of the quality a researcher's body of work, or (2) incorporating metrics other than publications. What about short term solutions? What about an IMDB-like review and rating system for publications? This way, researchers still publish wherever they like, but could be potentially reviewed by a independent system. Would such a system be too readily game-able?
- pzs 10y ago
  The main challenge that I can see is that it takes real effort to review papers. Without that effort "popular" publications may end up spreading materially wrong results. The shortcoming of current peer review systems is that anonymous peer reviewers are expected to put in this work without receiving commensurate (not necessarily monetary) compensation.
- searine 10y ago
  > incorporating metrics other than publications. This is qualitative and easily gamed though. Science can get mean and highly political. Adding a qualitative metric to scientific achievement would just give ruthless people a tool to hurt good scientists. Science is a small world. Among your peers in the field, it's not your number of publications that matter but the quality of that work. Your results build your reputation, and that is what gets you jobs.
DrNuke 10y ago
Journals are flooded in a way you would never believe if not spending a day on the other side of the desk. Many papers are presumptuous and preposterous at best, from developing countries but also from reputed institutions. The model is clearly flawed and the ecosystem saturated, there are a small number of institutions being accepted by default and a lot of the other not being given any sniff in. I am not sure how to rectify this distortion, predatory journals being one effect more than a cause: you can't stop shit / compilative / small incremental papers being put forward and spammed if not charging them a fee? The more you charge, the more probable they desist. Point is such money should be reinvested into the ecosystem, not drained out by greedy publishing corps imho.
- visarga 10y ago
  > you can't stop shit / compilative / small incremental papers being put forward There's a place for literature review papers. They can be good starting points or useful for catching up with recent state of the art.
ayuvar 10y ago
I worked for one of these outfits for a summer job. I needed the money and they seemed alright on the outside. There was a strange obsession regarding looking official and academically legitimate, to the point where they would attempt to recruit professors to do the peer-reviewing, then override what they said in the final "edit" stage of the review and approve the submission anyway. Since it was anonymous, there was no way to tell if "Reviewer 3" was actually bumped or just that someone else got to that submission first. That said, their business model was a bit different. They weren't open-access: they made their money selling conferences (which were mandatory to attend if you wanted your paper to actually get published in the journal). Often, they would resell gifts from the venue such as comped hotel rooms and airport shuttles at above market prices to the attendees as well as part of a "package." As well, the venues usually also matched where-ever the founder wanted to go on vacation. Out of paranoia as much as cost-cutting, they ran the offices very lean and centralized authority in the founder and his family. They probably would have had a more successful operation had they gotten good lieutenants who were better capable of maintaining the facade. My local university used to warn people off of publishing with them by name, which I thought was a remarkable step considering the precarious state of Canadian libel law. Other staff was mostly early-stage "green card"-esque workers who they would hold the threat of dismissal over their heads (forcing those workers to rush to get a new job before they timed out and had to leave the country) and students like myself. The year before I got there, they had a major publicity crisis in which they took substantial heat in academic circles for basically auto-publishing plagiarized articles from anybody with an email address. Part of my work was integrating one those "turn it in" style plagiarism detectors into their submission funnel. By the end of the summer they were in deep with the tax authorities from a backlog of unpaid taxes; the founder bragged to me that he considered paying corporate income tax a kind of "game" in which the penalties for losing were insubstantial. I'm sure by now the penalties have grown in seriousness, though the last time I looked them up they still seem to be publishing journals and hosting conferences. It was a good lesson for me about what to look out for in the future when trying to select a small business/team to work for.
- jopsen 10y ago
  > which I thought was a remarkable step considering the precarious state of Canadian libel law. Taking a University to court for calling you a fraud only gives the University a great opportunity to prove it in a public court room :) Also you can probably interview current and former employees, like yourself. Not to talk about the presumably long list of sketchy things published, which should be sufficient on its own. If you want to maintain some illusion of legitimacy, suing a University isn't going to get you far.
jszymborski 10y ago
If a paper is published after 2010 and the corresponding author's email is from a free service (gmail, yahoo, yandex) or is not from an institution that is a university or firm with an R&D department, you shouldn't trust the journal or the paper. It's a simple litmus test and while it generates many false negatives, there are almost zero false positives. EDIT: At least, for biomedical papers... can't speak for other fields
- paviva 10y ago
  Actually, not true at all for medical papers. For instance, take the Annals of Emergency Medicine (http://www.annemergmed.com/ http://www.annemergmed.com/). More than 50% of corresponding authors use gmail.
  - jszymborski 10y ago
    While it's not predatory, I still wouldn't trust it. It's way to easy for journals to fall prey to peer-review rings when they accept email addresses that are easily spoofed [0]. [0] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2014/07/10/scholarly-journal-retracts-60-articles-smashes-peer-review-ring/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2014/07/1...
- woliveirajr 10y ago
  Disagree. Sometimes the main (corresponding) author is exactly a Master or PhD student, and will leave the institution after submitting the article but before it is published. Or even a Professor will change the institution he is in. I prefer to read a paper or article by its merits. E-mail from the author had little impact in that sense. (Speaking for areas outside biomedical papers, for those, I don' know.)
  - jszymborski 10y ago
    The peer-review system, as very flawed as it is, protects us from a certain level of bad and in some cases fake science. It's not very difficult to establish a peer-review ring when you use freely available emails, and journals are increasingly aware of this [0,1]. That's why I'm often suspect of journals who let this slide, because it's a sign they don't screen very well. In 2017, in light of the widely successful and low-barrier ways to game the peer-review system, I don't buy your "leaving an institution" argument. Corresponding author is more commonly the professor than the main author, and faculty at academic institutions almost always have "e-mail for life" privileges. [0] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2014/07/10/scholarly-journal-retracts-60-articles-smashes-peer-review-ring/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2014/07/1... [1] http://www.nature.com/news/publishing-the-peer-review-scam-1.16400 http://www.nature.com/news/publishing-the-peer-review-scam-1...
ma2rten 10y ago
Are there journals like this for computer science?
logicallee 10y ago
I'm sorry, I only read the abstract[1] but this is excellently written, in a way that only people with real scientific understanding are able to write. This isn't a "hoax", it's simply unconscionable on the part of the author. Let me translate this to terms people here might understand. This is like writing an O'Reilly book entitled "Essential System Administration In Client-Side Javascript" detailing a cookbook of the most common techniques you would want to use to do local system administration from Angular, React, Meteor/Ember, etc, with special attention to the pitfalls of identifying whether the local system is a Windows,Mac, Linux, a mobile browser, tablet, etc, and listing the various ways you can set up the local user's device to your own liking. Where it crosses the line is if it's written in a highly informative way without any indication WHATSOEVER of being satire. Local system administration from javascript frameworks doesn't exist. It's not a thing. You couldn't so much as set the time. But when you write with authority on how to do that and more, suddenly it does exist. What's more, it will be interesting and useful. If you write with authority and an overview of the subject, in the way done here (it starts by identifying the scope of the issue - the very first words of the abstract are "Uromycitisis is a rare but serious condition that affects over 2,000 mostly adult men and women in the United States each year". From the moment you've written those words -- you even say who it affects and the exceptions, since it affects adults but mostly adults -- you are now an expert and you're not writing a satire or hoax: you're writing fraud. It would be as if I began the above with: "Web-based administration of local devices with a standard browser serving as the remote administration client is a small but growing choice of hundreds of large companies with 5,000-50,000+ employees. Its advantages include leveraging development practices that may already be familiar, web standards, regular security upgrades from the major browsers, centralized distribution of small updates while leveraging the security mechanisms (such as HTTPS and signed certificates) already present in the browser, and cross-platform availability across many devices. Simply put, System Administration in client-side javascript is the closest you can come to fully controlling your user's devices without administrative tools at all. While it has important limitations, such as being unable to repartition hard-drives or install a standard image while the operating system is running, in other respects it enables all of the power of many administrative tools without many of the downsides. In this book we will cover some of the basic functions you may want to do, such as applying security updates, installing or removing software, creating user accounts and setting their privileges, and, in the case of Windows computers, setting up roaming profiles. Let's get started." Is that a hoax? No, it's more like simple fraud. (Our author invented a research institution, created fake gmail accounts, etc.) Sorry. I don't support the author in how they went about this. It would be different if what I wrote was hilarious - such as bemoaning that for the moment Apple Watches unfortunately do not support a standard browser, so you will have to break into them by finding and applying zero days for the iPhone, which are unfortunately patched regularly; a list of Russian and Chinese sources is contained in Appendix 1, and you can usually ask for a sample while promising bitcoins - but is the above paragraph I wrote hilarious? No. It's not hilarious and that means it's not okay. [1] direct link to PDF: http://www.the-scientist.com/images/Opinion/2017/UNOAJ-04-00132.pdf http://www.the-scientist.com/images/Opinion/2017/UNOAJ-04-00...
osazuwa 10y ago
Here is an fascinating instance of astroturfing by MedCrave on Quora, with painfully bad "smart-people" English https://www.quora.com/How-do-I-get-rid-of-the-rumours-about-Medcrave-Predatory-Publisher https://www.quora.com/How-do-I-get-rid-of-the-rumours-about-...
- Balgair 10y ago
  Hoooooly Cow! I think that thread could be the example of astro-turfing. Just, wow, the brazenness of it all is really astounding.
- Schizotypy 10y ago
  Lol holy crap!
WhiteSource1 10y ago
I'm more shocked at the fact that they published the article without receiving payment!

292 points by robwwilliams 10y ago

lostgame 10y ago

With all this hubbub about 'fake news' - 'fake science' may be even more dangerous.

jurie 10y ago
This has got to be how anti-vaxers obtain their "peer reviewed", "scientific" studies...
- ocfnash 10y ago
  Unfortunately Wakefield's paper that essentially kicked off the "MMR vaccine controversy" was published by the Lancet. They eventually retracted but enormous damage was done (including deaths apparently).
  - SOLAR_FIELDS 10y ago
    For the unknowing, the Lancet was at the time this paper was published considered to be a top-tier medical journal; the equivalent of Nature or Science for medicine. I cannot speak to its prestige now, however. I'm sure that its reputation was somewhat damaged by publishing this paper but I imagine it's still considered a "good" journal.

emeraldd 10y ago

I can't help but remember: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlanta_Nights https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlanta_Nights https://www.amazon.com/Atlanta-Nights-Travis-Tea/dp/1411622987 https://www.amazon.com/Atlanta-Nights-Travis-Tea/dp/14116229...

mrkgnao 10y ago
In addition to the more well-known https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokal_affair https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokal_affair although that had different goals.
- TuringNYC 10y ago
  And once you've read about that, make sure to have a laugh with the Postmodernism Essay Generator (http://www.elsewhere.org/journal/pomo/ http://www.elsewhere.org/journal/pomo/)
  - beaconstudios 10y ago
    but if you like the generated ones, you'll love the real, and really absurd, ones: https://twitter.com/realpeerreview?lang=en https://twitter.com/realpeerreview?lang=en
- dkbrk 10y ago
  It's not precisely analogous, but I am somewhat reminded of the Ern Malley affair: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ern_Malley https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ern_Malley > In the decades that followed, the hoax proved to be a significant setback for modernist poetry in Australia. Since the 1970s, however, the Ern Malley poems, though known to be a hoax, became celebrated as a successful example of surrealist poetry in their own right, lauded by poets and critics such as John Ashbery, Kenneth Koch and Robert Hughes. The poems of Ern Malley are now more widely read than those of his creators, and the affair has inspired works by major Australian writers and artists, such as Peter Carey and Sidney Nolan. American poet and anthologist David Lehman called Ern Malley "the greatest literary hoax of the twentieth century".
folli 10y ago
Perhaps I'm missing some of the context, but I don't see the problem of publishing low quality fictional literature. In contrast to science publications, where the reader expects that some scientific quality standards have been met, I'd assume that the market demand will be enough to wipe out low-quality entertainment publications.

Jedd 10y ago

I've spent basically zero time in academia. I've heard the phrase 'publish or perish', and I know the evils of Elsevier, and the popularity of sci-hub - but that's about it. How are these guys making money? Is it just the 'editing fees' for people trying to publish? Presumably advertisers are savvy enough to not throw money at these types of journals? Proper scientists / researchers are (hopefully) also not easily fooled - and whoever peer reviewed this article (assuming it actually was peer reviewed, as claimed) won't want their name attached to the publication. These stories come up often enough to suggest it's a well known problem, and the culprits are easy enough to identify. But that these stories do keep coming up suggests there's good money being made somehow, and attempts to thwart these publications are failing.

slashcom 10y ago
Real publishers make a good chunk of their profits from selling subscriptions of their journals to libraries. These allow anyone at a university to read the journal, but the fee can be many thousands per year (per university). These are legitimate businesses, problems aside. Fake ones like this make it off the $800 publishing fee. Since it's "open access" they just put the PDF online and call it a day. $800 isn't bad for a few hours of proofreading and updating one web page.
- colah3 10y ago
  Note that there are plenty of legitimate journals, like PLOS, that charge a fee to publish. It's a common business model for open access journals. Usually they have some mechanism for waiving the fee if an author can't afford it. Also, allegedly many of these journals actually have per-paper expenses in the hundreds of dollars (!!), mostly from editor time spent soliciting and managing reviewers. That seems crazy. In contrast, major ML venues like NIPS handle all the review management in a mostly automated way and are run by volunteers. But then again, the average review quality at ML conferences seems to be pretty poor, at least compared to what I've heard about in some other fields.
wsxcde 10y ago
Yes, it is the editing fees. Nth-tier universities in many countries are pushing faculty members to publish more. This is all done with the best intentions -- we all want faculty at the cutting edge of research. So many of these universities offer financial incentives of various sorts to faculty who publish more. For instance, they may tie pay hikes or promotions to the number of publications. There's often grant money available for research (and publication) to support these activities. This has led to the inevitable unintended consequences. Most of these faculty members do not have the resources or the ability to publish in "real" journals, nor do they even understand what a good journal is. So they publish in whatever venue that accepts their paper. If it requires them to pay, then so be it. And thanks to the beauty of capitalism, a bunch of predator journals have emerged to lighten the purses of these poor folks.

theprop 10y ago

Wow! There are multiple wars against science, exploiting "science". There seems to be a strong need for some service that can flag fake news, fake research, etc. in facebook, google and others. The government which funds the vast majority of scientific research should insist that real research is freely accessible not in these gated journals that are ridiculously expensive (as much as $25k/year for a single subscription)...so that there was an easy way to access real scientific research. Incidentally a similar stunt was pulled with a humanities journal several years ago and the gibberish paper got published...but this was in something a lot more like a real journal.

beaconstudios 10y ago
I believe you're referring to the Sokal affair: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokal_affair https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokal_affair
a_bonobo 10y ago
But who gets to say what's fake news and fake journals, who gets to be the gatekeeper? A few years ago the Beall-list added the Frontiers journals to its list of predatory journals, which generated quite the backlash: http://www.nature.com/news/backlash-after-frontiers-journals-added-to-list-of-questionable-publishers-1.18639 http://www.nature.com/news/backlash-after-frontiers-journals... There is quite a bit of 'regular' research published in Frontiers and they do have peer review, but also a lot of crap (a similar point can be raised for Nature's new Scientific Reports, but also for PLOS ONE, which all cost money to publish in). The border between 'predatory' and just 'kinda crappy' journal is hard to set. The big difference between most predatory OA journals and Frontiers is that Frontiers at least responds to criticism. Edit: Some similar criticism on Nature Scientific Reports: http://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2016/06/15/more-on-scientific-reports-and-on-faked-papers http://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2016/06/15/mor... and for PLOS ONE: http://www.omnesres.com/blog/plosone/ http://www.omnesres.com/blog/plosone/
- palunon 10y ago
  >who gets to say what's fake news and fake journals, who gets to be the gatekeeper? That's not how reputation works. There isn't a single institution who gets to say "This is good science, but this isn't", but scientists as a body can. An institution can of course choose its own standard regarding specific journals, but it cannot impose them unto others.

MichailP 10y ago

What people don't realize is that it is YOUR responsibility to make your research any good. Peer review won't significantly improve your research, and btw it is very rarely constructive criticism, and it certainly doesn't make you feel you and reviewer are in the same team (but you should be in a perfect world). So what the author of original article confirmed here is that he can falsify results, his name, etc. But that's ON HIM!

19eightyfour 10y ago

To complete the expose of broken peer review, there ought to be a kickstarter / crowd funding for the $799 fee. Cash for publication. Sad state of science. Terribly irresponsible that this is medical science. I'm not emphasizing blame for the individuals involved...I think the way the system operates incentivizes things that don't work to produce solid results. A new peer review system that does work to reliably generate reproducible results would be a significant technological innovation that improves basic publicly funded STEM research.

lutusp 10y ago

Quote: "My long-term goal—an ambitious one, I know—is to stop the production of predatory journals altogether." I salute your energy and your objective. Having observed individual scientists over a period of decades and noting the degree to which a modern scientist's professional life is ruled by "publish or perish", I think some very basic changes would have to take place to eliminate phony journals. On the one hand, phony journals, and corner-cutting episodes like the recent retraction of 107 cancer research papers from otherwise legitimate scientific journals[1], only show the desperation in the lives of many scientists and pseudoscientists. On the other hand, freedom of the press allows pretty much any nonsense to be put on paper and online, and efforts to stop phony publications often collide with a very permissive attitude toward printed expression, including those that walk a thin line between fact and fiction. To me, the central problem is that publishers make too much money from technical and scientific publication -- it invites cheating and exploitation. Maybe in the future there will be some kind of publication arrangement that is (a) beyond reproach and (b) not undermined by absurd access prices. 1. http://retractionwatch.com/2017/04/20/new-record-major-publisher-retracting-100-studies-cancer-journal-fake-peer-reviews/ http://retractionwatch.com/2017/04/20/new-record-major-publi...

GrumpyNl 10y ago

Its all about greed. As long as you pay, or say you have the intention to pay the 799, your paper will get published. The system is rotten.

frozenport 10y ago

Nobody is suprised that there are con-artists who will take your money. The real problem is similiar behavior from supposedly legitimate journals.

eecc 10y ago

I've been drafting a P2P app to (legitimately) share publications without intermediaries. Authenticity and traceability of all data - including metadata such as tags to represent peer approval - are supported using PGP cryptography. If anyone is interested to at least provide a critique to the code (it's my pet project so it's also rife with "let me try this new framework" syndrome) please give me a ping. If you want to contribute yay!

Mediterraneo10 10y ago
Peer approval at respected journals is anonymous: the writer doesn't know who the reviewers are. Sometimes the reviewers don't even know the identity of the author. How does your system allow for that? PGP signatures do not permit anonymity.
- lmm 10y ago
  PGP keys can be used with any authentication mechanism or none. A PGP signature is always associated with a particular key, sure, but a key ID is just a random number.
  - Mediterraneo10 10y ago
    How would a PGP signature from a certain key lend any prestige to the paper it signed, unless that key were linked to some respected identity?
    - lmm 10y ago
      Whatever your model is, you can implement on top of PGP. E.g. if you want pseudonymous reviewers selected by the editors of the Foo journal (the current model), there could be a key that's publicly linked to the Foo journal and you could use that key to sign short-lived pseudonymous "review keys" for "approved reviewer of paper xyz" which could sign their reviews.
- rocqua 10y ago
  There was an article on HN a while ago from someone whom decided to start signing his reviews. To me, that seemed like a decent initiative. The only real downside I see is that it allows the authors to contact and potentially bias the reviewer to affect a potential review of the written material.

glangdale 10y ago

There's a expose like this every couple of years, but nothing ever changes. My adviser told me entertaining stories of pranksters putting fake articles into CS journals from "The Austrian Naval Academy". I suspect one reason things don't change much is that the publishing game is shades of grey all the way up to the best publications - a third-tier journal won't publish complete gibberish, but you certainly might be able to get some pretty shallow stuff into it and I would be very surprised if anyone, say, checked the references or reality-tested the results.

searine 10y ago
This is mostly due to the audience. Scientific journals are written for a scientific audience. For the most part, scientists get very adept at identifying good articles from bad, even in well regarded journals. Thus the system polices itself, by rewarding good articles with citations and letting bad or trivial articles wither. Unfortunately, the general public lacks that inherent skepticism, leading them to cite spurious articles from the East-Austrian Journal of Ass-scratch.
- arcanus 10y ago
  ^ This. Peer-review is not a magical panacea that guarantees anything. The way to judge the impact of a scientific paper is through its citation count, perhaps normalized by a typical count for that particular field.
  - kardos 10y ago
    Until the sham articles start citing each other to game that approach
    - JorgeGT 10y ago
      Or the classic... "Reviewer #1: Nice paper, but seems authors have missed this recently published work by TotallyNotReviewer1 et al. which could add..."
  - 10y ago

sytelus 10y ago

Can't websites like Google Scholar help here? There should be some algorithmic way to identify such journals. One way could be to use PageRank for a paper to create a PargeRank of journals. Then take the bottom of journals and use either wisdom of crowd or human editors to de-list them or flag them. If publications from bad journals stops showing up (or at least get flagged) in search results and/or Google Scholar, they practically don't exist.

jonathanstrange 10y ago
This would to more harm than good. Using automated methods to evaluate science can only make things worse. Hiring committees and funding authorities already rely on way too many automatic indicators such as impact factors and citation indices anyway, despite the fact that nobody has ever been called a great scientist because he or she published a lot, and, even worse than that, in the humanities people often get quoted a lot and make a career because they published a really bad article that somehow made it into a good journal. Everybody tries to correct them, they publish a few even more outraging and stubborn follow-ups and pronto - they've got their tenure. I've seen that more than once. Besides, whether journals show up in search results or not is also not that important. This is important to find readers and followers, but what counts more for many individual researchers nowadays is whether or not publications show up in their CV. To fix the problem, universities and funding authorities must return to putting a higher emphasis on the scientific evaluation of the actual work of scientists, evaluate their results, their approaches and how promising their line of research is, instead of bean counting. There is no other way to ensure quality other than evaluating on the basis of quality rather than quantity.
dragandj 10y ago
That is irrelevant. Anyone who is remotely competent to read any scientific article will recognize predatory journal with a quick glance. I doubt that predatory articles have even a couple of reads. The problem is something else: those articles are used to beef up the CV of the "scientists" who are then promoted on their jobs over honest candidates. That may be rare in USA (but I am not sure) but it is rampant in developing countries (of that I am sure).
10y ago

dragandj 10y ago

When we're here, I have to jump in with my own: https://www.scribd.com/doc/167706815/EVALUATION-OF-TRANSFORMATIVE-HERMENEUTIC-HEURISTICS-FOR-PROCESSING-RANDOM-DATA https://www.scribd.com/doc/167706815/EVALUATION-OF-TRANSFORM... The whole sting is later analyzed in a serious scientific journal: https://sci-hub.cc/10.1007/s11948-014-9521-4 https://sci-hub.cc/10.1007/s11948-014-9521-4

chestervonwinch 10y ago

The current system for publishing needs to be overhauled. This is difficult because those early in their careers have to establish themselves, and publications are the de facto metric for doing so. However, number-of-publications is not necessarily an accurate surrogate for the quality of a person's work since all journals do not have equally rigorous review processes (or any review process as shown by this article and many others). Long term solutions for this problem often focus on (1) new systems for reviewing/publishing scientific work as a means to make number-of-publications a more accurate quantifier of the quality a researcher's body of work, or (2) incorporating metrics other than publications. What about short term solutions? What about an IMDB-like review and rating system for publications? This way, researchers still publish wherever they like, but could be potentially reviewed by a independent system. Would such a system be too readily game-able?

pzs 10y ago
The main challenge that I can see is that it takes real effort to review papers. Without that effort "popular" publications may end up spreading materially wrong results. The shortcoming of current peer review systems is that anonymous peer reviewers are expected to put in this work without receiving commensurate (not necessarily monetary) compensation.
searine 10y ago
> incorporating metrics other than publications. This is qualitative and easily gamed though. Science can get mean and highly political. Adding a qualitative metric to scientific achievement would just give ruthless people a tool to hurt good scientists. Science is a small world. Among your peers in the field, it's not your number of publications that matter but the quality of that work. Your results build your reputation, and that is what gets you jobs.

DrNuke 10y ago

Journals are flooded in a way you would never believe if not spending a day on the other side of the desk. Many papers are presumptuous and preposterous at best, from developing countries but also from reputed institutions. The model is clearly flawed and the ecosystem saturated, there are a small number of institutions being accepted by default and a lot of the other not being given any sniff in. I am not sure how to rectify this distortion, predatory journals being one effect more than a cause: you can't stop shit / compilative / small incremental papers being put forward and spammed if not charging them a fee? The more you charge, the more probable they desist. Point is such money should be reinvested into the ecosystem, not drained out by greedy publishing corps imho.

visarga 10y ago
> you can't stop shit / compilative / small incremental papers being put forward There's a place for literature review papers. They can be good starting points or useful for catching up with recent state of the art.

ayuvar 10y ago

I worked for one of these outfits for a summer job. I needed the money and they seemed alright on the outside. There was a strange obsession regarding looking official and academically legitimate, to the point where they would attempt to recruit professors to do the peer-reviewing, then override what they said in the final "edit" stage of the review and approve the submission anyway. Since it was anonymous, there was no way to tell if "Reviewer 3" was actually bumped or just that someone else got to that submission first. That said, their business model was a bit different. They weren't open-access: they made their money selling conferences (which were mandatory to attend if you wanted your paper to actually get published in the journal). Often, they would resell gifts from the venue such as comped hotel rooms and airport shuttles at above market prices to the attendees as well as part of a "package." As well, the venues usually also matched where-ever the founder wanted to go on vacation. Out of paranoia as much as cost-cutting, they ran the offices very lean and centralized authority in the founder and his family. They probably would have had a more successful operation had they gotten good lieutenants who were better capable of maintaining the facade. My local university used to warn people off of publishing with them by name, which I thought was a remarkable step considering the precarious state of Canadian libel law. Other staff was mostly early-stage "green card"-esque workers who they would hold the threat of dismissal over their heads (forcing those workers to rush to get a new job before they timed out and had to leave the country) and students like myself. The year before I got there, they had a major publicity crisis in which they took substantial heat in academic circles for basically auto-publishing plagiarized articles from anybody with an email address. Part of my work was integrating one those "turn it in" style plagiarism detectors into their submission funnel. By the end of the summer they were in deep with the tax authorities from a backlog of unpaid taxes; the founder bragged to me that he considered paying corporate income tax a kind of "game" in which the penalties for losing were insubstantial. I'm sure by now the penalties have grown in seriousness, though the last time I looked them up they still seem to be publishing journals and hosting conferences. It was a good lesson for me about what to look out for in the future when trying to select a small business/team to work for.

jopsen 10y ago
> which I thought was a remarkable step considering the precarious state of Canadian libel law. Taking a University to court for calling you a fraud only gives the University a great opportunity to prove it in a public court room :) Also you can probably interview current and former employees, like yourself. Not to talk about the presumably long list of sketchy things published, which should be sufficient on its own. If you want to maintain some illusion of legitimacy, suing a University isn't going to get you far.

jszymborski 10y ago

If a paper is published after 2010 and the corresponding author's email is from a free service (gmail, yahoo, yandex) or is not from an institution that is a university or firm with an R&D department, you shouldn't trust the journal or the paper. It's a simple litmus test and while it generates many false negatives, there are almost zero false positives. EDIT: At least, for biomedical papers... can't speak for other fields

paviva 10y ago
Actually, not true at all for medical papers. For instance, take the Annals of Emergency Medicine (http://www.annemergmed.com/ http://www.annemergmed.com/). More than 50% of corresponding authors use gmail.
- jszymborski 10y ago
  While it's not predatory, I still wouldn't trust it. It's way to easy for journals to fall prey to peer-review rings when they accept email addresses that are easily spoofed [0]. [0] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2014/07/10/scholarly-journal-retracts-60-articles-smashes-peer-review-ring/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2014/07/1...
woliveirajr 10y ago
Disagree. Sometimes the main (corresponding) author is exactly a Master or PhD student, and will leave the institution after submitting the article but before it is published. Or even a Professor will change the institution he is in. I prefer to read a paper or article by its merits. E-mail from the author had little impact in that sense. (Speaking for areas outside biomedical papers, for those, I don' know.)
- jszymborski 10y ago
  The peer-review system, as very flawed as it is, protects us from a certain level of bad and in some cases fake science. It's not very difficult to establish a peer-review ring when you use freely available emails, and journals are increasingly aware of this [0,1]. That's why I'm often suspect of journals who let this slide, because it's a sign they don't screen very well. In 2017, in light of the widely successful and low-barrier ways to game the peer-review system, I don't buy your "leaving an institution" argument. Corresponding author is more commonly the professor than the main author, and faculty at academic institutions almost always have "e-mail for life" privileges. [0] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2014/07/10/scholarly-journal-retracts-60-articles-smashes-peer-review-ring/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2014/07/1... [1] http://www.nature.com/news/publishing-the-peer-review-scam-1.16400 http://www.nature.com/news/publishing-the-peer-review-scam-1...

ma2rten 10y ago

Are there journals like this for computer science?

logicallee 10y ago

I'm sorry, I only read the abstract[1] but this is excellently written, in a way that only people with real scientific understanding are able to write. This isn't a "hoax", it's simply unconscionable on the part of the author. Let me translate this to terms people here might understand. This is like writing an O'Reilly book entitled "Essential System Administration In Client-Side Javascript" detailing a cookbook of the most common techniques you would want to use to do local system administration from Angular, React, Meteor/Ember, etc, with special attention to the pitfalls of identifying whether the local system is a Windows,Mac, Linux, a mobile browser, tablet, etc, and listing the various ways you can set up the local user's device to your own liking. Where it crosses the line is if it's written in a highly informative way without any indication WHATSOEVER of being satire. Local system administration from javascript frameworks doesn't exist. It's not a thing. You couldn't so much as set the time. But when you write with authority on how to do that and more, suddenly it does exist. What's more, it will be interesting and useful. If you write with authority and an overview of the subject, in the way done here (it starts by identifying the scope of the issue - the very first words of the abstract are "Uromycitisis is a rare but serious condition that affects over 2,000 mostly adult men and women in the United States each year". From the moment you've written those words -- you even say who it affects and the exceptions, since it affects adults but mostly adults -- you are now an expert and you're not writing a satire or hoax: you're writing fraud. It would be as if I began the above with: "Web-based administration of local devices with a standard browser serving as the remote administration client is a small but growing choice of hundreds of large companies with 5,000-50,000+ employees. Its advantages include leveraging development practices that may already be familiar, web standards, regular security upgrades from the major browsers, centralized distribution of small updates while leveraging the security mechanisms (such as HTTPS and signed certificates) already present in the browser, and cross-platform availability across many devices. Simply put, System Administration in client-side javascript is the closest you can come to fully controlling your user's devices without administrative tools at all. While it has important limitations, such as being unable to repartition hard-drives or install a standard image while the operating system is running, in other respects it enables all of the power of many administrative tools without many of the downsides. In this book we will cover some of the basic functions you may want to do, such as applying security updates, installing or removing software, creating user accounts and setting their privileges, and, in the case of Windows computers, setting up roaming profiles. Let's get started." Is that a hoax? No, it's more like simple fraud. (Our author invented a research institution, created fake gmail accounts, etc.) Sorry. I don't support the author in how they went about this. It would be different if what I wrote was hilarious - such as bemoaning that for the moment Apple Watches unfortunately do not support a standard browser, so you will have to break into them by finding and applying zero days for the iPhone, which are unfortunately patched regularly; a list of Russian and Chinese sources is contained in Appendix 1, and you can usually ask for a sample while promising bitcoins - but is the above paragraph I wrote hilarious? No. It's not hilarious and that means it's not okay. [1] direct link to PDF: http://www.the-scientist.com/images/Opinion/2017/UNOAJ-04-00132.pdf http://www.the-scientist.com/images/Opinion/2017/UNOAJ-04-00...

osazuwa 10y ago

Here is an fascinating instance of astroturfing by MedCrave on Quora, with painfully bad "smart-people" English https://www.quora.com/How-do-I-get-rid-of-the-rumours-about-Medcrave-Predatory-Publisher https://www.quora.com/How-do-I-get-rid-of-the-rumours-about-...

Balgair 10y ago
Hoooooly Cow! I think that thread could be the example of astro-turfing. Just, wow, the brazenness of it all is really astounding.
Schizotypy 10y ago
Lol holy crap!

WhiteSource1 10y ago

I'm more shocked at the fact that they published the article without receiving payment!