Pagliari, Claudia

English

Discusses fraud and deception in digital publishing, with reference to fake and predatory journals, and considers the role of the academic 'social machine' in the governance of these new forms of knowledge dissemination

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     Edinburgh Research Explorer                                      Deception and Democracy in Digital Science PublishingCitation for published version:Pagliari, C 2015, Deception and Democracy in Digital Science Publishing. LinkedIn Publishing.<https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/deception-democracy-digital-science-publishing-claudia-pagliari>Link:Link to publication record in Edinburgh Research ExplorerGeneral rightsCopyright for the publications made accessible via the Edinburgh Research Explorer is retained by the author(s)and / or other copyright owners and it is a condition of accessing these publications that users recognise andabide by the legal requirements associated with these rights.Take down policyThe University of Edinburgh has made every reasonable effort to ensure that Edinburgh Research Explorercontent complies with UK legislation. If you believe that the public display of this file breaches copyright pleasecontact openaccess@ed.ac.uk providing details, and we will remove access to the work immediately andinvestigate your claim.Download date: 22. Nov. 2020Image from the Washington Post WebsiteDeception and Democracy in DigitalScience PublishingPublished on March 29, 2015It’s been obvious for some time in academic science that all is not right in the promisedland of online Open Access (OA) publishing. Rather than democratising thedissemination of research for the greater good of society - as the original visionpromised - it has in many cases resulted in a skewing of ‘today’s science’ towardsauthors and institutions who can pay the often-high fees required, and spawned a wholeindustry of hangers on and image spinners able to offer services-on-top, which hasfurther increased the wallet-linked digital science divide. As highlighted in an article inthis week’s Washington Post, it has also opened the door to a host of unethical andfraudulent practices. (1) The article points the finger to a scam emerging from a groupof Chinese universities who appear to have used an agency that supplies fake peerreviews to guarantee papers are judged fit for publication. All credit to Biomed Centralfor exposing this where others have failed. As the writer points out, this practice is rifeand growing worldwide, particularly in countries and institutions keen to break into theglobal market as serious players. Since many journals rely almost exclusively on authorfees, and given that many researchers don’t have the financial means to pay‘administrative costs’ of up to $1800 per published article, the temptation for somejournals to turn a blind eye to quality shouldn’t be underestimated. Indeed there’s a newand growing industry in manufactured scientific journals pushing ‘opportunities’ topublish at unsuspecting junior researchers, purely for the money - but that’s for adifferent article, this one is focused on the ones that should know and do better.Tipping the revenue-generation model away from subscriptions by respectedinstitutional libraries with strict quality control procedures, to authors and their hostorganisations with a vested interest in publishing, was bound to lead to problems. WeEdit articleClaudia PagliariProgramme Director, MSc in Global eHealth at The Univ…2 2 0are now caught in a situation where our own institutions sometimes have to pay threetimes: once to purchase the journals, once to pay the staff who produce the science, andonce to enable their staff to disseminate the science they have produced in those samejournals (its not supposed to work like this but in practice it does in many cases). Manyacademic institutions have failed to budget for this adjustment, leaving researchers tofend for themselves if they want their work to see the light of day in a half decentjournal, which is essential for their career advancement. An extraordinary double-bind.(Yes, I said double-bind, not double blind.)This is not to say that it doesn’t work all of the time - there are truly excellent examplesof rigorous online OA publishing - but the marketplace itself has created opportunitiesfor exploitation and bias that weren’t anticipated at the outset.Fraud is a tricky concept in science, where it straddles issues around the stealing ofpeople’s ideas, the manufacture of data, unfairly influencing editors and softer socialpressure towards positive peer-reciprocation. While commercial services that offereditorial help with article preparation may be a legitimate investment for those without anative fluency in the language of the journal, or as an aid to typesetting, brazenly fakingthe email addresses of respected academics and submitting reviews in their names, orwriting sweatshop articles for purchase by dodgy academics to pass off as their own hasshocked even the most cynical of us old guard.One of the arguments levied in commentaries like this, is that digital publishing hastaken the nepotistic academic rings we all knew about before and commoditised them innew ways that bode very badly for scientific freedom. Of course, mutual backscratching can be hard to disentangle from the genuine need to engage reviewers thatshare a set of theoretical, methodological or content skills, and the more specialist yourtopic is the more likely it is that you will be drawing on a small pool of experts knownto one another. After all, if people don’t know what you’re talking about or aren’tfamiliar with the relevant literature how can they possibly judge whether your paper isany good? Likewise there has always been an economic value attached to thesebehaviours; with some professional networks and journals associated with more rapidcareer advancement; but the fact that OA now involves direct payments to journals,coupled with the rising importance of online publishing as a social marketing tool foruniversities, raises the stakes appreciably.On the up-side, online OA publishing enables more people to read, scrutinise and learnfrom academic research, hence the movement to unleash journals from privileged payerinstitutions and into the hands of the majority. Potentially, the digitization of theseresources and their meta-data provides new opportunities to clean up scientific rings bymaking social networks and patterns of reciprocation easier to detect and more open tojustification which, as I’ve said, may be perfectly straightforward in many cases.Likewise, with the right level of academic oversight, internal governance andtechnological savvy, journals should find it increasingly easy to spot fake reviewers andcommercial off-the-shelf articles. The best ones are already investing in this sort ofnecessary activity, mindful that it is ultimately their own bottom line that will suffer ifthey don’t and thus risk losing credibility.Of course, journals cost money to produce, whether they are printed or digital, andsomehow this must be paid for, so some fair sharing of the burden is to be expected.However there must surely be something wrong with a business model that has arguablydiminished the nobility of scientific dissemination by converting learned journals intoonline advertising spaces, with price tags to match. There is a need to keep challenginga model with so much potential to increase inequity by preventing those with goodresearch but little money from publishing, while those with bigger checkbooks canafford to pay for even fairly insignificant or lower-quality work to reach a wideaudience, with all of the career advantages that offers. Of course, many argue, notunreasonably, that having a bigger budget as an institution or research group is itselfindicative of having better quality research, and that publication is the outcome of thatquality, but this rather misses the point.Either way, I hope the Washington Post article draws greater attention to the topic andmakes responsible editors more savvy to the tricks of this new ecosystem. But thisburden must also be shared with the academics and institutions feeding the journals,whose responsibility it is to co-manage this social machine. And let’s not forget thatmany academics are eschewing the commercial journals anyway, in favour of their owncommunity-driven, community-triaged, online dissemination vehicles, which of coursealso creates a need for effective self-governance.1. The Washington Post. Major publisher retracts 43 scientific papers amid wider fakepeer-review scandal. By Fred Barbash, published March 27th.http://wapo.st/19X2EjzKey words. Digital Science. Open Access Publishing. Democracy. Fraud. Ethics.Tagged in: open source, ethics, digital mediaClaudia PagliariProgramme Director, MSc in Global eHealth at The University of Edinburgh9 articlesLeave your thoughts here…Morna AtkinsonM.D. of EEEGood work  - there is a real problem with fraud within both the undergraduate andacademic society - maybe small, but defo there2yClaudia PagliariLike ReplyMorna AtkinsonM.D. of EEEThis is a real problem, especially when universities place a huge value in attracting inward investmentrather than on the research itself. The balance of universities as a business versus that of credible re-2yNewest2 commentsHelp Center About Careers Advertising Talent Solutions Sales Solutions Small Business Mobile Upgrade Your AccountLinkedIn Corporation © 2017 User Agreement Privacy Policy Ad Choices Community Guidelines Cookie Policy Copyright Policy Send FeedbackFun and Fallacy in Consumer GeneticsMarketingClaudia Pagliari on LinkedInPoliticians and the Privacy-TransparencyParadoxClaudia Pagliari on LinkedInTechnology, politics and power - Russiaplans new mobile OSClaudia Pagliari on LinkedInLooking for more of the latest headlines on LinkedIn?Don't miss more articles by Claudia Pagliari1search results, pushing previous boundaries needs to be auditable by those funding them. Which KPI'sshould be focussed on - is university promotion based on raising ex… See moreLike ReplyClaudia PagliariProgramme Director, MSc in Global eHealth at The University of EdinburghThanks Morna. The Queensland case is sobering and illustrates the power of rankonomics andhow it can corrupt even those at the top of our most prestigious universities, although I'd beloath to judge before the case is tried. As one lawyer commented - "If you really want to tackleresearch misconduct you have to think about why researchers might be tempted to cut corners… See more2yLike ReplyDiscover more storiesLanguage

Deception and Democracy in Digital Science Publishing

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Deception and Democracy in Digital Science Publishing

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