The Cavalier Daily - :: Predatory publishers may threaten academic integrity

"Predatory publishing manifests in various guises. Childress explained that like most individuals in academia, her exposure to predatory publishing occurs almost daily.

'Just last week, for example, one of my journal invitations ostensibly came from Monica Lewinsky,' Childress said.

Frustrated, academic researchers have tested the limits of predatory publishers over the years. In October 2016, Christoph Bartneck, Assoc. Prof. at the Human Interface Technology laboratory at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand, submitted a paper to a fraudulent conference — the International Conference on Atomic and Nuclear Physics — entirely written by the iOS autocomplete function. Within a few hours, the paper was accepted.

Predatory publishers, Butler affirms, are fraudulent. Often, these fake journals are comprised of fake editors and assert false impact factors.

'If you publish in one of these journals knowingly, then you're defrauding your institution,' Butler said.

Butler suggests a possible explanation for falling victim to predatory publishers is the 'publish-or-perish' outlook in academia. Many researchers advance in the academic marketplace by publishing heaps of papers, as quantity published has become akin to academic productivity, Butler explained. As a result, researchers publish papers after collecting minimal data, include multiple authors and reframe research questions.

'We have to get those lines on our CVs to get tenure,' Butler said.

Despite their destructive nature, predatory journals are not considered a major problem in the U.S. As BMC Medicine reported in 2015, Asia and Africa contribute over 75 percent of the fraudulent publishers and authors, while the U.S. contributes only six percent."