Sting Operation Reveals Science's Incredible Fake News Problem | Gizmodo Australia

lterrat's bookmarks 2017-03-23

Summary:

"A group of researchers sent phoney resumes to 360 scientific journals for an applicant whose Polish name translated to 'Dr Fraud'. And 48 journals happily appointed the fake doctor to their editorial board. 

This sting operation was the first systematic analysis on editorial roles in science publishing, adding concrete evidence to a problem past stings have shed light on. There are a whole lot of 'predatory' scientific journals out there, journals that take advantage of scientists' need to produce articles by publishing anything for a fee, without checking to make sure the paper is actually new research, worth publishing, and not completely inaccurate. But the problem is more than a juiced-up email scam (despite some probably-predatory journals looking essentially the same), and highlights many issues in today's scientific publishing industry. Those issues can result in important science not being published in real journals, or worse, bad, un-vetted science being published, scientists bolstering their resumes with crap, and an eroding public trust in science as an institution.

If we cannot trust the academic publishing system, who can we trust?

'What this boils down to is that scholarly papers published in these types of journals are far less likely to have undergone any kind of quality check, including proper peer review,' one of the scientists leading the sting from the University of Sussex, Katarzyna Pisanski, told Gizmodo in an email. 'It could result in (and probably already has) thousands of scientific articles that have essentially gone 'un-checked'... If we cannot trust the academic publishing system, who can we trust?'"

Link:

https://www.gizmodo.com.au/2017/03/sting-operation-reveals-sciences-incredible-fake-news-problem/

From feeds:

Open Access Tracking Project (OATP) » lterrat's bookmarks

Tags:

oa.journals

Date tagged:

03/23/2017, 21:47

Date published:

03/23/2017, 17:47