Curbing the cargo cults | About Hindawi

"How do you know which journals and publishers to trust? An update of the Principles of Transparency and Best Practice in Scholarly Publishing from a group of professional organisations – the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE), the World Association of Medical Editors (WAME), the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) and the Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association (OASPA) – this month should help. ...

Richard Feynmann in 1974 coined the term “cargo cult science” as an analogy to post-WWII Pacific Island “cargo cults” who built imitations of airstrips and control towers in the hope this would bring back the goods brought by the US military during the war. Cargo cult science looks like real science but lacks the rigor that makes science work. Similarly, “cargo cult journals” go through the motions, but for whatever reason lack the processes of a real peer-reviewed journal and hence enable those conducting cargo cult science. .... Open Access London created Publishing Integrity and Ethics (PIE) and many boast indexing in Index Copernicus or pretend to be indexed in Scopus or Clarivate’s Web of Science when they are not (despite this indexing being easy to check online)...."