Tackling pharma’s predatory research problem - PharmaTimes

"Peter Cherry, PhD, Medmeme’s vice president, information systems, explores how pharma can identify predatory journals and conferences

High volumes of clinical and drug research data are being generated across the world every day. While this information can bring critical insights to pharma companies; it can also lead them down a wrong and costly path if it turns out to be fake or unsubstantiated. ‘Fake data’ has become increasingly prevalent throughout modern academia, where it can be difficult to distinguish genuine publications from predatory ones and legitimate conferences from those that exist purely to make money from those keen to ‘publish or perish’. On the issue of predatory journals, an article in Nature last year by Katarzyna Pisanski - a researcher in the School of Psychology at the University of Sussex, Brighton, UK, and the Institute of Psychology at the University of Wrocław, Poland - and colleagues said: “Thousands of academic journals do not aspire to quality. They exist primarily to extract fees from authors.” The Nature article added: “These 'predatory' journals exhibit questionable marketing schemes, follow lax or non-existent peer-review procedures and fail to provide scientific rigour or transparency. The open-access movement, although noble in its intent, has been an unwitting host to these parasitic publishers.”..."