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Scientific journal publishers and editors say they are being offered bribes
- stanrivers 3y ago“ It's to the point where every journal publisher and every editor will tell you, if they're being honest, that they have been and are continually being offered bribes. I would be very suspicious if someone tried to act shocked at the question, as if they'd never heard of such a thing. This is the state of scientific publishing in the 2020s, and we have to realize it. What we don't have to do is accept it.” Well… then start reporting it with names publicly and to authorities…
- sickofparadox 3y ago3 or 4 cases of PHDs losing their positions because of this garbage would likely go a long way towards discouraging these frauds.
- ramraj07 3y agoNo it won’t - the vast majority of the perpetrators, perhaps rightfully, will think that doesn’t apply to their case because of their instititional politics.
- canadiantim 3y agoI think it's more how the incentives in the system are set up. Unless the incentives change (publish or perish, gatekeeping journals, etc.), then nothing will change.
- chaxor 3y agoThis is the real answer. Many of the problems in academia are due to publish or perish. Very many of them.
- eli_gottlieb 3y agoThree or four cases of entire laboratories or departments being shut down for fraud would make a dent.
- rcbdev 3y agoJust look at all the high profile academic fraud cases in politics - Von Der Leyen (President of the EU Commission, plagiarized half of her dissertation, zero consequences), Aschbacher (Former Minister in Austria, her thesis was filled with grammatical and logical errors that would've shocked a high school teacher, gets to keep her PhD), Voshmgirs (Founding Director of the Institute for Cryptoeconomics at the Vienna University of Economics, the only one who might actually lose her PhD because of this) As long as the general public does not care nothing will change.
- bowsamic 3y agoAuthorities? I don't think it's illegal. Also I get roughly 5 offers of "bribes" (of the "special issue" variety) a day, it's an overwhelming situation.
- albino_yak 3y agoExactly. Bribing editors to publish your paper is unethical, it's not breaking any laws. The word "bribe" the has the connotation of secretly paying government officials, which is illegal. But authors paying editors? I don't think that's legally viewed as any different for scientific publications than it is for fiction, where pay-to-publish is an accepted practice. (Disclaimer - IANAL)
- haswell 3y agoThe definition of what constitutes bribery is not limited to legal matters or government officials. The legal vs. ethical distinction helps determine what can be done about the bribery, but does not change the nature of the act itself. It’s just that bribing government officials has been (appropriately) deemed problematic enough to make it a legal issue vs. just an ethical one. This scandal may very well provide the impetus to make this kind of bribery illegal too, because of the degree of harm and public interest in that harm.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- theGnuMe 3y agoBribes are illegal in the USA.
- pvaldes 3y agoScience keeps a lot of traditions that would be illegal in most fields. A company wouldn't dare to say publicly "People older than 30 Years can't apply to our job" or "People from NY will be favored, we will not hire people from Louisiana". I see equivalent claims in the Academic field aaaall the time; is pissing on the constitution, and nobody fucking cares.
- nativeit 3y ago> And don't get the idea that it's just Hindawi - how could it be? MDPI journals are mixed up in this, De Gruyter, IMR, AIMS Press and many others as well. Any publisher where people are willing to look the other way.
- dooopdoop 3y ago[dead]
- kashunstva 3y ago> "every journal publisher and every editor will tell you..." As much as I disdain academic fraud, I'm also deeply suspicious of statements about "every" editor. So I asked my wife, would is a lead editor of a major scientific journal. Her experience is nothing of the kind. Crappy paper-mill papers, plagiarism, etc.? Yes. Flat-out bribes, no.
- a123b456c 3y agoSame. I serve in an editorial role for a top journal in my field. I know some foreign universities pay six-figure bonuses to faculty who publish in my journal. I have never been offered anything like a bribe. To my ears, 'every' is hyperbole.
- InSteady 3y agoIn addition to the "every publisher" claim, he also states, "And don't get the idea that it's just Hindawi - how could it be? MDPI journals are mixed up in this, De Gruyter, IMR, AIMS Press and many others as well." However, he only provides evidence that something is seriously amiss at Hindawi. The author links to two articles that detail some really shady behavior, but after reading them it doesn't look like he is adding anything new to the discussion beyond speculation and outrage. Well, that, and using his name and platform to amplify the message that it is time to get serious about fraud in scientific publications (which is laudable). This is a serious problem, with the linked articles detailing brazen advertisement of payment for publication by people and organizations who appear to be associated with paper mills. I don't think the takeaway is that we should immediately throw the baby out with the bathwater, but this definitely needs a lot of urgent and sustained attention.
- chaxor 3y agoI know a lab that tried to publish names along with scores for the likelihood that they were h-index hacking. It's a very popular thing to do for more well known scientists. Unfortunately legal teams were very discouraging to do so and publishing that type of thing is hard, so it didn't happen.
- TravisCooper 3y agoJust put this out there: The higher the stakes, the less we should trust what we're "told". Esp if we're told to "believe and don't question". It won't always be obvious to you directly, why something is wrong or corrupt, rather this is a sense we have to develop over time: question the people and ideas that we're supposed to "trust".
- nequo 3y agoYou’re posting your conspiracy theory under the wrong article. This one is about paper mills, not the manipulation of public opinion in high-stakes cases.
- coldtea 3y agoYou're posting the "trust the system" apologetics under the wrong comment. The observation the parent makes about "high stakes" is fully compatible with the article, and it's just a general observation about similar shit on all domains. The same shit that happens when there are high stakes (products, money, careers, grants, etc.) on the table for scientists/journals is also true for politicians, journalists, regulating bodies, and so on. It's also not a conspiracy theory: just basic life experience.
- nequo 3y agoPaper mills are not usually the prestigious journals. Those are usually obscure outlets whose sole purpose is to publish questionable research. Leading the public opinion is happening elsewhere.
- dweekly 3y agoBlind mistrust can lead to even more foolishness than blind trust because it presumes the individual alone to have the power to fully discern the systems of the world independent of the inputs of others. This framing is how you get things like flat earth, holocaust denial, etc. Healthy skepticism is appropriate - and god bless investigative journalism to find holes in things* - but generally speaking, people try to do the right thing. * I'd suggest a donation to the Center for Investigative Reporting if this resonates
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- LeifCarrotson 3y ago> This is the state of scientific publishing in the 2020s, and we have to realize it. What we don't have to do is accept it. What else can be done? This isn't a meritocracy, it's just capitalism. Is the alternative going to make more money? Then it will probably win. Is it going to make less money? Then it will almost certainly lose. I think the simplest way to push more honesty into the system is to better inform consumers - Right now, a byline is a byline, and a citation is a citation, and those sell. People are vaguely aware that there are lower- and higher-quality papers, but for the most part, these bribes are considered someone else's problem and careers still use these simple metrics regardless of quality. We have to reduce the incentives to game the metrics, increase investigation for misconduct, and increase the penalty when that misconduct is found. But how are we going to cause people to do those things? How does that pay?
- xondono 3y ago>What else can be done? This isn't a meritocracy, it's just capitalism. What an absurd take. Just because it involves money doesn't mean it's "capitalism"s fault, for starters because this has way more to do with regulatory capture than anything else. The number one reason for all these fraudulent research is that it has become mandatory for phds, and that education in the west is subsidized to a point that you need a phd to qualify for jobs that would have only required a bachelor's 50 years ago. There's a law of diminishing returns to science, so vastly increasing the amount of people researching is going to disappoint lots of them. It's only reasonable that a number of them will take the easy way out and cheat.
- bowsamic 3y ago> education in the west is subsidized to a point that you need a phd to qualify for jobs that would have only required a bachelor's 50 years ago I've only ever encountered this in Germany. Are you sure it's a general phenomenon?
- prewett 3y agoThis isn't capitalism, it's human nature.
- lazycog512 3y ago[flagged]
- jhbadger 3y agoThere certainly are these dodgy journals out there, but be somewhat skeptical of why the journal Science, which has fought tooth and nail against making its papers open access, is publishing this -- they want to imply that open access journals in general are scams.
- great_tankard 3y agoIt's true that Science is very invested in this bad (for everyone else) publishing model, and I suppose if somehow, by omission, they managed to convince the population that open access is inherently scammy, that's all the more convenient for them. I wouldn't necessarily group Derek in with that, though, and he's not wrong about this.
- bowsamic 3y agoI started ignoring MDPI emails entirely. I even know someone who is threatening legal action against them because they refuse to stop asking him to review papers for them. The problem is that it poisons everything. It's not just those bribing, it makes everyone suspicious of legitimate journals too. Scientific literature in general is devalued by these paper mills. Now every scientist has to keep a list in their mind of "reputable journals". And guess what, those journals aren't that great either!
- pvaldes 3y agoPut all sort of random obstacles to hire, just for fun. That will create a slight advantage for people that just will lie about having those list of merits (while sending the honest researchers to spend valuable time trying to learn those skills, that aren't really necessary for the job). Will also promote ways to bypass the process, like bribes. Repeat the cycle until liars start hiring more liars and start chasing off the honest researchers or slowly assimilating them. Enjoy the results of your great job.
- neffy 3y agoOr employ an excel spreadsheet wielding administrator whose only job is to count the number of publications internally for the entire university and circulate back to the department heads and marketing folks. And see how much they care about which journal papers are published in.
- thaumasiotes 3y agoOne of the more memorable parts of paying for a deluxe interview preparation course on interviewing.io was the coach emphasizing "There is no place for honesty in a behavioral interview. No one is going to check on your story."
- chs20 3y agoIn my experience, papers published in these "special issues" don't really get any attention.
- pama 3y agoI agree with the author that improper scientific publishing became systematically worse over the last couple of decades, and was coupled with an explosion in science and technology which is a great thing. The somewhat optimistic thought here is that once we can have AI evaluate/referee papers we will reach a state where scientific publishing is judged in a fair and transparent manner.
- MontagFTB 3y agoAssuming these papers are at the boundary of human knowledge, what would these AIs be trained on? How much authority should rest on an LLM reporting that, statistically, the paper’s tokens appear to match up with that trained model?
- mistermann 3y agoAn AI that can execute (all forms of) logic perfectly seems like an obviously useful approach since it is largely (entirely?) domain agnostic, and can fill the gap humans are not able to for cultural reasons. In my experiments, GPT-4 is already extremely capable in this regard.
- pvaldes 3y ago"More than 10,000 research papers were retracted in 2023 - a new record". Nature 12/12/2023 [1] Are we training AI on this fake papers also? How do the AI companies would remove a fake claim after it is included as true on AI models when popularity depends on how much boring is a theme? Until the last years, I never had seen so many papers that claim flamboyant new scientific discoveries that are counterintuitive, against the logic, or directly don't make any sense. [1] https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-03974-8 https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-03974-8
- rossdavidh 3y agoIt appears that so-called "AI" is much better at making bogus papers, than at spotting them.
- kmeisthax 3y ago
- hammock 3y ago[flagged]
- h2odragon 3y ago> This is the state of scientific publishing in the 2020s, I kinda suspect the problem has been growing for some time; not just popped into existence the past couple years.
- bglazer 3y agoMy understanding is that this is mainly affecting publishers that are widely known to publish low quality, mostly forgettable research. Like there’s thousands of “machine learning” papers published in MDPI and Hindawi journals that are literally just a writeup of how the authors applied scikit-learn algorithms to a small dataset. No conclusions or advances in understanding are made. Consequently these are extremely easy to filter out as trash. I absolutely don’t condone or dismiss the problem, but its not yet a serious impediment to real research. It’s mostly self contained within this ecosystem of trash journals. Trash research doesn’t escape containment to contaminate more serious venues because it’s transparently and obviously trash and serious journals care about their reputation. So, I think its important not to overstate the consequences or reach of this problem. That’s not to say academic publishing doesn’t have problems, but I don’t think this kind of trash publishing is going to seriously impede progress. That said I would shut down all these people and their journals if I could
- OmarShehata 3y agoInterestingly, one of the comments on the article makes this exact point ("Is this actually harmful to the scientific community?" "No one in the real world of scientific progress is getting fooled by a Mad Libs paper in a Mad Libs conference proceeding.") The real harm here may be moreso outside of the scientific community. Consider why they are paying to get these articles published in the first place. I thought this was well articulated in another comment there: "These papers are the tools by which fraudsters advance up the acaddemic ladder. As a result, billions of public money get diverted to fund this fakers rather than actual science and scientists. On top of that, all these fake papers poison the waters and confuse decision makers and the public all over the world, resulting in bad policies that cause more harm."
- andy99 3y agoThe issue is that the audience of legit scholarship is neither the public nor "decision makers" nor academic administrators. It's other researchers. The system works fine (more or less) for actual scholars working on advancing their fields. It's just that a scam industry has been built up for the benefit of the other various stakeholders who actually have no business relying on communications that are not meant for them.
- bee_rider 3y agoThe scientific record is not a load-bearing structure. It survived because it was something that only academics cared about. Now that publishing is being used as a source to pull metrics from and The Science* is being used a source of political arguments, we’re in a really unstable and dangerous position. * I want to be clear that I’m very much in favor of science-based policy, but giving The Science credit and blame is not a tenable path forward, because science is hard and there will be mistakes. The way to do it is to have public figures analyze where the field is and stake their professional reputations on interpreting it correctly. Individual professional reputation is the load bearing structure of a serious society.
- D13Fd 3y agoI don't think that's the problem. The problem is "publish or perish" and the fact that survival and job advancement depend on quantity over quality of publications. That drives a huge demand to be published, and the purpose of getting published is not to advance science but to get more bullet points on an a C.V.
- bee_rider 3y agoThe fact that we pull metrics (for hiring) from the scientific record causes the publish-or-perish problem, so I’m not sure I see a disagreement here.
- chengiz 3y agoYou are reversing cause and effect. You "perish" by being unable to procure grants. Grants require a publishing record. Why? Because estimating success is harder than simply looking up a list. The entire system works that way. The hiring procedures are simply following this system.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- beezlebroxxxxxx 3y agoI agree. One thing that is pretty depressing to anyone that spends time in grad school or in academia is that universities and colleges put barely any importance on a professor/scholar's teaching ability. Education is simply not the main focus at all. Instead, they view scholars as research machines. Rather than giving research and scholarly inquiry the time and patience it requires (a lot), they would have published research occur like clockwork and in many cases regardless of the quality of that published research. This looks better for the school; but leads to middling research at best and often shady stuff by harried researchers, and a subpar teaching experience for most students who are always second fiddle to the endless demands to publish. The school benefits (per se, they don't like getting caught in scandals of their own making, of course), while researchers and students get subpar experiences all around.
- scop 3y agoNot nearly as important as Science, but I had a friend who worked at a noteworthy video game publication in the 90s who had many good stories of bribes, arm-twisting, etc from game publishers.
- bombcar 3y agoPay-to-play, wine-and-dine, sponsored issues, etc It all is a variation on a continuum that ends in bribery.
- jampekka 3y agoWell, Science (the journal/magazine) runs on kickbacks and bribes too. They just do it through subscriptions that milk public funds so that public can read articles written and reviewed using public money. Academic publishing is a totally rotten industry, regardless of the funding model. Publishers shouldn't even exist. Dissemination and evaluation of scientific outputs could easily and should be facilitated by e.g. university libraries.
- InSteady 3y agoIt would be neat if some of the money publishers are sucking up is instead given to the peer reviewers as compensation for their efforts. It is such an important facet of keeping published research to a minimum standard. The fact that reviewers go mostly unpaid for their work seems like a major disincentive to spend extra time -- which is already spread thin trying to stay ahead on the publish or perish treadmill -- digging deep into papers that send up red flags.
- felipeerias 3y agoIt’s really worrying that the scientific community seems unable to implement better institutions and processes for itself. Publishing articles is a requisite for professional advancement, yet editors and reviewers are usually unpaid. It doesn’t take a genius to understand the incentives at play.
- drhelix 3y agothe problem comes from scientometrics. you have to pump up your numbers as a researcher if you ever want to get that grant, or that promotion or that tenure position. there was a time when there were far less journals and articles published per year. people spent a lot more time on an article and it shows. read an article today and you are left with nothing. back in the day (and by that I mean before about 2010) you had everything you needed to understand the subject and form your ideas. today is about tonnes of references (and not the useful kind either!) and inventing catchy acronyms. but now that scientometrics is so important everyone is chasing the numbers and not the quality. you need that high impact factor up, that h-index, the influence score and the citations up. and since you have no chance to spend more time to increase the quality of your article, the next best thing is to increase the quantity you push into the grind. these predatory publications are precisely the answer to this artificially increased demand. yet people continue to be surprised. think about it for a second: consider how many PhDs are awarded each year, they have to go somewhere and most of them want to go up. hence the increased demand. PhD courses are a huge business for universities, and this business drives the publishing industry. mix into this the fact that in academia, you have to change your research subject about every three years to keep it real for the grant masters with the big project money, you get to this disaster today. try to build a bibliography today on a new subject and you will find tonnes of articles and then try to find the ones where you can actually understand where the science on that subject is at. i don't know what the solution is, but counting scienctometric indices is not it.
- readyplayernull 3y agoHave there been any research on how power actors infiltrate hierarchies? I have only seen a CIA manual on sabotagong meetings [1]. I have previously been at small companies with former FAANG employees, and they get fortified. They set well defined roles of soldiers and spies that will do everything to twist your arm, if you don't comply they'll push you out. These, in principle non-illegal, shadow hierarchies become the actual rulers of company as they control information flow to management, and they tend to keep the __harmony__. Most of news media seems to be under control, with media on sync with goverment's tune. Scientific journals requiring bribes means they haven't been infiltrated enough, but that will happen, there is a perverse interest in place. When we find there is no more disagreement, we will know the shadow hierarchy is doing its work. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39073285 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39073285
- jovial_cavalier 3y agoScience is highly incentivized to make you think that this is what's eroding trust in the scientific literature and institutions. Not ivory tower "trust the science" rhetoric. Not universities being taken over by administrators and pushing everyone who is competent and self respecting into private industry. Not the insane things that Science/Nature publish themselves on a regular basis. The real problem is random no-name professors bribing their way into no-name journals.
- rossdavidh 3y agoOne is reminded of the saying, "once a metric becomes a target, it ceases to be a good metric". Number of papers published in (almost any) journal, has long since come to be viewed as a target that you have to hit in order to get tenure, grant funding, etc. Another way to say it is, if there is a problem with bribery, what is it that was supposed to prevent that? Currently, the answer is approximately "nothing". There is nothing in the current scientific publishing system that is intended to prevent bribes, you just aren't supposed to do that, or accept them if they are offered, but there is no mechanism to suppress it. Therefore, it happens.
- alasarmas 3y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart's_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart's_law
- nonethewiser 3y agoIs there a trend in nationality of the bribers? In some countries bribes are extremely common. Including a few very large countries with an increasing presence in global academia. Are these bribes coming from the UK, France, Germany, the US, Japan, who have long contributed to the international academic scene and which don't have pervasive issues with bribes?
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- dang 3y agoRecent and related: Firms churning out fake papers have taken to bribing journal editors - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39061275 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39061275 - Jan 2024 (5 comments)
- m3kw9 3y agoAll names on a paper should be tarnished if their papers were found published with bribes, you’d create an incentive for all involved to make sure no bribes were used
- amadeuspagel 3y ago> especially in an open-access journal where money has to change hands It's hilarious that in an article about scientific publishing, this inanity is merely mentioned in passing and not questioned.
- cashsterling 3y agoI've said this before... we need a open-source "(Git)Hub for Science" where anyone is allowed and encouraged to publish and continuously iterate on their 'research' and peer review is crowd-sourced from the community via discussion on a open forum attached to the research (the way issues are attached to a repo). Mentioning Github is triggering for some because they less about foundational open-source support these days short description: - upload and manage your data, analysis code, research 'write-up' and other supporting on the platform in revision control repository (basically using git) that the main research controls and can invite other to be editors. - platform would have electronic lab notebook features... all data/etxt/etc. generation/upload and modification is time stamped. - data tables/mini-databases and data files would be assigned unique Id's so that the data can be cross referenced in other research repo's. So calculations, etc. can reference and use revision controlled data in other repos. This could rapidly turn into a mess at scale (I'm not a DB expert) but this would be cool. - platform would have internal publishing platform for generating a 'polished presentation/manuscript' of the research: written article, iteractive notebook, slides, etc." Think of this as the polished readme or GitHub Pages of the repo, but with more features to generate really clean looking, polished copy like Authorea, Curvenote, Overleaf. - each repo would have a discussion forum like "github or gitlab issues" but with a little more functionality akin to Discourse. - the platform would also have a centralized topical discussion forum like reddit but with subreddits matching topical research areas. - users can build research collections that they follow, get update notifications, and can reference in their own research. So the system has an built-in bibliography system on steroids. - platform is free to use and access for everyone, period. - platform could be federated where platform nodes could be run by universities, companies, government labs, etc. Haven't thought this through in detail but could be done. Would provide some fault tolerance. Benefits: - research would be accessible to all... this by itself will be a radically positive enhancement. - Communication of ideas would be enhanced by provision of all data, experimental procedures, analysis code, etc. No page limits... just communicate what you think is necessary whether it is one page or two hundred pages. Science communication can also be corrected, amended, and improved over time. Most research papers have something wrong with them; few errors are ever corrected unless they are so wrong that a retraction is necessary. Even so, most papers are not retracted. By virtue of the issues and discussion forum, and the ability to edit your papers... research would have a much longer 'shelf-life' and new readers would be able ascertain whether or not a body of research is reliable/trustworthy or not. - editorial review and peer review would no longer be gating to whether or not something gets published. This removes political and scientific bias from the review process. - The concept of high impact journals would vanish... if research is awesome, it will get a lot of activity and "github stars / thumbs up", others will post their own data/research corroborating the original research and want to add to the body of research organically... just like what happens with good open-source software repos. If the research is crap to begin with, folks in the community will point out the flaws and help correct them. -It will lower the barrier to publishing null-results (tried this, didn't work) and commenting/critiquing/supporting research. We could develop a basic scoring system to 'reward' people who support research via review, critique, assistance, etc. I'm think of ways to help professors and others demonstrate their activity and helpfulness in a research community; publishing is great, but helping make other's research/science better is also highly valuable and we should develop a way to recognize that [for professorship tenure review, etc.]. my 0.02...
- NanoYohaneTSU 3y agoNo shit. The scientific method has been dead for a long time in the West because of politics.
- joshspankit 3y agoDo we still need “scientific journals” in the era of ~0 cost publishing? I keep seeing a lot of problems with the journal system as it stands now, and can’t think of any benefits that can’t be duplicated by a shift away from it.
- rossdavidh 3y agoI think you are not the only one asking this question. The issue, as best I understand it, is that there is a desire for a source of minimally-vetted scientific papers, something more reliably worth reading than "it's on the internet somewhere". The problem being that current journals in many cases only pretend to offer this, without actually doing so.
- joshspankit 3y agoThat’s the impression I get too, and it seems to boil down to two things: 1. Does the paper hold up to scrutiny by people who understand the subject matter? (Including: Are the facts represented truthfully, is it free from bias, do the calculations and charts actually represent the data, is the experiment viable) 2. Can the results be reproduced by a totally unrelated (and unbiased) team? And it feels like we’re at an excellent time in history where we can handle #1 through collaborative technologies (even a wiki), and 2 can be done better by encouraging those other scientific teams to publishing results along side the first. Am I off-base?
- 1vuio0pswjnm7 3y agoAuthors already have to pay these journals to have their papers published. It is not free. At what point do the fees become bribes.
- qsdf38100 3y agoWhen the money goes to the employee of the institution providing the benefit instead of the institution itself.
- 1vuio0pswjnm7 3y agohttps://www.science.org/content/article/paper-mills-bribing-editors-scholarly-journals-science-investigation-finds https://www.science.org/content/article/paper-mills-bribing-...
- InSteady 3y agoWhile both practices are problematic, bribes are categorically worse. A flat fee only gatekeeps people who don't have enough money, whereas bribes gatekeep people who are ethical. Furthermore, an author who pays a fee will still have their paper will still go through a (hopefully rigorous) review process involving input from independent peer reviewers as well as the editor. Paying the journal a fee does not directly and intentionally subvert the review process, whereas bribing the editor does.
- blackhaj7 3y agoI bet loads of this is people trying to get their work published to support a US visa application