Numerous online journals are willing to publish bad research in exchange for a credit card number. This is the conclusion of an elaborate sting carried out by journal Science. The result may as well trouble doctors, patients, policymakers and anyone who has a stake in the integrity of science (and who doesn't?).
To figure out just how common predatory publishing is, Science contributor John Bohannon sent a deliberately faked research article 305 times to online journals. More than half the journals that supposedly reviewed the fake paper accepted it.
Online scientific journals are reportedly springing up at an incredible rate. Many, such as PLOS, are totally respectable. The "open access" model is making good science more accessible than ever before, without making users pay the hefty subscription fees of traditional print journals.
At the same time the Internet has additionally opened the way to cunning imitators who gather expenses from researchers eager to get published. According to Bohannan, this might as well be equivalent to paying somebody to publish your work on their blog.
These untrustworthy journals often look legitimate. They bear titles like the American Journal of Polymer Science that closely resemble titles of respected journals. Their mastheads often contain the names of respectable-looking experts. But often it's all but impossible to tell who's really behind them or even where in the world they're located.
Bohannan's experiment revealed that many of these online journals did not notice fatal flaws in a paper that could have been spotted by 'anyone with more than high-school knowledge of chemistry.' And in some cases, even when one of their reviewers pointed out mistakes, the journal accepted the paper anyway - and then asked for hundreds or thousands of dollars in publication fees from the author.
A journalist with an Oxford University PhD in molecular biology, Bohannan fabricated a paper purporting to discover a chemical extracted from lichen that kills cancer cells. Its authors were fake too — nonexistent researchers with African-sounding names based at the fictitious Wassee Institute of Medicine in Asmara, a city in Eritrea.
With assistance from collaborators at Harvard, Bohannan made the paper look as science-y as possible – yet larded it with fundamental errors in method, data and conclusions.
For starters, the purported new cancer drug was tested on cancer cells – but not healthy cells. So there's no way to tell whether its effect was cancer-specific, or if it's simply toxic to all cells.
A graph in the paper purports to show that the more lichen drug that was added to test tubes of cancer cells, the more effective it was at killing. But in fact the actual data show no such difference.
The final touch was to make the paper read as though it had been written by someone whose first language is not English. To do that, Bohannan used Google Translate to put it into French, then translated that version back into English.
For the privilege of being published, the paper's authors were asked to send along a publishing fee of up to $3,100.
The highest density of acceptances was from journals based in India, where academics are under intense pressure to publish in order to get promotions and bonuses. To learn the location of online journals that accepted or rejected Bohannan's paper, see this interactive global map.
Bohannan says he doesn't mean to suggest that the whole business model of online open-access journals is a failure. As he acknowledges, it's not as if peer review is always up to snuff at subscription journals – even the top subscription journals have been embarrassed by lapses in their peer review processes. But he says online publishing makes poor-quality journals easier to set up. And the sheer volume of online publications these days makes it harder to distinguish between legitimate and shady journals.
Bohannan thinks there might be a sort of Consumer Reports to survey the quality of online journals and call out those that fall short. And he thinks maybe such an enterprise might regularly carry out stings like his to keep everyone in the field on their toes.
