This month has seen two articles published and garner significant attention on the predatory publishing phenomenon, highlighting many of the problems it creates for scholarly communications and society in general. Both articles are well argued, making interesting points and revealing core truths about predatory journals. So, what’s the problem?
One of them is wrong.
Not fundamentally, heinously wrong at all, but with errors that, in different ways, undermine its efforts to place a spotlight on predatory publishing practices. One of the articles in question is published in an academic journal, and the other is on a news website. For both of them, one would of course hope they do justice to their professions by calling on industry knowledge to ensure their publication was error-free.
Peer review
The first article was published in early September in the Springer Nature journal Publishing Research Quarterly. The author Stuart Macdonald, who is based at the University of Leicester in the UK, widens the notion of predatory publishing and says mainstream publishers “emulate the predators in their rush to make money, whatever the cost.”
What follows is a greatest hits of everything that is wrong with the publishing industry, from the dominance of the big five publishers to the problems inherent in the Impact Factor. But when it comes to predatory journals, Macdonald just… gets it wrong:
- He claims that Cabells “recently discovered” 17,000 predatory journals, when in fact we have identified these over the best part of a decade, and the latest figure is 19,832
- He claims a “ready definition” of a predatory publisher is “everything an established publisher is not,” but this wilfully ignores the numerous, well-cited definitions of the phenomenon that appear in the literature
- Citing the infamous Bohannon sting, he claims established publishers as well as predatory ones “will publish just about anything,” a facile remark that ignores the millions of articles rejected by peer review every year
- He claims that the practice of ‘cascading’ articles between journals by the same publisher is something “not so very different from that followed by many a predatory journal” – this misrepresents both legitimate and predatory publishing practices
- He conflates the lack of serious peer review in many predatory journals with light-touch or scientific peer review conducted by megajournals – again, a misrepresentation of what actually happens, where predatory journals will rarely offer any peer review at all.
There are many more such inaccuracies or unfounded suppositions in the paper, including even getting the name of Cabells Predatory Reports database wrong. As with many studies on predatory publishing where Cabells’ articles are cited or its database referenced, a simple email or phone call could have improved the accuracy of the paper.
Journals vs journalism
That simple sense check is part and parcel of a journalist’s modus operandi, so one would hope that a second article looking at predatory journal behavior would be an improvement.
Well, in a word, yes.
Dutch journalist Stan van Pelt recently contacted Cabells for information on Predatory Reports and predatory publishing, so some of the details in his article published on the Dutch website Volkskrant are well-researched. Like Bohannon, van Pelt conducted a sting operation on a journal called Cases published by Magnus Med Club, a publisher whose journals also appear in Predatory Reports. The article, van Pelt reveals, is a nonsense study on telepathy in part written by AI.
The key point of the article is that predatory journals will publish anything for a small fee, with no checks involved – not like legitimate journals, as Macdonald argues. Because van Pelt went to expert sources, his article is much more persuasive, accurate, and a more valuable contribution to the literature on this particular topic.
Isn’t it ironic?
In his paper, Macdonald alleges that Cabells “struggles to find characteristics that are peculiar to predatory journals,” ignoring the fact that these criteria have successfully identified more than 19,000 of them since 2017. He highlights indicators Cabells uses, such as “no way to contact the journal” and claims this is also a characteristic of an established journal, which a) is a single, minor infringement among over 70 other criteria, and b) is again false as most journals will have full contact information for the editor, editorial board, publisher, and publishing company.
As a former journalist myself, I have sometimes laughed at the academic critique that research is ‘journalistic’ when it does not fulfil lofty academic standards. But sometimes, journalistic beats ‘academic’ hands down when it comes to uncovering the truth.
