You are on page 1of 20

Sci Eng Ethics DOI 10.

1007/s11948-014-9521-4 ORIGINAL PAPER

Penetrating the Omerta of Predatory Publishing: The Romanian Connection


Dragan Djuric

Received: 13 October 2013 / Accepted: 18 January 2014 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2014

Abstract Not so long ago, a well institutionalized predatory journal exposed itself by publishing a hoax article that blew the whistle for its devastating inuence on the academic affairs of a small country. This paper puts that experiment in context, gives all the important details and analyzes the results. The experiment was inspired by well-known cases of scientic activism and is in line with recent efforts against predatory publishers. The paper presents the evidence in detail and uses it to analyze the publishing practices of the offending journal, using established criteria for assessing predatory publications. That journal somehow acquired an impact factor and charged money to publish thousands of scientic papers without any peer review. Since the impact factor is the major ofcial evaluation criteria for scientists in Serbia, these papers disturbed the whole academic evaluation process. Credentials acquired by those publications form a strong obstacle to institutionalized reasoned efforts against such practices. This case warns the whole community of the long lasting damage when journals with low publishing ethics are taken seriously. Keywords Predatory publishing Whistleblowing Scientic responsibility Peer review Publication practices Professional competence

Merriam-Webster online dictionary denes omerta as code of silence. According to Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Omerta), Omerta is a code of silence that seals lips of men even in their own defense and even when the accused is innocent of charged crimes. A Sicilian proverb says: He who is deaf, blind, and silent will live a 100 years in peace. In this article, the term is used metaphorically, as a literary gure. The article does not imply that any illegal or criminal activity has been performed by any party involved. D. Djuric (&) Department of Software Engineering, Faculty of Organizational Sciences, University of Belgrade, Jove Ilica 154, 11000 Belgrade, Serbia e-mail: dragandj@gmail.com

123

D. Djuric

Introduction In late summer of 2013, a prominent Serbian newspaper published an article announcing that a purely ctional scientic article has been published a few months before by the International Journal of Very Important Multidisciplinary Research (IJVIMR),1 apparently a scientic journal with a Thomson-Reuters Journal Citation Reports (JCR) impact factor. The article caught previously unthinkable mainstream media attention (considering that it was about an issue within the scientic community) for a reason: hundreds of Serbian scientists published hundreds of articles in that particular journal in only a couple of years. The article that has been announced proved that any hodgepodge has an excellent chance of being published in IJVIMR; for a small fee. This article is a thorough description, by the main contributor to the article in question, of the motivation, methods being used and immediate results achieved; enhanced by a discussion of future work. The subjects of the experiment and related investigation were not individual papers, but particular journals and the cottage industry they spawned (Sipka 2012). While each individual scientist should certainly maintain her own integrity (Fischer and Zigmond 2012), groupthink can lead to behavior that individual scientists would otherwise nd unacceptable (Sims 1992). Therefore, the subject of this work was the behavior that had spread through whole organizations, involving a large part of the Serbian scientic community, that threatened to become normal and even dominant. Although at rst those journals did not affect the community around software engineering, computer science, articial intelligence, and information systems much, over time the number of articles in these elds, became alarmingly large, adding to the already large number of management articles. There were many red ags, that included: those journals dedicated to elds completely unrelated to any area of computer science or management, were publishing many papers from these elds. How is that possible? How do the editors and reviewers who claim expertise in daisy gardening,2 for example, decide on a plethora of research that they publish in management or computer science, areas they have no connection with? This was not the rst socially responsible action against scientic negligence. For decades, scientists used cleverly planted hoaxes to expose what they consider deviant behavior of various parties involved in scientic research. Why use such unconventional methods? Probably because conventional methods had failed, so something unexpected with higher impact was needed; a sort of proof that no one can neglect. What differentiates this case from the others that will be described in Standing on the Shoulders of Giants section is the sheer proportion of the Serbian scientic institutions that were affectedthe whole system was compromised. The structure of this article is as follows. After this introduction, The Background section describes the important background information relevant to this research: the
1

International Journal of Very Important Multidisciplinary Research is, obviously, a pseudonym. The journal name, as well as the names of persons, dates and other identifying details have been changed.

Daisy gardening has been used in this paper for anonymization purposes, as a replacement for the actual scientic eld of the journal.

123

Penetrating the Omerta of Predatory Publishing

problem and denition of predatory journals and their unfortunate relevance to research and university-level education institutions in Serbia. Section Standing on the Shoulders of Giants describes some of the most effective methods of exposing such publications that were successfully used in the past, on which this research is built. The The Case of Evaluating Transformative Hermeneutic Heuristics for Processing Random Data section describes the experiment with IJVIMR in detail, and the analysis of the results. Section Evaluation describes an evaluation of IJVIMR according to previously enumerated criteria for determining whether a journal is predatory, and gives a brief overview of further development of the issue after the experiment was discovered and announced (by a third party, without our interference). The nal section delivers the conclusions.

The Background The traditional methods for measuring scientic output that are in use today leave a lot to be improved (Lane 2010). Regardless of whether the service is based on automated indexing, for example on the Hirsch index, or is partly curated by humans, like Thomson Reuters JCR is, they have one thing in commonthey can be manipulated. The widely used Hirsch index can be misleading in a lot of cases (Franceschini and Maisano 2011). It can be even purposefully manipulated to the absurd, as shown with the famous Ike Antkare hoax that exploited Google Scholar (Cyril 2010). Garelds journal impact factor (IF), used by JCR, has its own issues (Vanclay 2012); however, it is still the only variable signicantly related to whether a journal has a (written) research misconduct policy (Resnik et al. 2010). As the cases of IJVIMR (described in this article), TTEM, and HealthMED shows (Sipka 2012), JCR can also be heavily manipulated, although to a lesser degree and with labourous social engineering effort, which, unfortunately, makes it harder to be discovered and fought.

Standing on the Shoulders of Giants Humor and hoax as a form of scientic activism is not a new and unusual thing. For example, Hans Bethe, who won the Nobel prize in physics in 1967, had published a parody article on solid state physics in 1931. This might be an interesting trivia, but is poorly publicized to be a solid basis for this work. The most relevant recent research efforts that this research was based on are Alan Sokals hoax in Social Text (Sokal 1996b, 2010), SCIgen automatic computer science paper generator (Ball 2005), and the most successful non-existing scientist in the world, Ike Antkare (Cyril 2010). This section briey introduces the results obtained from these research efforts. The Sokal Affair In 1997, a prominent postmodernist journal Social Text, published an article called Transgressing the boundaries: Toward a transformative hermeneutics of quantum

123

D. Djuric

gravity, by a distinguished physicist Sokal (1996b). A few weeks later, Alan Sokal published an article in another magazine revealing that the previous article was a hoax, a parody of postmodern science criticism (Sokal 1996a). That article publicly exposed the meaninglessness of the jargon used by leading postmodernist critics of science, by showing that any meaningless text can be accepted and praised by the leading journal of that particular eld as long as it uses the community jargon and praises its leading authors. Sokal satirized the target genre by its own methods: the hoax article was a mixture of truths, part-truths, falsehoods, non-sequitors, and completely meaningless grammatically correct sentences (Sokal 1996a). Additionally, like the authors he was criticizing, he used many methods of demagogy rooted in logical fallacies. He also extensively cited leading postmodernist authorsall references and citations in the article are real. After Sokal revealed the hoax, the editors of Social Text tried to offer excuses, such as that they doubted the text themselves, but they published it because Alan Sokal was a distinguished scientist. Such excuses, if taken seriously, just enforce the point Sokal wanted to make: instead of publishing the article because it was faithful, true, and accurate to its subject, they published it because it was written by an authority gure. Thus, the hoax demonstrated that the eld it was targeting was prone to supporting pseudoscience as long as it is fashionable and in line with the leading authors ideas. While Sokal received wide public praise for his action, leading postmodernist authors that were the targets in the article tried to discredit his hoax for various reasons, one of which is quite relevant for the IJVIMR experiment: he was accused of having insufciently grasped the philosophy he criticized, rendering his criticism meaningless (Sokals analysis of this criticism can be found in Bricmont and Sokal (2004)). Had Sokal relied only on his own analysis of the articles from Social Text in his criticism, his opponents would easily brush him off as incompetent, for the authorities do not agree with him. His action effectively made him an authority in the eld, since his opponents previously recognized his competence by publishing his article in their leading publication. This is a strong argument in favor of our choice to publish a humorous article in IJVIMR. SCIgen Another widely publicized hoax, which is much more relevant for this experiment, is SCIgen, an automatic computer science paper generator. It was created by a group of MIT students who wanted to check the reliability of the reviewing process at a few conferences that they suspected to be bogus (Stribling et al. 2005; Ball 2005). SCIgen is a computer program written in the Perl programming language, which uses context-free grammar to create gibberish scientic papers. The papers appear to be genuine on the surface: they are full of technical jargon, use common ATEX-powered phrases, have graphs, diagrams, citations and have rst-class L typography. Laymen could be fooled in thinking that they describe genuine

123

Penetrating the Omerta of Predatory Publishing

scientic results only if they succumb to authority or can not see past the obscurity of the jargon. Any scientist, from any eld, should be competent enough to discover a SCIgen hoax; reviewers, if there are any, should be able to do the same. Unfortunately, as the SCIgen authors experiment and many subsequent experiments that used their program for the last 8 years has shown (see Stribling et al. 2005), there are numerous conferences and journals that have a weak reviewing process, or no reviewing process at all. Usually, those are spammy conferences and journals whose only purpose is to make money regardless of quality, and which are never taken seriously. However, the case of IJVIMR shows that the whole operation could be much less obvious, and the consequences much more serious. For the experiment described in this paper, SCIgen and the related experiments are the most adequate foundation of all that have been shown in this section, since it provides a good test for the quality of the reviewing process. Moreover, it is a rather resourceful treasure-trove of typical jargon used in scientic papers that can be used to facilitate brainstorming of man-written hoax papers. Ike Antkare: The Worlds Most Successful Fictional Computer Scientist If we searched those citation services that use data provided by Google Scholar for the most inuential computer scientist of the modern world, we would be astonished to discover that, judging by hm index , it is Ike Antkare (Cyril 2010). By the same metrics, he is the sixth most inuential scientist in all disciplines, and by other commonly used indexes he is not far down the line. Yet, you have probably never heard of him, which is not surprising, since he is ctionalall 99 of his highly inuential papers are the product of SCIgen, and use blatant auto-citation abuse to build his citation index. As shown in the Ike Antkare study, metrics for measuring scientic results can, and will be abused if no audit and control is set in place. That does not mean that the metric is meaningless, or that services that use it cannot be trusted more than a random guess; but it is a loud warning that they should only used as a necessary condition for deciding on the research quality, which shall also be augmented by human expert review or some other form of sufcient condition. The relevance of this case for the topic at hand is in showing the vulnerability of such metrics, among them Thomson-Reuters JCR. However, although vulnerable, impact factor is still one of the best objective metrics available for judging the journal quality. The point is that it has to be narrowed, by removing publications that use dishonest techniques to manipulate the impact factor, and that it should be used while paying attention to details. Predatory Journals Traditionally, reputable scientic journals are mostly nanced by subscriptions by institutions, corporations, and individuals. Only 17 % in the elds of science mandate charges to the scientists for publishing their research, and these are usually

123

D. Djuric

open-access journals. Depending on the eld, charging for optional services like exceeding page limit or color print is more common, but it is not mandatory (Curb and Abramson 2012). Journals from JCR from the elds of software engineering, computer science, articial intelligence and information systems, typically do not mandate charges (excluding optional charges) from the author for publishing an article, unless they are open-access.3 Open access journal publishing is a new model of scientic publishing that shifts the publication costs from the readers to the authors of the articles, in order to provide a wider access to the publication, thus increasing the chance for citations (Van Noorden 2013). The model has proven successful, although it has its own challenges (Laakso et al. 2011). The most annoying issue with open-access journals is that they have attracted scam artists that have seen a business opportunity and proliferated countless spam scientic open access journals (Butler 2013). Those are the most numerous subtype of predatory journals, journals of questionable or low quality, whose main (and usually the only) purpose is to make money, rather than to disseminate high-quality scientic research results (Beall 2012b). In most cases, it is easy to determine that a journal is predatory, but there can be some borderline cases, and we need a precise method of determining whether a journal is predatory or not. Bealls List of Predatory Publishers is the most current and continuously maintained list of openly predatory publications (Beall 2013). The list is created following 25 criteria for determining whether a publication is predatory (Beall 2012a). Some of the criteria are not relevant in this case, since they are related to multiple-journal publishing. The 22 criteria relevant for the case of a single journal are: Editor and Staff: Criteria regarding the editor and staff: 1. 2. 3. 4. No single individual is identied as the journals editor. The journal does not identify a formal editorial/review board. No academic information is provided regarding the editor, editorial staff, and/or review board members (e.g., institutional afliation). Evident data exist showing that the editor and/or review board members do not possess academic expertise to reasonably qualify them to be publication gatekeepers in the journals eld. have board members who are prominent researchers but exempt them from any contributions to the journal except the use of their names and/or photographs.

5.

Business management: The publisher: 1. 2. 3. Demonstrates a lack of transparency in publishing operations. Has no policies or practices for digital preservation. Depends on author fees as the sole and only means of operation with no alternative, long-term business plan for sustaining the journal through augmented income sources.

This is only anecdotal evidence, but it is telling.

123

Penetrating the Omerta of Predatory Publishing

4.

Provides insufcient information or hides information about author fees, offering to publish an authors paper and later sending a previously-undisclosed invoice.

Integrity: Characteristics of predatory journals: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. The name of a journal is incongruent with the journals mission. The name of a journal does not adequately reect its origin. The journal falsely claims to have an impact factor, or uses some made up measure (e.g. view factor), feigning international standing. The publisher sends spam requests for peer reviews to scholars unqualied to review submitted manuscripts. The publisher falsely claims to have its content indexed in legitimate abstracting and indexing services or claims that its content is indexed in resources that are not abstracting and indexing services. The publisher dedicates insufcient resources to preventing and eliminating author misconduct, to the extent that the journal or journals suffer from repeated cases of plagiarism, self-plagiarism, image manipulation, and the like. The publisher asks the corresponding author for suggested reviewers and the publisher subsequently uses the suggested reviewers without sufciently vetting their qualications or authenticity.

6.

7.

Other: A predatory publisher may: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. Publish papers already published in other venues/outlets without providing appropriate credits. Use language claiming to be a leading publisher even though the publisher may only be a startup or a novice organization. Operate in a Western country chiey for the purpose of functioning as a vanity press for scholars in a developing country. Do minimal or no copy-editing. Publish papers that are not academic at all, e.g. essays by laypeople or obvious pseudo-science. Have a contact us page that only includes a web form, and the publisher hides or does not reveal its location.

The journal IJVIMR will be examined below based on these criteria to determine whether it can be deemed predatory. Why Predatory Journals Were (and Still Are) Relevant in Serbia For years, several allegedly scientic journals from Southeast Europe, popular with Serbian authors, have had been repeatedly accused of being predatory. The presence of a few misbehaving journals among many that exist would not have caught much attention had it not been for the fact that they were somehow given a Thomson Reuters JCR impact factor (IF) (Roth 2005), which is the most important, if not the only, objective criteria ofcially required by reputable universities in Serbia for

123

D. Djuric

awarding PhDs, tenure-track and tenured professorships (Univerzitet u Beogradu 2008; Nacionalni savet za visoko obrazovanje 2007). At rst, most Serbian scientists ignored such journals, for they were suspicious from the start. Some, however, who have previously had trouble publishing in journals with an IF, or who were not experienced and well-informed about publishing ethics and various issues with bogus journals, discovered with time that there is a not so slow and not so painful method to achieve the required publication quota and get the promotions to higher academic positions. The stage was set in 2007, when, after several years of debate, Serbian state universities introduced new requirements for awarding PhDs, professorships, and tenures. For example, the largest university in the region of former Yugoslavia (23,000,000 inhabitants), the University of Belgrade, to prevent the arbitrariness in older procedures, introduced the following necessary conditions to academics working in the elds of science and technology (Univerzitet u Beogradu 2008): PhD thesis: The candidate has to have an article about the topic of the thesis published in a journal that is indexed in Thomson-Reuters JCR and has an impact factor. Assistant professor: One article published in a JCR-indexed journal with impact factor. Associate professor: Two additional such articles (three in total). Tenured professor: Two additional such articles (ve in total). PhD thesis advisor: Five such articles. Additionally, the Ministry of Science (later incorporated into the Ministry of Education) introduced new categories for researchers on government-sponsored research projects, where articles published in journals with an IF was an important requirement for individual participants, that were given many more points than nonJCR indexed journals. Such rules have quickly become a huge challenge for a large proportion of Serbian university teaching and research staff. Not only that Serbia spends a tiny amount (less than 0.5 % in 2000s) of its small GDP ($4943 GDP per capita in 2012.) on its research and development sector, so naturally most research is practically funded on personal enthusiasm, but many researchers simply do not have experience of publishing in respected international journals, or visiting international conferences. This created a huge publish or perish pressure. Some researchers managed to meet such quotas despite the extremely unfavorable conditions, but many had to resort to alternative solutions. The most notorious, at rst, were two journals published in Bosnia and Herzegovina: Technics Technologies Education Management (TTEM) and HealthMED, which, according to a detailed bibliometric research study of their editorial practices (Sipka 2012), formed a citation cartel (relying primarily on autocitations and inappropriate mutual cross-citations) in addition to being published by the same publisher run by the members of one family. They had previously started as regular journals, and in the second half of the last decade were included in the ThomsonReuters JCR, together with a batch of East-European journals. A few years later they were given an impact factor (HealthMED in 2008 and TTEM in 2010).

123

Penetrating the Omerta of Predatory Publishing

The publisher of TTEM and HealthMED was, apparently, one of the rst to see the business opportunity in Serbias newly created demand for papers in journals with an IF, and started to accept papers of questionable quality. Their main (and now it appears to be the only) criteria for publishing started to be the payment of the publication fee. As the example of these two journals spread among the Serbian scientic community, the demand started to increase, which led to a steep increase in the number of articles published annually and the publishing charge increase by those two journals.4 For example, the rst volume of TTEM, published in 2006, contained 2 issues, and 11 articles in total. Volume 7 (2013) contained 4 issues, with 235 articles. Almost all the articles were written by authors from former Yugoslavia, predominantly by Serbian authors. If the practices of TTEM and HealthMED seem strange, they were quickly eclipsed by IJVIMR, an international journal published in Romania, indexed in JCR, with an impact factor, whose publishing practices were investigated in this experiment, and have been described and analyzed in The Case of Evaluating Transformative Hermeneutic Heuristics for Processing Random Data section.

The Case of Evaluating Transformative Hermeneutic Heuristics for Processing Random Data Preparing the Experimental Paper When the author rst got the idea for the experiment that will put IJVIMR practices to the test, he did not have much information. His co-authors and himself only noticed that many articles from different areas related to computer science were being published in a daisy gardening journal, which was not very logical. They were curious to know more, since it seemed from the number of articles published by Serbian researchers that IJVIMR is the strongest pillar of Serbian science. Naturally, the author rst tried to get the ofcial data from the publishers website. It was not easy, since the site was poorly designed, with no information in English, so he had to use the Google Translate service. He found the archives that offered past issues for download. After examining the archive and a content of a convenience sample of a few issues, the following was found:
4

there were 12 regular and many special issues per year; each issue contained about 70 papers; not only there were many computer science papers, there were papers from all areas of science; the number of papers from the eld daisy gardening was comparatively low; the majority of papers were by Serbian authors and the rest by Romanians (here and there, there was a paper from China); only paper abstracts were available.

Ofcial information is not fully transparent, the fee ranged from around 250 EUR in the beginning to around 1200 EUR in December 2012.

123

D. Djuric

The information was alarming, so he checked the editorial list. There was only a list of persons and afliations, the areas of expertise were not indicated. He performed a search with a convenience sample and it was difcult to determine the expertise. The only thing the author could say for certain is that technology (probably gardening) was dominant. During the investigation, it was found that a number of the authors colleagues had published one or several articles in IJVIMR and a few previously mentioned journals. They approached some of them and asked for their experience including how long the process lasts, how detailed are the reviews, and whether there are any publication charges. Unfortunately, at the time, the colleagues could not remember anything, since they had published their article at least a few weeks or even a few months before! They were also not able to search their e-mail archives for the correspondence with the editors, or to nd any of the source documents, since the preparation, correspondence and payment had always been handled by the other coauthor. The author checked the IJVIMR archive again, and, fortunately, found that there was a complete issue 7/2012, available for download. He read some articles related to computer science and determined that they are of a rather low quality. That indicated that the review process was not very strict, but it was not sure whether the editors at least checked for hoax articles. Therefore, the author was in doubt whether the journal should be tested by a downright bogus Lorem ipsum nonsense, middle-ground SCIgens completely computer-generated paper, or a more subtle approach in the line of Alan Sokal. Moreover, if the least subtle Lorem ipsum5 article had been detected with a simple glance to the text, it would have warned the editors of the experiment, so they might have put the authors on their blacklist, and informed other predatory journals of their intentions. Therefore, the authors opted for an approach that falls between SCIgen and Alan Sokals hoax: they wrote the article themselves, but tried to put as many obvious hints that the article is not really a competitor for the Nobel prize. The hypothesis was straightforward: if there is any review at IJVIMR, the experiment will be easily detected and the article refused. If the article is published, it means that IJVIMR does not conduct reviews. The authors also had to take care of their reputation: if the article was published, it should be obvious as to what was its purpose. Here are the techniques that have been used, with example quotations from the article (Djuiric et al. 2013): Misspelled author names The authors did not want the article to be tied to their names in bibliographic databases. They misspelled Dragan Djuric as Dragan Z Djuiric and Boris Delibasic as Boris Delilbasic. Stevica Radisic opted for his real name. Funny author portraits Wigs and false mustache are a classic technique for funny portraits, although it is not sure how it worked in this case since some regular IJVIMR authors also appear to send amusing photographs.
5

A group of words in Latin starting with Lorem ipsum, used by publishers to test the appearance and practicality of a publication proposal.

123

Penetrating the Omerta of Predatory Publishing

Informative abstract The abstract should subtly indicate that the article is important only in itself: The improved understanding and proper application of simulation models for various domains, from e-government to e-learning is an appropriate riddle. In this signicant paper, we increasingly understand how randomized heuristic algorithms could be unexpectedly applied to the intuitive processing of random data in a novel way. While such a claim might seem counterintuitive, it is supported by prior relevant work in this thriving eld. We describe a robust conceptual tool for solving this promising challenge using transformative hermeneutic heuristics for processing random data. Accordingly, the main focus of our work is, obviously, the evaluation of such methodology on an encouraging and intriguing subject of nding in which ways people in an insufciently developed country see the aid provided by European Community. This illustrative case clearly demonstrates our profound approach, and, thusly, is a compelling foundation for future improvements of the methodology. In fact, the main contribution of our work is that we argue that although a random process might carry a slight risk of being insufciently relevant for the problem at hand, the solution to any such conundrum could be surely looked for in a multidisciplinary approach. Everything being said should be true (but not very useful) Proper care should be taken of people who might not like the experiment and try to accuse the article of being dishonest. Therefore, the article relies on truisms, and such constructs. If the article claims that X is a riddle or that the solution to Y could be looked for in Z, or that A might lead to a solution for B, how could the critics prove the contrary? This is a common defense strategy of authors of bogus papers, so I thought: if you cant beat them, join them. Consider the following paragraphs: The very existence of many approaches gives possibilities for new theories to emerge. As all theories might have aws it is not unexpected to question any of these. It is very expected that most of the results gained from scientic research would have to pass rigorous tests. or The rst experimental results came from 2500 trial runs, and were not reproducible. The next batch of results come from only 50 trial runs, and were not reproducible. Continuing with this rationale, the many discontinuities in the graphs point to improved precision introduced with our decision tree algorithms. Such a hypothesis at rst glance seems unexpected but fell in line with our expectations. As hypothesized, the nal run was sufciently consistent, which shows the useful convergence of our heuristics. Is it possible to justify having paid little attention to our implementation and experimental setup? Yes, but only in theory. Praising our research That was a signicant paper, the authors were solving a promising challenge in a thriving eld, creating a compelling foundation for future improvements, and they wanted to communicate that clearly to their readers.

123

D. Djuric

Overusing the scientic jargon SCIgen proves to be a ne treasure trove of common jargon. The authors used its suggestions, and also allowed their own creativity. Random stylistic and grammatical errors Seeding the article with words and phrases such as thusly, or and, however or furthermore, in addition makes it more fun, without interfering with rigor, if there is any. Explaining the silliness of the research There should be many sentences that clearly state the purpose of the article, such as: Following the usual and by now well-spread practice in many academic circles of producing insignicant research papers of great importance to pseudo science, our research aims at identifying ground truth for undecidability, and, however, this research is principled. Rather that rely on the overly-reasoned, wide-spread use of scientic apparatus, without consideration of randomness, we invent the following architecture. or After thorough literature review and disseminating many theories, we might propose a new theory, possibly superior to all others. The main concerns would be that many of the theories widely accepted by the community will be thoroughly reviewed after facing the ndings of hermeneutic heuristics for processing random data. Using and combining obscure concepts Transformative Hermeneutic Heuristics could actually have meaning, although one might need to use hermeneutics itself to nd it and it could be whatever one thinks appropriate (or nothing at all).6 Using various inside jokes Error! Reference source not found. Using colorful but meaningless diagrams Scientic articles often use diagrams in the spirit of a Chinese proverb that one picture is worth a thousand words. Since the words in the article should introduce as much confusion as possible, diagrams should emphasize that even more (Djuiric et al. 2013). Seeding funny references References offer an excellent place for indulging in humor and creativity, although some real references offer a tough challenge. If we compare the following two references from the paper, it is obvious which one is real: K. Peano, D. P. Suzuki, B. Shannon, H. Supaporn. Some reversibility results for commutative, continuous, simply pseudo- intrinsic categories. Transactions on mathematical foundations of management, 5(57) pp. 55-68, 2007. and M. Ebibi, B. Fetaji, M. Fetaji. Expert Based Learning (EXBL) Methodology for Developing Mobile Expert Learning Knowledge Management Software System, TTEM, 7(2) pp. 864- 875, 2012.

The meaning of hermeneutics is the theory of text interpretation, especially the interpretation of biblical texts, wisdom literature, and philosophical texts.

123

Penetrating the Omerta of Predatory Publishing

There are many more subtle techniques that the authors usedreading the whole article a couple of times is recommended. Ofcially, it is difcult to nd since at this moment it is not clear whether IJVIMR is still operational. Fortunately, the demand for the article was so high that someone7 bought it and put it online at http:// www.scribd.com/doc/167706815, where more than 85,000 readers accessed it in the rst 2 weeks.8 The Editing Process of IJVIMR When the paper was ready, the author wrote an e-mail message, attached the source document, and included all of the e-mail addresses of IJVIMR staff that he could nd in the recepients list, since there were no clear instructions on their web site. The message was sent on December 17th 2012. at 17:30 GMT?1.9 The very next morning, the author found the acceptance message from Aladin Popescu, the Senior Editor of IJVIMR in the mailbox. The editors obviously recognized the importance of that research and had given it an expedited treatment, of only 2 h and 40 min since the start of the workday for both the reviewing process and the necessary administration procedures. The acceptance message was received on December 18th, 2012. at 10:40 a.m. It is so unbelievable how an ofcial correspondence can look like, that it has to be shown it in Fig. 1 as an important piece of evidence relevant for predatory journals.10 The author was lucky that he rescued it from the spam folder, where it had been directed by spam lters, probably because its features have striking similarities with Nigerian business proposals, fabricated East-European teenage love letters, and win free iPhone solicitations. Attached with the message was an invoice, with a rather confusing specication of the products and services for which they charge and the amount to be paid (Fig. 2).11 Naturally, no reviews were included, since the paper was awless. The author checked with the accounting department, and there were technical problems with the invoice, which did not clearly specify that they were paying charges for paper publication. He sent an e-mail message to IJVIMR asking for some sort of document that will clearly specify the items to be paid for and got the following response on December 21st 2012:12 Dear Sir, My name is Aladin Popescu and I send this email in name of the IJVIMR editorial. After these addition please consider this email as editorial staff accept for publication of this paper. In this aspect we dont accept any
7 8

The authors have nothing to do with this action, nor they know who made the article publicly available.

The article also inspired a cottage industry of video parodies, such as https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=zzP6RtBspNA and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b3eeeGvWr-8.

9 Romania is in a different time zone, GMT?2, so it was already 18:30 in the ofces of IJVIMR. The editors had already nished their work day. 10 11

Sensitive but unimportant data, such as bank account numbers, has been marked out in all documents.

It appears from the invoice that one can order the authors for 290 EUR. The reader should be assured that such transaction is not possible.
12

The message is quoted verbatim, the bold formatting appears in the original message.

123

D. Djuric

Fig. 1 The overnight acceptance message, in all its colorfulness

modication of this paper (authors or text content) after the date of this email. By payment of proforma invoice you conrm that the researches from this article are your personal work. Your article will be published in IJVIMR no. 6-2013 If we dont receive the scan of payment for your article, the article will be rescheduled in next issue. Regards, Aladin Popescu The certicate of publication scheduling shown in Fig. 3 was attached to the message, and it was ne for the accounting department. A few days after, the author had the proof of payment that he sent to IJVIMR and got the response that the article is scheduled for issue no. 6 2013. All he had to do is to wait for some IJVIMR readers to discover it upon publishing. That important article was indexed in EBSCO and available at http://connection. ebscohost.com/c/articles/87565148 as evidence. However, after the hoax publicity, IJVIMR forged the issue 6/2013 and replaced the article with another article, without an ofcial announcement. Fortunately, the Web Archive service recorded a snapshot of the original link at 29. September 2013., so that evidence has not been destroyed and is forever available at http://web.archive.org/web/20130929152251/ http://connection.ebscohost.com/c/articles/87565148/evaluation-transformative-her meneutic-heuristics-processing-random-data. The experiment conrmed the starting hypothesis. On the basis of all this evidence, we have to conclude that IJVIMR does not conduct any scientic review of the articles it published, and it can not claim that it is a scientic peer-review journal.

123

Penetrating the Omerta of Predatory Publishing

Fig. 2 Invoice

123

D. Djuric

Fig. 3 Certicate

123

Penetrating the Omerta of Predatory Publishing

Evaluation This section contains the evaluation of the practices of IJVIMR in the case of the experiment described in the previous section, according to the criteria for identifying predatory journals, described in Predatory Journals section. Editor and Staff: Two criteria (4, 5) of predatory journals regarding the editor and staff have been completely met, whereas three (1, 2, 3) have been met in part: 1. 2. 3. 4. This journal has information about the journals editor in charge, although his afliation is missing from the journals impressum. This journal does identify a formal editorial board, although it is not clear who are the reviewers. For this journal, some academic information is provided regarding the editor, editorial staff, and/or review board members, although it is not complete. Evident data exist showing that the editor and review board members do not possess academic expertise to reasonably qualify them to be publication gatekeepers in the journals eld, when we consider that it publishes articles from all areas of science indiscriminately. Judging by the number, scope and quality of the articles, it is unlikely that (numerous) board members contribute to the journal except the use of their names and/or photographs.

5.

Business management: All criteria of predatory journals have been met by IJVIMR: 1. 2. IJVIMR demonstrates a lack of transparency in publishing operations. Reviews are not sent to the authors, and there is no public information about the charges. It seems that this journal has no policies or practices for digital preservation. Their web site has not been operational since the week after the discovery of the affair, an there is no access to their archives. IJVIMR clearly depends on author fees as the main (maybe even the only) means of operation. IJVIMR hides information about author fees.

3. 4.

Integrity: Four characteristics of predatory journals have been met (1, 2, 3, 6), two do not apply (4, 7), for the lack of any peer review, and one (5) is not met: 1. 2. The name of the journal is incongruent with its mission. The name of the journal does not adequately reect its origin and scope. In the name it is International, but in practice, there are only a handful of articles outside Serbia and Romania. After the journal had been dropped from JCR in July 2013, it continued to falsely claim to have an impact factor (on its website). The publisher does not send spam requests for peer reviews to scholars unqualied to review submitted manuscripts, but this experiment indicated that there was no peer review at all. The publisher has its content indexed in legitimate abstracting and indexing services, so this condition is not met.

3. 4.

5.

123

D. Djuric

6.

7.

This publisher clearly dedicates insufcient resources to preventing and eliminating author misconduct, to the extent that the journal or journals suffer from repeated cases of plagiarism, self-plagiarism, image manipulation, and the like. The publisher does not ask the corresponding author for suggested reviewers with insufcient qualications, but it seems from the evidence that it has an even worse practice of not doing peer review at all.

Other: Four conditions (1, 2, 4, 5) of predatory journals have been met whereas (3, 6) have not: 1. Since there is probably no peer review, there is nothing to prevent the publication of papers already published in other venues without providing appropriate credits. IJVIMR uses language claiming to be a leading publisher even though it is clearly not. IJVIMR does not operate in a Western country chiey for the purpose of functioning as a vanity press for scholars in a developing country. IJVIMR did no copy-editing. The journal publishes papers that are not academic at all. IJVIMR does not hide its location.

2. 3. 4. 5. 6.

Of the 22 criteria of predatory journals, IJVIMR has met 14 in full, 3 have been met only in part, 2 did not apply (although IJVIMR has even worse practice regarding these two criteria) and only 3 criteria have not been met. Therefore, evidence strongly suggests that IJVIMR is a predatory journal. In June 2013, the same month that the experimental article was published, IJVIMR received a new IF for the scientic eld of Daisy Gardening from Thomson-Reuters. It even increased, from 0.084 in 2011. to 0.134 in 2012. Obviously, something happened quickly after that, for in July, the journal was dropped from JCR. After the publicity the hoax received in late summer of 2013, the quiet majority in various Serbian scientic committees, which refused to take action for several years, started to support the initiatives that ght misconduct related to predatory journals. However, those initiatives have not achieved much since there is a very strong opposition from parties involved in this and related cases of questionable publishing. Finally, some important questions considering this action have to be discussed. Was it ethically justiable to use a fake article in exposing predatory practices of this journal and (some of) the authors publishing there? Could it have been done in another, more appropriate manner? Does this mean that anyone can start submitting such papers to all journals, just to test their practices? After all, is this experiment honest, or it could be treated as a form of scientic misconduct? The author would advise all readers to carefully consider all alternatives before undertaking the hoax article method. Ethically, the most acceptable approach is to analyze the available data and try to ght similar misbehavior through institutionalized procedures. In this case, that has been tried, and it gave only meager results, for the reasons described in Why predatory Journals Were (and

123

Penetrating the Omerta of Predatory Publishing

Still are) Relevant in Serbia section. Moreover, the data is often not accurate, since predatory journals misrepresent the actual procedures, dissecting article by article is unacceptably time consuming due to their overproduction, and even when all this is done, there is a large probability that it will be ignored due to many invested interests. When the author decided that the experiment is necessary, he had a rm resolution that it had to be honest. The paper is not a fake paper designed to trick the editors or the reviewers. On the contrarythe text is an honest and accurate description, the described research was actually performed, and there are numerous statements that accurately describe that the paper is valuable only in itself and in the reconsideration of the journals relevance that it will hopefully cause. Although he had not found any statement of ethical policies of IJVIMR, the author respected the usual requirement that the work should be honest and original. Until there is an established set of principles and procedures that guide this line of work, the ethical justiability has to be judged case by case. It should be used only as a last resort, when all conventional methods fail, and only when the menace they are set to expose is much larger than the unintended consequences. The authors should take care to avoid falling into a scientic misconduct trap themselvesthe experimental paper should be honest (but irrelevant) and it should be designed to be easily detected by the least sophisticated procedures. The authors opinion is that Evaluating Transformative Hermeneutic Heuristics for Processing Random Data, succeeded in maintaining ethical integrity. The experiment was conducted in an honest way and the author stands behind this research and defends it. The author would like to invite all interested parties to future discussions about this case, with a hope that it would result in clearer guidelines about this type of research, which will, it seems, become necessary and more common in the approaching years.

Conclusions This article describes the relevance of one publication and its inuence upon many aspects of scientic affairs in Serbia. The author described an experiment that was set out to check the scientic credibility of the journal IJVIMR. The experiment was properly placed in the context of previous scientic work with a similar purpose. The assessment criteria were dened in accordance with the current development in this area, described in leading scientic publications (e.g. Nature), that is widely supported by the international research community. The evidence is presented, and the assessment performed. Conclusion: IJVIMR can be classied as a predatory journal. Are all articles published in IJVIMR worthless, and should be immediately discarded? Certainly not! For all we know, guided by Aristotelian logic, there might even be some genuine Nobel prize-worthy gems hidden in the (currently inaccessible) archives of IJVIMR. This article only evidences that IJVIMR is a predatory journal, and cannot be taken seriously as a scientic reference. Unfortunately, most of the human endeavour published there has not been

123

D. Djuric

scientically peer-reviewed yet, and could not be incorporated into the main body of scientic knowledge until that has been done.

References
Ball, P. (2005). Computer conference welcomes gobbledegook paper. Nature, 434(7036), 946946. Beall, J. (2012a). Criteria for determining predatory open-access publishers (2nd edition). http:// scholarlyoa.les.wordpress.com/2012/11/criteria-2012-2.pdf. Accessed 24 September 2013. Beall, J. (2012b). Predatory publishers are corrupting open access. Nature, 489(7415), 179179. Beall, J. (2013). Bealls list of predatory publishers 2013. http://scholarlyoa.com/publishers/. Accessed 24 September 2013. Bricmont, J., & Sokal, A. (2004). Reply to gabriel stolzenberg. Social Studies of Science, 34(1), 107113. Butler, D. (2013). The dark side of publishing. Nature, 495(7442), 433435. Curb, L. A., & Abramson, C. I. (2012). An examination of author-paid charges in science journals. Comprehensive Psychology, 1(1), 16. Cyril, L. (2010). Ike antkare one of the great stars in the scientic rmament. International Society for Scientometrics and Informetrics Newsletter, 6(2), 4852. Djuiric, D. Z., Delilbasic, B., & Radisic, S. (2013). Evaluation of transformative hermeneutic heuristics for processing random data. International Journal of Very Important Multidisciplinary Research, 18(6), 98102. http://www.scribd.com/doc/167706815. Fischer, B., & Zigmond, M. (2012). Scientic publishing. In R. Chadwick (Ed.), Encyclopedia of applied ethics (2nd ed.) (pp. 3240). San Diego: Academic Press. doi:10.1016/B978-0-12-373932-2.001757. http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/B9780123739322001757. Franceschini, F., & Maisano, D. (2011). Criticism on the hg-index. Scientometrics, 86(2), 339346. rk, B. C., & Hedlund, T. (2011). The development Laakso, M., Welling, P., Bukvova, H., Nyman, L., Bjo of open access journal publishing from 1993 to 2009. PLoS One, 6(6), e20,961. Lane, J. (2010). Lets make science metrics more scientic. Nature, 464(7288), 488489. Nacionalni savet za visoko obrazovanje. (2007). Preporuke o bliim uslovima za izbor u zvanja nastavnika. Nacionalni savet za visoko obrazovanje. Resnik, D. B., Patrone, D., & Peddada, S. (2010). Research misconduct policies of social science journals and impact factor. Accountability in Research, 17(2), 7984. Roth, D. L. (2005). The emergence of competitors to the science citation index and the web of science. Current Science, 89(9), 15311536. Sims, R. R. (1992). Linking groupthink to unethical behavior in organizations. Journal of Business Ethics, 11(9), 651662. Sipka, P. (2012). Legitimacy of citations in predatory publishing: The case of proliferation of papers by serbian authors in two bosnian wos-indexed journals. Tech. Rep. CEES Occasional Papers Series 2012-12-2, CEONCentar za evaluaciju u obrazovanju i nauci. http://ceon.rs/ops/12122.pdf. Sokal, A. (2010). Beyond the hoax: Science, philosophy and culture: Science, philosophy and culture. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Sokal, A. D. (1996a). Transgressing the boundaries: An afterword. Philosophy and Literature, 20(2), 338346. Sokal, A. D. (1996b). Transgressing the boundaries: Toward a transformative hermeneutics of quantum gravity. Social Text, 46/47, 217252. Stribling, J., Krohn, M., & Aguayo, D. (2005). Scigenan automatic cs paper generator. http://pdos.csail. mit.edu/scigen. Univerzitet u Beogradu. (2008). Kriterijum za sticanje zvanja nastavnika na univerzitetu u beogradu. Glasnik Univerziteta u Beogradu. http://www.bg.ac.rs/les/sr/univerzitet/univ-propisi/Kriterijumi ZaSticanjeZvanja.pdf. Accessed 24 September 2013. Van Noorden, R. (2013). The true cost of science publishing. Nature, 499(7456), 1919. Vanclay, J. K. (2012). Impact factor: Outdated artefact or stepping-stone to journal certication? Scientometrics, 92(2), 211238.

123

You might also like