6 ms·

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 th

by 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.
- thaumasiotes 10y ago
  It seems odd to call the journal "predatory" in this situation. Who is it preying on? The person who got rejected from a journal with standards but still wanted to keep his job?
  - wsxcde 10y ago
    The problem with these journals isn't that they accept low-quality papers. They're called that because they don't make an honest attempt at peer-review, and the publishing/editing fees are pocketed by the publishers. IEEE Access is an example of a journal which charges a hefty "article processing fee" and publishes rather mediocre papers. But I wouldn't call them a predatory journal. They do get feedback from real researchers working in the field, they do reject fake and obviously-flawed papers, and they do not just use the publishing fees to enrich themselves. The journal in the OP did none of these things.
    - thaumasiotes 10y ago
      I am happy to stipulate that these journals do no review and pocket their editing fees. But they are not victimizing the authors, they're helping them. That's why they can charge fees.
user5994461 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. I don't know if they are so evil as people say. They send me nice invitations on linkedin to interview with them :D They appear to have interesting data and text analysis problems to solve.
gcb0 10y ago
international policy pissing contest: countries actually rank education internationaly by counting number of published articles. you can't make this up.
metaphorm 10y ago
this particular case is what is called an "open-access journal" which is a controversial topic. the nominal goal of journals of this sort is to break up the fairly awful stranglehold on academic publishing that companies like Elsevier have created. however, it is a deeply problematic space and many of these open-access journals are fraudulent publications in that they don't even attempt to do appropriate and necessary peer reviewing. it's just pay to play at a corrupt journal like this. pay your fees get your publication. it's like vanity publishing. independent of academic merit. the ideal is an open-access journal that is open in terms of who can read it but very closed in terms of who can successfully get an article published. that's not what we're getting these days though.

by Jedd 10y ago

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.

thaumasiotes 10y ago
It seems odd to call the journal "predatory" in this situation. Who is it preying on? The person who got rejected from a journal with standards but still wanted to keep his job?
- wsxcde 10y ago
  The problem with these journals isn't that they accept low-quality papers. They're called that because they don't make an honest attempt at peer-review, and the publishing/editing fees are pocketed by the publishers. IEEE Access is an example of a journal which charges a hefty "article processing fee" and publishes rather mediocre papers. But I wouldn't call them a predatory journal. They do get feedback from real researchers working in the field, they do reject fake and obviously-flawed papers, and they do not just use the publishing fees to enrich themselves. The journal in the OP did none of these things.
  - thaumasiotes 10y ago
    I am happy to stipulate that these journals do no review and pocket their editing fees. But they are not victimizing the authors, they're helping them. That's why they can charge fees.

user5994461 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. I don't know if they are so evil as people say. They send me nice invitations on linkedin to interview with them :D They appear to have interesting data and text analysis problems to solve.

gcb0 10y ago

international policy pissing contest: countries actually rank education internationaly by counting number of published articles. you can't make this up.

metaphorm 10y ago

this particular case is what is called an "open-access journal" which is a controversial topic. the nominal goal of journals of this sort is to break up the fairly awful stranglehold on academic publishing that companies like Elsevier have created. however, it is a deeply problematic space and many of these open-access journals are fraudulent publications in that they don't even attempt to do appropriate and necessary peer reviewing. it's just pay to play at a corrupt journal like this. pay your fees get your publication. it's like vanity publishing. independent of academic merit. the ideal is an open-access journal that is open in terms of who can read it but very closed in terms of who can successfully get an article published. that's not what we're getting these days though.