“Paging Dr. Fraud”: The Fake Publishers That Are Ruining Science - The New Yorker

"So they concocted Anna O. Szust, a candidate 'dismally inadequate for a role as editor,' they write in Nature, and sent her application to three hundred and sixty journals. A third went to accredited journals listed on the Journal Citation Reports, published annually by Thomson Reuters; a third went to journals listed on the Directory of Open Access Journals, which, like the J.C.R., requires its journals to follow certain ethical and quality guidelines; and a third went to the Wild West on Beall’s black list. Forty-eight journals accepted Szust as an editor—forty of them from Beall’s list. One offered to make Szust the editor-in-chief ('if you accept because we would like to honor you'); another, the opportunity to start and name a new journal; another, the option to organize conferences and take forty per cent of the proceeds, with the remaining sixty per cent going to the publisher. Several also required her to become a member—at a cost, in one case, of six hundred and fifty dollars. “I congratulate you and I am sure you to create extraordinary works in the journal,” another journal wrote to Szust. 'In any case, I will be honored tocorporate [sic] you, please let me know.'

These are hard times for proven facts. Years of data confirming the reality of climate change are being officially dismissed by the federal government, as are large portions of the scientific agencies that gave rise to them. As predatory journals and conferences continue to spawn, even scientists are having a hard time discerning the real from the fake. 'If you don’t have a good editor, then bogus papers or really poor papers get out there; they are out there,' Pisanski said. 'And that’s really scary.' Others are exploiting the confusion, disseminating worthless research that debunks climate change or purports to show the value of new drugs. 'Predatory and low-quality journals are granting the imprimatur of science to basically any idea for which the author is willing to write an article and pay the author fees,' Beall said last year, in an interview with the Scholarly Kitchen blog. 'This is polluting the scientific record with junk science, and demarcation has essentially failed. I believe this will worsen in time and the notion of what constitutes valid science and what isn’t will become increasingly vague.' In his conversation with me, Beall said, 'The biggest victim is science itself.'"