Stop this waste of people, animals and money
David Moher, Larissa Shamseer, Kelly D. Cobey , Manoj M. Lalu, James Galipeau, Marc T. Avey, Nadera Ahmadzai, Mostafa Alabousi, Pauline Barbeau, Andrew Beck, Raymond Daniel, Robert Frank, Mona Ghannad, Candyce Hamel, Mona Hersi, Brian Hutton, Inga Isupov, Trevor A. McGrath, Matthew D. F. McInnes, Matthew J. Page, Misty Pratt, Kusala Pussegoda, Beverley Shea, Anubhav Srivastava, Adrienne Stevenset al.
06 September 2017
Predatory journals have shoddy reporting and include papers from wealthy nations, find David Moher, Larissa Shamseer, Kelly Cobey and colleagues.
Subject terms: Publishing Ethics Research management Lab life
Predatory journals are easy to please. They seem to accept papers with little regard for quality, at a fraction of the cost charged by mainstream open-access journals. These supposedly scholarly publishing entities are murky operations, making money by collecting fees while failing to deliver on their claims of being open access and failing to provide services such as peer review and archiving.
Despite abundant evidence that the bar is low, not much is known about who publishes in this shady realm, and what the papers are like. Common wisdom assumes that the hazard of predatory publishing is restricted mainly to the developing world. In one famous sting, a journalist for Science sent a purposely flawed paper to 140 presumed predatory titles (and to a roughly equal number of other open-access titles), pretending to be a biologist based in African capital cities1. At least two earlier, smaller surveys found that most authors were in India or elsewhere in Asia2, 3. A campaign to warn scholars about predatory journals has concentrated its efforts in Africa, China, India, the Middle East and Russia. Frequent, aggressive solicitations from predatory publishers are generally considered merely a nuisance for scientists from rich countries, not a threat to scholarly integrity.
Our evidence disputes this view. We spent 12 months rigorously characterizing nearly 2,000 biomedical articles from more than 200 journals thought likely to be predatory. More than half of the corresponding authors hailed from high- and upper-middle-income countries as defined by the World Bank.
Of the 17% of sampled articles that reported a funding source, the most frequently named funder was the US National Institutes of Health (NIH). The United States produced more articles in our sample than all other countries save India. Harvard University (with 9 articles) in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and the University of Texas (with 11 articles across all campuses) were among the eight institutions with the most articles. It is easy to imagine other, similar institutions coming up in a different sample. The point is, the problem of predatory journals is more urgent than many realize.
Articles in our sample consistently failed to report key information necessary for readers to assess, reproduce and build on the findings. Fewer than 10% of studies claiming to be randomized controlled trials described how patients were allocated to treatment groups; where blinding was possible, fewer than one-quarter noted whether patients and outcome assessors were blinded to group assignment.
Whether authors are being duped or are overzealously seeking to lengthen their publication lists, this represents enormous waste. Just the subset of articles that we examined contained data from more than 2 million individuals and over 8,000 animals. By extrapolation, we estimate that at least 18,000 funded biomedical-research studies are tucked away in poorly indexed, scientifically questionable journals. Little of this work will advance science. It is too dodgily reported (and possibly badly conducted) and too hard to find.
In our view, publishing in predatory journals is unethical. Individuals who agree to be studied expect that their participation could benefit future patients. Use of animals in biomedical research is rationalized on the assumption that experiments will contribute valuable information. Even assuming authors are publishing more than one paper from their study (and some are), they should be held to a higher standard of disclosure. Publishers, funders and research institutions must join together to prevent research from ending up in predatory journals.
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FREE FULL PDF COMPLETO GRATIS: Nature
