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Academic fraud has reached a new level of deceit as a “predatory” journal that prints low-quality research for cash has stolen the identity of a dead doctor.
Sir Richard Doll was an eminent British epidemiologist who was among the first to realize that smoking causes lung cancer. He died in 2005, aged 92.
Now his photo has popped up with an altered surname — Turner — on the list of people who supposedly edit a shady academic journal, Journal of Spectroscopy and Molecular Physics.
It’s no slip. The entire editorial board appears to be fake, though most of the other stolen identities at least belong to the living. At least one is Canadian.
‘Professor Richard Turner’ and other purported editors of the Journal of Spectroscopy and Molecular Physics. The journal says hackers placed inaccurate information on its site.
The ersatz physics editors are mostly in non-physics fields. There’s a chemistry professor at Simon Fraser University; a hematologist in Michigan; an anthropologist in Little Rock who specializes in Micronesia, kinship, gender, migration and dance; and a dermatologist in Singapore. Another is Caroline Apovian, an obesity expert at Boston University School of Medicine. The journal gives her a fictional surname, Teins.
“That is my photo,” she emailed after the Citizen wrote her to ask about it. “But I am not on the board and my last name is Apovian. Wow thank you for seeing this. What do I do to remove my photo?”
At Simon Fraser, professor Mario Pinto, identified on the site as “Mario Augentaller (PHD) Managing Editor,” had a similar reaction: “This is indeed my photo but I have never heard of this journal.”
Stories like these are becoming more common because the field of fraudulent academic publishing is exploding. Many are small operations that steal the identifies of real researchers in order to look more established.
Research journals are the place where academics announce their results. A proper journal first checks the work with independent experts in a process called peer review, but predatory journals skip this and print anything, muddying the record of what findings scientists can trust.
And a new study in the journal BMC Medicine estimates that there were 420,000 articles published in predatory journals in 2014, up from 53,000 five years ago. These were in 8,000 predatory journals.
By comparison, some 1.4 million to 2 million papers are published in mainstream academic journals annually.
The study by Cenyu Shen and Bo-Christer Bjork of the Hanken School of Economics in Finland says academics in Asia and Africa are widely excluded from publishing in Europe and North America. But it adds that the authors who publish their work in bogus journals share blame.
“We believe that most authors are not necessarily tricked into publishing in predatory journals; they probably submit to them well aware of the circumstances and take a calculated risk that experts who evaluate their publication lists will not bother to check the journal credentials in detail. Hence we do not uncritically see the authors as unknowing victims,” they write.
“The universities or funding agencies in a number of countries that strongly emphasize publishing in ‘international’ journals for evaluating researchers, but without monitoring the quality of the journals in question, are partly responsible for the rise of this type of publishing.”
The study cites research on predatory publishing by the Ottawa Citizen, among others.
An anonymous staffer at the Journal of Spectroscopy and Molecular Physics replied to questions by email, saying unknown hackers sabotaged the website months ago with inaccurate information about the editorial board. The staffer says the journal has been unable to remove the posts.
He or she acknowledges that repeated inferences the journal is part of the Elsevier science publishing house are also inaccurate.
tspears@ottawacitizen.com
twitter.com/TomSpears1
查看原文...
Sir Richard Doll was an eminent British epidemiologist who was among the first to realize that smoking causes lung cancer. He died in 2005, aged 92.
Now his photo has popped up with an altered surname — Turner — on the list of people who supposedly edit a shady academic journal, Journal of Spectroscopy and Molecular Physics.
It’s no slip. The entire editorial board appears to be fake, though most of the other stolen identities at least belong to the living. At least one is Canadian.
‘Professor Richard Turner’ and other purported editors of the Journal of Spectroscopy and Molecular Physics. The journal says hackers placed inaccurate information on its site.
The ersatz physics editors are mostly in non-physics fields. There’s a chemistry professor at Simon Fraser University; a hematologist in Michigan; an anthropologist in Little Rock who specializes in Micronesia, kinship, gender, migration and dance; and a dermatologist in Singapore. Another is Caroline Apovian, an obesity expert at Boston University School of Medicine. The journal gives her a fictional surname, Teins.
“That is my photo,” she emailed after the Citizen wrote her to ask about it. “But I am not on the board and my last name is Apovian. Wow thank you for seeing this. What do I do to remove my photo?”
At Simon Fraser, professor Mario Pinto, identified on the site as “Mario Augentaller (PHD) Managing Editor,” had a similar reaction: “This is indeed my photo but I have never heard of this journal.”
Stories like these are becoming more common because the field of fraudulent academic publishing is exploding. Many are small operations that steal the identifies of real researchers in order to look more established.
Research journals are the place where academics announce their results. A proper journal first checks the work with independent experts in a process called peer review, but predatory journals skip this and print anything, muddying the record of what findings scientists can trust.
And a new study in the journal BMC Medicine estimates that there were 420,000 articles published in predatory journals in 2014, up from 53,000 five years ago. These were in 8,000 predatory journals.
By comparison, some 1.4 million to 2 million papers are published in mainstream academic journals annually.
The study by Cenyu Shen and Bo-Christer Bjork of the Hanken School of Economics in Finland says academics in Asia and Africa are widely excluded from publishing in Europe and North America. But it adds that the authors who publish their work in bogus journals share blame.
“We believe that most authors are not necessarily tricked into publishing in predatory journals; they probably submit to them well aware of the circumstances and take a calculated risk that experts who evaluate their publication lists will not bother to check the journal credentials in detail. Hence we do not uncritically see the authors as unknowing victims,” they write.
“The universities or funding agencies in a number of countries that strongly emphasize publishing in ‘international’ journals for evaluating researchers, but without monitoring the quality of the journals in question, are partly responsible for the rise of this type of publishing.”
The study cites research on predatory publishing by the Ottawa Citizen, among others.
An anonymous staffer at the Journal of Spectroscopy and Molecular Physics replied to questions by email, saying unknown hackers sabotaged the website months ago with inaccurate information about the editorial board. The staffer says the journal has been unable to remove the posts.
He or she acknowledges that repeated inferences the journal is part of the Elsevier science publishing house are also inaccurate.
tspears@ottawacitizen.com
twitter.com/TomSpears1
查看原文...
