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6/23/18, "Some science journals that claim to peer reveiw papers do not do so," Economist.com
"One estimate puts the number of papers in questionable journals at 400,000."
"WHETHER to get a promotion or merely a foot in the door, academics
have long known that they must publish papers, typically the more the
better. Tallying scholarly publications to evaluate their authors has
been common since the invention of scientific journals in the 17th
century. So, too, has the practice of journal editors asking
independent, usually anonymous, experts to scrutinise manuscripts and
reject those deemed flawed—a quality-control process now known as peer
review. Of late, however, this habit of according importance to papers
labelled as “peer reviewed” has become something of a gamble. A rising
number of journals that claim to review submissions in this way do not
bother to do so. Not coincidentally, this seems to be leading some
academics to inflate their publication lists with papers that might not
pass such scrutiny.
Experts debate how many journals falsely claim
to engage in peer review. Cabells, an analytics firm in Texas, has
compiled a blacklist of those which it believes are guilty. According to
Kathleen Berryman, who is in charge of this list, the firm employs 65
criteria to determine whether a journal should go on it—though she is
reluctant to go into details. Cabells’ list now totals around 8,700
journals, up from a bit over 4,000 a year ago. Another list, which grew
to around 12,000 journals, was compiled until recently by Jeffrey Beall,
a librarian at the University of Colorado. Using Mr Beall’s list,
Bo-Christer Björk, an information scientist at the Hanken School of
Economics, in Helsinki, estimates that the number of articles published
in questionable journals has ballooned from about 53,000 a year in 2010
to more than 400,000 today. He estimates that 6% of academic papers by
researchers in America appear in such journals.
Behind all this is a change in the way a lot of journals make their
money. Over the past decade, many have stopped selling subscriptions.
Instead, they charge authors a publication fee and permit people to read
the result for nothing. This “open access” business model has the
advantage of increasing the dissemination of knowledge, but it also
risks corrupting the knowledge thus disseminated.
Trouble with lichen
The
truth of this was shown as far back as 2013, in an experiment conducted
by John Bohannon, a journalist with a doctorate in molecular biology.
Dr Bohannon set up a sting operation by writing versions of a paper
falsely claiming that a molecule found in lichens inhibits cancer. The
papers featured, he says, “laughably bad” methodology and a shocking
conclusion that the molecule is “a promising new drug” despite an
absence of clinical trials. He attributed the papers to fictional
biologists at made-up African medical institutes and then submitted them
to open-access journals. Of 121 chosen from a blacklist, 69% offered to
publish the paper for a fee, and even when he turned to journals on a
whitelist of supposedly trustworthy open-access journals, 38% of the 167
he approached fell into the trap.
Dr Bohannon’s experiment did
lack a true control—submission to journals that still charge
subscriptions. Nevertheless, his findings were worrying and since then,
he says, “things have only gotten darker”.
One aspect of that
darkness is that compiling a blacklist has itself become risky. Mr Beall
stopped adding to his last year and left his job at the University of
Colorado in March. He claims to have been subjected to pressure from a
superior, to a research-misconduct investigation by the university and
to threats of lawsuits by publishers. The university, for its part, says
that no pressure was put on him to take down the list. As far as it is
aware that decision was his, and his job was never in jeopardy because
of his work researching open-access journals. It cannot, however,
disclose whether or not there was a research-misconduct investigation.
Disclosure happens only after a finding has been made in such an
investigation. Mr Beall’s list has been taken up by another researcher
who has since appended 690 new journals to it. But this new custodian
refuses to be named.
Meanwhile, at Cabells, Ms Berryman reckons
the publishers of bogus journals are getting ever cannier. She has seen
cases of journals she regards as suspect claiming to be on whitelists,
fabricating citation scores for papers, stating plausible time frames
for peer review (claims of rapid review are often associated with
questionable journals) and brazenly listing as sitting on their
editorial boards scholars who are not in fact doing so.
Ms
Berryman says, too, that some websites copy wording and graphics used by
legitimate journals. Other sites go further, assuming a name that is
confusingly similar to that of a reputable journal. And according to
Ivan Oransky, co-founder of Retraction Watch, a blog that monitors such
matters, questionable journals now also occasionally retract articles in
a bid to appear responsible, in what can only be described as a superb
piece of subterfuge.
None of this would matter if institutions
hiring academics were appropriately vigilant about checking candidates’
publication histories against blacklists, and similarly inquisitive
about the publications of those already employed. But some, apparently,
are not. According to Brian Nosek, head of the Centre for Open Science, a
not-for-profit organisation in Virginia that studies the matter, many
institutions that hire and promote researchers seem unconcerned about
where those researchers have been publishing—a problem made worse by
recent requirements by the American and Canadian governments that
taxpayer-funded research must be published in open-access journals.
Unsurprisingly,
this is an area in which data are hard to come by. But one academic has
been prepared to stick his neck out and investigate his own
institution. Last year Derek Pyne, an economist at Thompson Rivers
University’s business school, in British Columbia, published a paper in
the Journal of Scholarly Publishing, itself
published by the University of Toronto Press. In it, he reported that
many of the business school’s administrators, and most of its economics
and business faculty with research responsibilities, had published in
journals on Mr Beall’s blacklist.
Dr Pyne also claimed that these papers
seemed to further their authors’ careers. Of the professors who had
published in the blacklisted journals, 56% had subsequently won at least
one research award from the school. All ten instructors promoted to
full professor during the study period had published in a journal on Mr
Beall’s list.
Subsequently, Dr Pyne told school officials that an
administrator up for promotion had published widely in blacklisted
journals. This earned Dr Pyne an e-mail from the university’s
human-resources department on June 15th, threatening him with
disciplinary action for “defamatory language and accusations”. When
asked, the university declined to comment.
Review peer review
What
can be done about all this is hard to say. Dr Pyne thinks part of the
problem is that too many academic administrators have no research
experience, and so either cannot tell good publications from bad, or do
not care. Few researchers, though, thrill to the idea of a career in
administration, so changing that might be difficult.
An extreme
reaction, albeit one supported by a growing minority of researchers who
think the peer-review system is anyway creaking under the weight of
publication pressure, would be to abandon anonymous peer review
altogether, and make the process open and transparent. This could be
done (as sometimes happens already) by publishing unreviewed papers on
special servers and then inviting criticism conditional on the name of
the critic being public. That, though, brings other risks. Anonymous
critics often find it easier to be honest, especially in fields where
most researchers know each other.
One far-fetched solution is a
return to journal subscriptions. These have for so long been excoriated
as rent-seeking profit-inflators restricting the flow of information
that a change of course would now be unthinkable. But those who pushed
for their elimination might be wise to pause for thought. As the old
proverb has it, be careful what you wish for. You might get it."
