The Downside of the Shifting Paradigm of Scholarly Publishing in the Biomedical Sciences: Predatory Publishing

“The aim of science is not to open the door to infinite wisdom, but to set a limit to infinite error.”Bertolt Brecht, in The Life of Galileo (1940)1Brecht, B. Leben des Galilei (1940). Play translated by Laughton, Charles, 1959. In: Brecht's Works in English: A Bibliography. University of Wisconsin, Local Identifier: BrechtGuide.02570.bib.Google Scholar About 20 years ago, the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of Canada developed an educational framework for the training of specialists that emphasizes basic competencies. Known as the CanMEDS framework, it underscores the following six sets of competencies for the modern Canadian physician around the central role of medical expert: communicator, collaborator, leader, health advocate, professional, and scholar. As the latter, specialist physicians must be comfortable with lifelong learning and teaching, making informed evidence-based decisions, and mastering the principles and value system of medical research.2Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of Canada Scholar. Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of Canada, Ottawa, ON2017http://www.royalcollege.ca/rcsite/canmeds/framework/canmeds-role-scholar-eGoogle Scholar To do this effectively, physicians must identify the medical articles that are relevant to them and their practices. With more than 1.2 million scientific articles logged in PubMed annually, this is not a simple navigation task (there were less than 500 000 annually when the CanMEDS framework was conceived). During the sleepless days at the outset of medical training, one learns from teachers and peers about the importance of trusting the reputation of the main aggregators of so much medical knowledge (i.e., the general and specialty medical journals). The credibility that these journals enjoy comes from the simple concept of peer review, which has been the cornerstone of scholarly publishing for the last three centuries. It stems from the time-tested idea that constructive review by impartial peers can help authors add value to their scientific papers before they reach the public domain. The reader is oblivious to the paper's trajectory before it appears on the pages of the journal, trusting the journal in its role of enforcing a rigorous peer-review process that selects only the most relevant and valid research findings and makes them even stronger after revision. To an author comes the assurance that she or he will receive valuable feedback from experts that can be used in revising the work for resubmission to the same journal or to another one. To be sure, peer review has its drawbacks,3Rennie D. Guarding the guardians.JAMA. 1986; 256: 2391-2392Crossref PubMed Scopus (89) Google Scholar, 4Horton R. Genetically modified food: consternation, confusion, and crack-up.Med J Aust. 2000; 172: 148-149Crossref PubMed Scopus (42) Google Scholar and to paraphrase Sir Winston Churchill on his gem about democracy as a form of government, peer review is the worst process to adjudicate scientific findings, except for all other processes “that have been tried from time to time.” Surely, peer review fails from time to time, but it is the gatekeeper for what passes as science. It is what keeps a useful signal identifiable through so much noise that fills up the pages of scholarly journals. Thanks to thoughtful pleas for candour and reliability,5Ioannidis J.P.A. Why most published research findings are false.PLoS Med. 2005; 2: e124Crossref PubMed Scopus (5893) Google Scholar, 6Baker M. 1,500 scientists lift the lid on reproducibility.Nature. 2016; 533: 452-454Crossref PubMed Google Scholar the scientific community and the public are now much more aware that the ivory tower of academia produces a large proportion of irreproducible, invalid, false, or plainly irrelevant “scientific” findings. Therefore, it is not surprising that the hegemony of classical scholarly publishing has come under attack. The paradigm shift began some 15 years ago with the advent of the “open access” (OA) model for academic journals. The OA model democratized access to scientific information by shifting the costs of publishing from the reader to the author. The OA model was enormously facilitated by the advent of electronic publishing. As readers of JOGC are aware, the days of bringing home that glossy bound copy of the last issue of one's favourite obstetrics and gynaecological journal are long gone. We now read the articles we care about on a computer or tablet screen, perhaps even on a smart phone. University libraries no longer need to maintain large collections of periodicals, at a cost of several hundred thousand dollars annually for their journal holdings. As OA journals gain popularity and prestige (e.g., Biomed Central, Public Library of Science, eLife, and others) universal access to scientific findings is quickly becoming the new norm. Even classical subscription journals are adopting hybrid OA models or launching offspring journals that are entirely OA. In sum, OA brought agility, transparency, and equity to the work of scientists and consumers of scientific information. It let sunshine in on a paradigm that had existed for centuries. It gives anyone connected to the Internet easy access to a scientific paper and the opportunity to learn from it. OA is thus an irresistibly progressive and just concept that we should all embrace, this editorialist included. Unfortunately, the reality has been less than rosy, not as I just depicted. The relatively low cost of launching and maintaining a scientific journal in the era of electronic publishing combined with the economic incentive of charging OA fees for publishing papers was quickly perceived as a great business opportunity by groups that had no tradition or experience with scholarly publishing. The fact that researchers need to publish papers to move ahead in academia contributed a third sine qua non condition for the development of a perfect storm. Thus, some 10 years ago the world of scholarly publishing by reputable professional societies or established and experienced publishers that relied on the peer review model by scientists began to be polluted by a swarm of so-called predatory publishers. The term predatory publisher was coined by Jeffrey Beall, a librarian at the University of Colorado, who took upon himself the arduous and thankless job of curating a detailed list of such organizations.7Beall J. Predatory publishers are corrupting open access.Nature. 2012; 489: 179Crossref PubMed Scopus (503) Google Scholar Predatory publishers rely on email spam sent indiscriminately and repeatedly to thousands of researchers whose electronic addresses they harvested from the websites of serious academic journals or purchased from list providers. Knowing that most respected journals are based in North America, Western Europe, and Oceania, these publishers make their email invitations seem to come from legitimate addresses in these regions. In reality, however, most predatory publishers are based in India and China. The Western address is a simple office location in a commercial district or a suburban bungalow in an American city. These emails are idiomatically awkward and full of adulation and praise for the work of the recipients, in an attempt to make them think that the invitation to submit a paper was genuine and individualized. The opening sentences are usually folksy, likely to disarm recipients to make them think that the English-sounding name of the person signing the spam has the directness of prose that an American colleague would have. A subset of these malicious email invitations tries to lure recipients to serve as editors or members of an editorial board. A simple reply asking for more information may be a sufficient trigger for the malicious journal to hijack the name and photo of the unsuspecting recipient and paste it on its webpage listing the person as another supporting scientist. Predatory publishers sensed very early that researchers also need to divulge the fruit of their work in professional conferences. Thus began a second line of attack via the relentless promotion of vanity conferences that promise researchers, via emails like the ones just described, the “distinction” of being a keynote speaker or session chair. These conferences are often held in airport hotels and managed at a distance by the publishers with little or no staffing locally. The handful of “keynote speakers” take turns going to the podium and returning to their seats, while the session chairs try to keep the event running despite the lack of event organizers on site. At the end of one or two days, the delegates will not have learned much but will have spent hundreds of dollars in registration fees, travel, and lodging. Malicious invitations from predatory publishers and vanity conferences are not difficult to identify in the clutter of a morning email batch, and thus they seem innocuous and even comical. However, merely pressing the delete button will not make a more ominous fact disappear. What these publishers print in their pseudo-journals is unfiltered noise that not only is irrelevant or random but may even be pernicious. There is little (and light) or no peer review done because the objective of these journals is to collect the OA article processing fee. Obsessive conspiracy rants and anti-vaccination verbiage are common in these journals. Some scientists and science journalists have conducted sting operations to reveal the shady practices of these journals.8Bohannon J. Who's afraid of peer review?.Science. 2013; 342: 60-65Crossref PubMed Scopus (747) Google Scholar Yet, the enormity of the business opportunity keeps them alive and well.9Shen C. Björk B.C. ‘Predatory’ open access: a longitudinal study of article volumes and market characteristics.BMC Medicine. 2015; 13: 230Crossref PubMed Scopus (453) Google Scholar In fact, before being discontinued,10Silver A. Controversial website that lists ‘predatory’ publishers shuts down.Nature. 2017; (http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/nature.2017.21328)Crossref PubMed Google Scholar Beall's well-curated list had only 18 predatory publishers in 2011. This number rapidly increased to 1155 at the beginning of 2017, thus making them vastly more numerous than all the serious academic publishers combined. Because predatory publishers aspire to gain credibility and respect, they make false claims of having earned acceptable citation counts for their journals. Not surprisingly, a cottage industry of misleading citation metrics companies has sprung up; there are now more than 50 of them, at the last update of Beall's list. It is no shame to have fallen prey to these scammers. Physicians and scientists have too much in their minds and may in a moment of distraction accept an invitation thinking that it came from a reputable source. However, enabling an ongoing relationship with one of these journals or conferences is problematic. Simply read a random sample of papers from the journal and decide for yourself if you would want to have one of your own papers in that mix. By placing your work in a professional journal that upholds the highest standards of scholarship and rigorous peer review, you will be doing your part in maintaining the signal-to-noise ratio of medical science as high as possible. In doing so, and promoting good citizenship in science, you will contribute to elevating the CanMEDS ideal for Canadian medicine. The author is Editor-in-Chief of Preventive Medicine and Co-editor of Preventive Medicine Reports, both journals published by Elsevier. L’inconvénient du changement de paradigme dans l’édition savante en sciences biomédicales : l’arrivée des éditeurs prédateursJournal of Obstetrics and Gynaecology Canada Vol. 39Issue 7PreviewLe but des sciences n’est pas d’ouvrir une porte à la sagesse infinie mais de poser une limite à l’erreur infinie. Bertolt Brecht, La vie de Galilée (1940)1 Full-Text PDF

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