Anarchy and exploitation in scientific communication - University World News

"Another frightening and widespread development in the scientific communication industry is the emergence of ‘academic fakery’. On 29 December 2016 The New York Times devoted a long article to 'Fake Academe, Looking a Lot Like the Real Thing'. The article discussed the proliferation of fake conferences and fake journals.  International ‘academic’ conferences organised by shady companies in India and elsewhere charge participants high fees to attend meetings held in hotels around the world and accept all papers submitted, regardless of quality. Academics are sufficiently desperate to be able to put on their CV that they have had a paper accepted for an international conference that they pay for these useless events. There is also a proliferation of fake journals. No one knows how many of these exist, but their number is in the hundreds or even thousands. Jeffrey Beall, an American university librarian, has been tracking these fakes for years and last year listed at least 923 publishers, many with multiple ‘journals’, up from 18 in 2011.  In late 2016, Beall announced that he was no longer compiling his valuable list and it was removed from the internet. Although he gave no explanation, there is little doubt that he was threatened with lawsuits.  The fake journals are often published from Pakistan or Nigeria by invisible publishers and editors. They often claim to be peer reviewed and list internationally prominent academics on their editorial boards – people who seldom actually agreed to serve there and find it difficult to have their names removed when they request it. But almost all papers submitted tend to be published quickly once a fee, often substantial, is paid to the publisher.

What is to be done?

Without question, there is anarchy in the realm of knowledge communication in the 21st century. A combination of mass production of scientific papers, most of little scholarly value, tremendous pressure on academics to publish their work regardless of ethical considerations, the communications and publishing revolution made possible by the internet, the greed of the established multinational publishers and the huge new coterie of fake publishers have all combined to produce confusion.  The issues involved are complex – how to manage technology, accommodate the expansion of scientific production, rationalise peer review, break the monopoly of the multinationals and, of great importance, instil a sense of ethics and realistic expectations into the academic community itself.  The implications of these changes for journals published in languages other than English and in countries other than the main publishing countries are also unclear. It is likely they will be weakened by these global trends. Questions abound, answers are few. "