.The UKZN Griot Of Predators and Creditors
February saw my offering two seminars in the School of Arts on how to spot a predator. The School framed them as: ‘Understanding the issue of “Predatory Publishing” and observed that the Department of Higher Education had sent back 95 UKZN journal articles this year; post-doctoral students are not having their contracts renewed; various investigations are underway throughout the University into staff who have (fraudulently) used articles in predatory publications for promotion or PU purposes, to mention just a few issues.’ This column has dealt with this topic previously [1].
Publication was less fraught in the good old analogue days. The rules of thumb were that you:
• submitted articles to the journals to which your university subscribed, which you read and in which your colleagues published
• considered journals published by, or known, to your disciplinary associations
• trusted bona fide publishers known to librarians and the scholarly communities to which you belonged
• checked the editors and editorial boards, and checked if any were known to you, your colleagues, thesis supervisors etc.
• Such journals did not panhandle for submissions, but issued calls for papers where appropriate.
• In contrast, the publishers of predatory journals leverage the ‘publish or perish’ syndrome; they milk the insecurities of emergent, undiscerning and impatient academics, and what’s offered is too good to be true. Identified by forensic Librarian Jeff Beall as “predatory”, on account of their aggressive recruitment of authors, theft of intellectual copyright, and lack of peer-review, this sector eliminates barriers to learnéd publishing. Where legitimate publishers have street addresses and named officers, all that these predatory digital addresses need is a computer, a website, a bank account and gullible authors.
The legitimate publication sectors include:
• journals published by international companies and/or disciplinary associations and indexed on WoS (now Clarivate Analytics) and Scopus, amongst others. Such journals may be owned by these publishers, but many are published in collaborative arrangements with independently owned journals
• regional journals published by disciplinary associations or other entities, often in partnership with local and/or international publishers
• national journals published by associations, university presses, university departments and individual collectives
• house journals where the majority of papers emanate from a single institution.
• All of the above now can be open or closed access, electronic and/or published in hard copy.
• The business models may vary (page charges, article processing charges, submission fees self-supporting, subvented, etc.).
In contrast, the illegitimate sector is characterised by:
• poorly constructed websites, error-ridden grammar, promising fast turn-around, limited information on assessment procedures, no editorial board, or a phantom or cloned list
• issuing of overly familiar personalised multi-coloured invitations appealing to the recipient’s vanity and ego
• use of fake metrics such as bogus journal impact factors (e.g. Global Impact Factor) and claims to being listed in indexing services that turn out to be fake themselves
• faking location, using non-institutional Yahoo, Google or generic addresses
• concealing editorial structure and selling peer review reports to authors to enable them to show evidence of the process
• including names of scholars on editorial boards that are either non-existent or deceased
• addressing an over-broad range of topics, and generic and often misspelled journal titles and use of motivational terms (e.g., Merit, Nextgen, Advanced, Platinum); branding of bizarrely-named publishers. Recent arrivals to my inbox include ‘International Journal of Latest Research in Science Technology (IJLRST)’ and ‘Degenerative Intellectual & Developmental Disabilities (DDID)’
• lack of added value: peer review, proof reading, author contracts, libel checks, marketing and promotion, copyright protection, archive back-up etc
• hidden publishing fees and surcharges, usually invoiced after submission
• retraction disallowed, except on further (extortionary) payment
• operating like retailers, offering freebees, discounts, payment plans, free memberships of phantom associations, invitations onto editorial boards, bulk buying, paying via PayPal to conceal destination of payment, totalling well over USD 1 000
• Some predatory journals have been listed on even WoS and IBSS. This occurred because of lax assessment procedures early on. Now, predators buy legit journals indexed by these sites, or clone them, and expand from 8 to 80 articles a number. These are the journals that have been recently identified by DHET. Since they were on the IBSS list, the seemingly weak link; there is now doubt that IBSS will continue to be one of the DHET qualifying indexes.
Academics are now examining the predatory sector more rigorously than did the pioneering Beall. Johann Mouton, for example, has taken Beall’s (often flawed) primary data, stripped it of its personalised exhortations, stratified the descriptive and judgemental data into “weak” and “strong” cases, and built the statistical methodology that was lacking in Beall’s own approach. We can thank Beall for identifying the early threats, the complicit journals and the publishers, and then his compiling of the primary (if dirty) data and then bringing this information to global attention. Mouton and Valentine, amongst others, have cleaned the data and taken the analysis through subsequent steps into a much more sophisticated way [2].
The counter-arguments for Predatory journals include:
• They contest Western hemisphere big publisher dominance
• They provide entry points to emergent scholars denied by the established journals
• They accept whatever is submitted, and therefore do not engage in “censorship”, racial or gender exclusion, or other discriminatory practices such as peer-review
But is this “science”? What would be the implications? It was in these kinds of below-the-radar journals in which the AIDS denialists first published their counter-narratives as legitimate properly peer-reviewed journals sensibly declined to take them seriously. The consequences of lack of peer-review and fast tracking opportunistic medical claims can be catastrophic, as was the case in South Africa during the early 2000s.
ASSAf, the NRF, DHET and university research auditors are now acutely alert to the predators and who writes for them. DHET may have temporarily rescinded its recent prohibition, but of one thing we can be sure – the titles listed will be removed for future returns and that the whole sector is now being much more closely monitored than previously.
References
[1] Of Publishing or Perishing, http://ccms.ukzn.ac.za/files/articles/30%20april%202014%20the%20ukzn%20griot.pdf
[2] Mouton, J. and Valentine, A. 2017. The extent of SA-authored articles in predatory journals, South African Journal of Science, 113(7/8). http://www.sajs.co.za/system/tdf/publications/pdf/SAJS-113-7-8_Mouton_ResearchArticle.pdf?file=1&type=node&id=35779&force
Keyan Tomaselli is a UKZN Professor Emeritus and is Distinguished Professor at the University of Johannesburg.
Disclaimer: The views expressed in this column are the author’s own.
Words: Keyan Tomaselli