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It’s time for universities to crack down on fake science publishers and the academics who use them, legal experts say.
The “how” part is trickier.
The problem came to light again this week after an Indian company operating in Canada accepted for the second time a garbled, meaningless article it already printed once and retracted. The Citizen submitted it to test whether OMICS International actually reads material that it supposedly reviews.
OMICS has bought up a string of Canadian science journals, and will operate 22 conferences in Toronto and Vancouver this summer. But it accepts research on flying pigs.
David Sweanor, who teaches at the Centre for Health Law, Policy and Ethics at the University of Ottawa, hopes there will soon be software to detect articles published in fake journals, just as programs today can detect plagiarism.
“If the presence of such journals/conferences on a CV were treated akin to plagiarism, and it was known that (like plagiarism) they were easily detected, much of the viability of this business would likely disappear,” he said in an email.
“Just the possibility of such things would in the meantime be a huge deterrent to the use of these services. After all, we have seen the way past plagiarism or degree mill diplomas have come back to haunt people now that such things are easy to detect and this issue is taken seriously.”
He said the rule should also apply to conferences run by fly-by-night publishers, which sell their service to anyone who wants to acquire black-market academic credentials.
“Basically, this is just a matter of preventing something fraudulent. People are deceived. We would not be fine with that in consumer representations and certainly should not countenance it in science.
“I think there are too many signs of the ‘death of the Enlightenment,’ and it would be good to fight back.”
But who, exactly, is a predator?
The thousands of academic journals range across a continuum with some in the middle that are trying to do an honest job, says Tim Caulfield of the University of Alberta.
Caulfield has a Canada Research Chair in Health Law and Policy. He also campaigns against scam publishing, which he has nicknamed “quackajournals.”
There is discussion of “some kind of accreditation system where journals are assessed and they have to meet certain criteria to be considered an academic publication,” he said.
“There is a fascinating tension” between the desire to stop the fake journals and a broad wish to let new, open-access journals enter the business, he said.
Here’s the problem: Many traditional journals charge thousands of dollars a year for one subscription, and use a paywall. Some of these are accused of controlling the spread of knowledge, concentrating it in the hands of a small elite of companies such as Springer, Elsevier and Wiley.
Because of this, smaller journals that are free online have opened up, saying their “open access” will help spread knowledge. But some of the newcomers operate as predators.
If universities are too hard on the mid-range publishers, it’s possible this will hurt the legitimate part of the open access spectrum and concentrate more power in the top-ranked, elite journals, Caulfield said.
It’s very hard to stop low-level conferences that exploit young academics, he noted.
“That’s much more difficult to regulate.”
He says one way is for universities and others to draw up a description of the elements of a good conference, “and then junior scholars and postdocs and PhD students and graduate students can look at those and get a sense of whether this entity is worthwhile.”
The primitive scams that used to be easy to recognize will become smoother and harder to detect, he predicts.
It used to be obvious when a journal was run by scam artists, he said. “They have that vibe” — such as poor English, a lack of articles and aggressive self-marketing.
Today, he said, some have become so much better-looking that it takes time and effort to determine whether it’s legitimate.
The predatory list once maintained by Jeffrey Beall of the University of Colorado is no longer active. Beall, who invented the term “predatory publisher,” stopped his public work last December. He hasn’t said why. The final version of his list is still archived.
The Citizen tried to contact a lawyer for OMICS but has not received a reply.
tspears@postmedia.com
twitter.com/TomSpears1
查看原文...
The “how” part is trickier.
The problem came to light again this week after an Indian company operating in Canada accepted for the second time a garbled, meaningless article it already printed once and retracted. The Citizen submitted it to test whether OMICS International actually reads material that it supposedly reviews.
OMICS has bought up a string of Canadian science journals, and will operate 22 conferences in Toronto and Vancouver this summer. But it accepts research on flying pigs.
David Sweanor, who teaches at the Centre for Health Law, Policy and Ethics at the University of Ottawa, hopes there will soon be software to detect articles published in fake journals, just as programs today can detect plagiarism.
“If the presence of such journals/conferences on a CV were treated akin to plagiarism, and it was known that (like plagiarism) they were easily detected, much of the viability of this business would likely disappear,” he said in an email.
“Just the possibility of such things would in the meantime be a huge deterrent to the use of these services. After all, we have seen the way past plagiarism or degree mill diplomas have come back to haunt people now that such things are easy to detect and this issue is taken seriously.”
He said the rule should also apply to conferences run by fly-by-night publishers, which sell their service to anyone who wants to acquire black-market academic credentials.
“Basically, this is just a matter of preventing something fraudulent. People are deceived. We would not be fine with that in consumer representations and certainly should not countenance it in science.
“I think there are too many signs of the ‘death of the Enlightenment,’ and it would be good to fight back.”
But who, exactly, is a predator?
The thousands of academic journals range across a continuum with some in the middle that are trying to do an honest job, says Tim Caulfield of the University of Alberta.
Caulfield has a Canada Research Chair in Health Law and Policy. He also campaigns against scam publishing, which he has nicknamed “quackajournals.”
There is discussion of “some kind of accreditation system where journals are assessed and they have to meet certain criteria to be considered an academic publication,” he said.
“There is a fascinating tension” between the desire to stop the fake journals and a broad wish to let new, open-access journals enter the business, he said.
Here’s the problem: Many traditional journals charge thousands of dollars a year for one subscription, and use a paywall. Some of these are accused of controlling the spread of knowledge, concentrating it in the hands of a small elite of companies such as Springer, Elsevier and Wiley.
Because of this, smaller journals that are free online have opened up, saying their “open access” will help spread knowledge. But some of the newcomers operate as predators.
If universities are too hard on the mid-range publishers, it’s possible this will hurt the legitimate part of the open access spectrum and concentrate more power in the top-ranked, elite journals, Caulfield said.
It’s very hard to stop low-level conferences that exploit young academics, he noted.
“That’s much more difficult to regulate.”
He says one way is for universities and others to draw up a description of the elements of a good conference, “and then junior scholars and postdocs and PhD students and graduate students can look at those and get a sense of whether this entity is worthwhile.”
The primitive scams that used to be easy to recognize will become smoother and harder to detect, he predicts.
It used to be obvious when a journal was run by scam artists, he said. “They have that vibe” — such as poor English, a lack of articles and aggressive self-marketing.
Today, he said, some have become so much better-looking that it takes time and effort to determine whether it’s legitimate.
The predatory list once maintained by Jeffrey Beall of the University of Colorado is no longer active. Beall, who invented the term “predatory publisher,” stopped his public work last December. He hasn’t said why. The final version of his list is still archived.
The Citizen tried to contact a lawyer for OMICS but has not received a reply.
tspears@postmedia.com
twitter.com/TomSpears1
查看原文...
