stop the rot!

Several entries in Nature this week about predatory journals. Both from Ottawa Hospital Research Institute. One emanates from the publication officer at the Institute, whose role is “dedicated to educating researchers and guiding them in their journal submission”. And telling the tale of a senior scientist finding out a paper submitted to a predatory journal and later rescinded was nonetheless published by the said journal. Which reminded me of a similar misadventure that occurred to me a few years ago. After having a discussion of an earlier paper therein rejected from The American Statistician, my PhD student Kaniav Kamary and I resubmitted it to the Journal of Applied & Computational Mathematics, from which I had received an email a few weeks earlier asking me in flowery terms for a paper. When the paper got accepted as such two days after submission, I got alarmed and realised this was a predatory journal, which title played with the quasi homonymous Journal of Computational and Applied Mathematics (Elsevier) and International Journal of Applied and Computational Mathematics (Springer). Just like the authors in the above story, we wrote back to the editors, telling them we were rescinding our submission, but never got back any reply or request of copyright transfer. Instead, requests for (diminishing) payments were regularly sent to us, for almost a year, until they ceased. In the meanwhile, the paper had been posted on the “journal” website and no further email of ours, including some from our University legal officer, induced a reply or action from the journal…

The second article in Nature is from a group of epidemiologists at the same institute, producing statistics about biomedical publications in predatory journals (characterised as such by the defunct Beall blacklist). And being much more vehement about the danger represented by these journals, which “articles we examined were atrocious in terms of reporting”, and authors submitting to them, as unethical for wasting human and animal observations. The authors of this article identify thirteen characteristics for spotting predatory journals, the first one being “low article-processing fees”, our own misadventure being the opposite. And they ask for higher control and auditing from the funding institutions over their researchers… Besides adding an extra-layer to the bureaucracy, I fear this is rather naïve, as if the boundary between predatory and non-predatory journals was crystal clear, rather than a murky continuum. And putting the blame solely on the researchers rather than sharing it with institutions always eager to push their bibliometrics towards more automation of the assessment of their researchers.