“Paging Dr. Fraud”: The Fake Publishers That Are Ruining Science (original) (raw)

In the fall of 2015, a young scholar named Anna Olga Szust began sending her C.V. and a cover letter to scores of scientific journals, with the hope of being named an editor. Editors play a vital role in the world of science publishing, checking the methodology of authors and managing the peer-review process; they are the thin red line between fact and fakery. At the same time, being appointed a journal editor is one of the many essential rungs in a scientist’s climb toward credibility and tenure.

Szust is—or was, until today—an associate professor at Adam Mickiewicz University, in Poznań, Poland. There’s a photo of her on the school’s Web site: she has short brown hair, is stylishly dressed, and sports a smile that is at best half-hearted. Szust’s scholarly interests range from the history of science and sports to the study of cognition, attractiveness, and motivation. She has delivered a few papers at conferences (“How to conduct research on the development of science”), given a lecture or two, and published a few book chapters, such as “Adult females (Homo sapiens) born during the spring season are more physically attractive,” in a compilation titled “Handbook of Attractiveness.” In her cover letter, though, Szust listed no published papers, and no prior experience as a reviewer or an editor.

“She would be a terrible option as an editor,” Katarzyna Pisanski, a researcher in the school of psychology at the University of Sussex, told me. Nonetheless, nearly fifty journals wrote back to Szust, sometimes within a matter of hours, to offer her a post. In a comment piece in this week’s issue of Nature, Pisanski writes at length about Szust and exposes her as a fraud—which Pisanski can state definitively because she and three colleagues invented Szust out of whole cloth, to draw attention to the proliferation of fake and disreputable science journals. Indeed, in Polish, the word oszust means “a fraud.”

For many years, academia was dominated by a reasonably sane number of established journals; these made money through advertising and by selling subscriptions to libraries, often at breathtaking prices. The rise of the Internet introduced the open-access model—journals such as Public Library of Science, or PLoS, which are free and widely available. Some of these publications, including PLoS, charge the author a fee for the privilege of having her work peer-reviewed and published.

The shift was largely welcomed, but as the number of O.A. journals grew, the potential for abuse became evident. By midway through the decade, researchers were assaulted by spam from journals of questionable legitimacy asking them to submit a paper or to be an editor, even in areas of research where they had no expertise. In exchange for a hefty fee, these journals—with names such as Journal of Clinical Toxicology and _Enzyme Engineering_—offered quick peer review, which often meant no review whatsoever. “They were journals I’d never heard of,” Jeffrey Beall, an associate professor and librarian at the University of Colorado, Denver, said. “Often they were based in West Africa or South Asia, with titles close to existing ones, and filled with grammatical errors. Basically, they were just pay-to-publish operations.” The barrier to entry couldn’t be lower, he said. “You just need a Web site and a journal title, and you can be in business in a day.”

Beall coined the phrase “predatory journal” to describe such outlets, and by 2009 he’d started blogging about them and keeping an online list of their names, as a public service to his colleagues. Between 2011 and this year, the number of suspect publishers on his list grew from eighteen to more than eleven hundred, and the number of stand-alone journals has jumped into the thousands. A Finnish study found that, between 2010 and 2014, the number of articles published by predatory journals grew from fifty-three thousand to almost half a million. Many predatory publishers also now run bogus conferences, often with names similar to existing ones, to dupe researchers into submitting papers for a nonrefundable fee. Last year, the Federal Trade Commission filed suit against the OMICS Publishing Group and two other companies, which together publish hundreds of open-access journals, for “deceiving academics and researchers about the nature of its publications and hiding publication fees ranging from hundreds to thousands of dollars.”

In the past decade, punking these journals has become something of a sport among scientists. In 2005, David Mazières, of New York University, and Eddie Kohler, of U.C.L.A., set the standard with a ten-page paper that they routinely sent back to O.A. spammers. Titled “Get Me Off Your Fucking Mailing List,” it consisted entirely of that phrase, repeated over and over. In 2014, Peter Vamplew, of Federation University Australia, submitted the same paper to the International Journal of Advanced Computer Technology, where it was quickly accepted. (Vamplew also received a bill for a hundred and fifty dollars.) Last October, Christoph Bartneck, of the University of Canterbury, in New Zealand, responded to an invitation from the International Conference on Atomic and Nuclear Physics—Bartneck’s specialty is information technology—with a paper he’d written by typing “atomic” and “nuclear” on his iPhone and using auto-complete suggestions to write the rest. (There’s a (http://www.bartneck.de/2016/10/20/ios-just-got-a-paper-on-nuclear-physics-accepted-at-a-scientific-conference/) on his Web site.) Three hours after submitting the paper, Bartneck received a message saying that it had been accepted.

One of the more popular spoofing tools is SCIgen, an algorithm created, in 2005, by a group of M.I.T. students that randomly tosses together words “to auto-generate submissions to conferences that you suspect might have very low submission standards,” as well as “to maximize amusement,” according to its Web site. The results typically look something like this:

Thanks to SCIgen, Marge Simpson and Edna Krabappel had their paper “ ‘Fuzzy,’ Homogeneous Configurations” published in the spurious Journal of Computational Intelligence and Electronic Systems and Aperito Journal of NanoScience Technology. In April of 2010, Cyril Labbé, of Joseph Fourier University, in Grenoble, France, used SCIgen to create more than a hundred papers by Ike Antkare, a make-believe author. Three years later, Labbé reverse-engineered SCIgen to create a tool that would detect papers made with it. He discovered that meaningless SCIgen papers had been published in more than thirty conference proceedings between 2008 and 2013, as well as by Springer, a major scientific publisher, and the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers, based in New York.