» Lessons from the faux journal investigation The Occasional Pamphlet

"Investigative science journalist John Bohannon[1] has a news piece in Science earlier this month about the scourge of faux open-access journals. I call them faux journals (rather than predatory journals), since they are not real journals at all. They display the trappings of a journal, promising peer-review and other services, but do not deliver; they perform no peer review, and provide no services, beyond posting papers and cashing checks for the publication fees. They are to scholarly journal publishing what 419 scams are to banking.We’ve known about this practice for a long time, and Jeffrey Beall has done yeoman’s work codifying it informally. He has noted a recent dramatic increase in the number of publishers that appear to be engaged in the practice, growing by an order of magnitude in 2012 alone.In the past, I’ve argued that the faux journal problem, while unfortunate, is oversold. My argument was that the existence of these faux journals costs clued-in researchers, research institutions, and the general public nothing. The journals don’t charge subscription fees, and we don’t submit articles to them so don’t pay their publication fees. Caveat emptor ought to handle the problem, I would have thought.But I’ve come to understand over the past few years that the faux journal problem is important to address. The number of faux journals has exploded, and despite the fact that the faux journals tend to publish few articles, their existence crowds out attention to the many high-quality open-access journals. Their proliferation provides a convenient excuse to dismiss open-access journals as a viable model for scholarly publishing. It is therefore important to get a deeper and more articulated view of the problem.My views on Bohannon’s piece, which has seen a lot of interest, may therefore be a bit contrarian among OA aficionados, who are quick to dismiss the effort as a stunt or to attribute hidden agendas. Despite some flaws (which have been widely noted and are discussed in part below), the study well characterizes and provides a far richer understanding of the faux OA journal problem. Bohannon provides tremendous texture to our understanding of the problem, far better than the anecdotal and unsystematic approaches that have been taken in the past.His study shows that even in these early days of open-access publishing, many OA journals are doing an at least plausible job of peer review. In total, 98 of the 255 journals that came to a decision on the bogus paper (about 38%) rejected it. It makes clear that the problem of faux journal identification may not be as simple as looking at superficial properties of journal web sites. About 18% of the journals from Beall’s list of predatory publishers actually performed sufficient peer review to reject the bogus articles outright.Just as clearly, the large and growing problem of faux journals — so easy to set up and so inexpensive to run — requires all scholars to pay careful attention to the services that journals provide. This holds especially for open-access journals, which are generally newer, with shorter track records, and for which the faux journal fraud has proliferated in a short time much faster than appropriate countermeasures can be deployed. The experiment provides copious data on where the faux journals tend to operate from, where they bank, where their editors are.Bohannon should also be commended for providing his underlying data open access, which will allow others to do even more detailed analysis ..."