6 Quick Tips on Predatory Journals: Show Me the Peer-Review

1. What is the role of medical journals?
   • Indispensable role as a purveyor of accurate knowledge and science.
   • Trusted source of information for healthcare professionals.
   • Pressure on medical journals to publish articles faster.
   • Money-making operations instead of information-sharing operations.
2. What is predatory open access publishing?
   • Charge publication fees without providing a high-quality peer-review.
   • Promote fabricated data, duplications (published previously), and academic plagiarism.
   • Erodes public confidence in the medical profession.
   • Cannot publish anything misleading that could cause harm.
   • Producing high-quality papers requires a large amount of human effort.
3. Why is it happening?
   • Pressure to publish articles as fast as possible.
   • Getting the information to the public when they need it.
   • Landmark papers often take years.
   • Truly emergent publications are rare.
   • Clarity is always more important than speed.
   • Process-changing papers need more rigorous review to ensure accuracy.
4. How do you recognize a predatory journal?
   • Look at the totality of what the Journal does.
   • Look closely at a journal’s editor and staff.
   • Is the owner also the editor in every issue?
   • Is there no editor identified?
   • What is the academic information provided regarding the editor—is it substantive?
   • Are there more than 3 editorial board members listed?
   • Review the journal’s business.
   • What are the policies regarding digital preservations?
   • Did it pop-up with a fleet of journals from the start or grow more slowly?
   • Is there sufficient information about the author fees?
   • Check the overall integrity of the journal.
   • Does its name match its vision and mission?
   • Is it falsely claiming a Thomson-Reuter impact factor?
   • Did they copy their author guidelines from another journal?
   • Do they have a robust retraction policy?
5. Who is fighting back?
   • Estimated 420,000 articles published from predatory journals in 2014.
   • In 2016, the Federal Trade Commission filed a lawsuit against several journals.
   • ‘Experiments’ submitting fake articles for submission to test the background vetting systems of hundreds of journals.
   • Lists available of predatory journals
   • Beall’s List
   • Cabell’s List.
6. Ending Advice
   • Do the best research that you can.
   • Find an important question, get the best tools, get answers, and move your field forward.
   • Despite the content of this article, it’s not where an article was published that is most important, but what was published.
   • Put your voice where you will reach the most people. Get it right, because someone will use your information to treat their next patient.

Bibliography

• Bauchner, H. & Drazen, J. The Future of Journal Publishing. (2017).
• Kolata, G. A Scholarly Sting Operation Shines a Light on ‘Predatory’ Journals. The New York Times (2017).
• Elliott, C. On Predatory Publishers: a Q&A With Jeffrey Beall. The Chronicle of Higher Education Blogs: Brainstorm (2012).
• Bohannon, J. Who’s Afraid of Peer Review? Science 342, 60–65 (2013).
• Open-Access Publisher Appears to Have Accepted Fake Paper From Bogus Center. The Chronicle of Higher Education (2009).
• Sanderson, K. Two new journals copy the old. Nat. News 463, 148–148 (2010).
• Caplan, A. The Problem of Publication-Pollution Denialism. Elsevier 90, 565–566 (2015).
• Beall’s List of Predatory Journals and Publishers – Publishers. Available at: https://beallslist.weebly.com/. (Accessed: 21st December 2017)
• Shen, C. & Bjork, B.-C. ‘Predatory’ open access: a longitudinal study of article volumes and market characteristics. BMC Med. 13, (2015).
• Straumsheim, C. ‘Predatory’ Publishing Up. Inside Higher ED (2015).
• Oransky, I. & Marcus, A. Are ‘predatory’ publishers’ days numbered? STAT (2016).
• U.S. government agency sues publisher, charging it with deceiving researchers. Retraction Watch (2016).
• Kluger, J. Dozens of Scientific Journals Offered Her a Job. But She Didn’t Exist. Time
• Society for Scholarly Publishing. http://www.cabells.org. Cabell’s Scholarly Analytics Available at: http://www.cabells.org/. (Accessed: 21st December 2017)
• Anderson, R. Cabell’s New Predatory Journal Blacklist: A Review. The Scholarly Kitchen (2017)

Article publié pour la première fois le 10/09/2018