I’m surprised that the New York Time took so long to catch on to this. It has been going on for over a decades now. There is a famous case of a group of computer science grad students at MIT who, back in 2005, wrote a program called SciGen to generate fake computer science papers. They submitted one to an sprawling conference in Orlando, which promptly accepted it and, then, after the story started being picked up in the media, un-accepted it. The students travelled to Orlando anyway, rented a room in the same conference center as the real conference, and held an unofficial fake symposium, disguised in fake moustaches.
Then there is the case, also in 2005, of the American computer scientists who were so vexed at a particular conference spamming them repeatedly that they responded with a mock up of an article titled “Take Me Off Your F—ing Mailing List” and consisting of nothing but that sentence repeated over and over again. Nine years later, 2014, an Australian engineer who was being spammed by a fake journal responded with a copy of that very “article,” but much to his surprise, just hours later, received a message saying that his submission had been accepted… for a fee, of course. It just so happens that I have been writing about this phenomenon of late. It is much more pervasive (and worse) than most scientists (and journalists) generally understand. Here are a few sentences from a paper about it that I’ll be giving in the Netherlands next month: As late as 2011, Beall reported only 18 [fake] publishers. By the time his list was shut down by mounting legal threats in January 2017 there were 1310 (Basken, 2017). Now we are up over 1400 (Anonymous, n.d.), who operate something like 8000 fake academic journals, which publish around 400,000 fake articles per year (Moher et al., 2017). Considering that there are something like 32,000 legitimate journals publishing something like 2 million legitimate articles every year (Ware & Mabe, 2009),[1] the proportion of fake publishing now amounts to approximately 20% of journals and 15% of articles across all of academia. --- [1] These figures were derived by taking Ware and Mabe’s (2009) figures of 25,400 “active scholarly peer-reviewed journals… collectively publishing 1.5 million articles per year” (p. 5), and ” and applying their annual growth rates of 3% and 3.5% respectively over 9 years. References Anonymous. (n.d.). Beall’s List of Predatory Journals and Publishers. Retrieved December 19, 2017, from http://beallslist.weebly.com/ Basken, P. (2017, September 12). Why Beall’s List Died — and what it left unresolved about open access. Chronicle of Higher Education. Retrieved from http://www.chronicle.com/article/Why-Beall-s-List-Died-/241171 Moher, D., Shamseer, L., Cobey, K. D., Lalu, M. M., Galipeau, J., Avey, M. T., … Ziai, H. (2017). Stop this waste of people, animals and money. Nature News, 549(7670), 23. https://doi.org/10.1038/549023a Ware, M., & Mabe, M. (2009). The STM report An overview of scientific and scholarly journal publishing. Oxford, UK: STM: International Association of Scientific, Technical and Medical Publishers. Retrieved from http://www.stm-assoc.org/2009_10_13_MWC_STM_Report.pdf Of course, sheer number of publications isn’t really what counts in academia these days; it’s the number of citations, especially recent citations. Some authors have been caught in “citation cartels” (promising to cite each other’s work as much as possible, even where not really relevant). One Dean of Engineering in Malaysia was recently found to have ordered his faculty to cite at least three other faculty in the same department every year (to jack up the department’s citation rate and, by extension, the government's funding of the university, which was guided by citation rates). My favorite scam, though, is the one in which authors submit gobbledegook articles to fake journals and conferences (with published proceedings) under a pseudonym. Why? How could a pseudonymous article help? The nonsense article would cite the author’s legitimate work profusely, thereby cranking up his or her citation rate (and appearing to be from independent sources rather than self-citation). Nice work if you can get it. Best, Chris ….. Christopher D Green Department of Psychology York University Toronto, ON M3J 1P3 Canada 43.773895°, -79.503670° chri...@yorku.ca http://www.yorku.ca/christo orcid.org/0000-0002-6027-6709 ………………………………... On Jan 31, 2018, at 11:28 AM, Michael Palij <m...@nyu.edu> wrote: > > > > > > NY Times on the conferences that accept word salad abstracts > for presentations (comparable to the predatory journals). > See: > https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/29/upshot/fake-academe-looking-much-like-the-real-thing.html?em_pos=medium&emc=edit_up_20180131&nl=upshot&nl_art=7&nlid=389166&ref=img&te=1 > > Some folks actually think these are okay. > > -Mike Palij > New York University > m...@nyu.edu > > --- > > You are currently subscribed to tips as: chri...@yorku.ca. > > To unsubscribe click here: > http://fsulist.frostburg.edu/u?id=430248.781165b5ef80a3cd2b14721caf62bd92&n=T&l=tips&o=52021 > > (It may be necessary to cut and paste the above URL if the line is broken) > > or send a blank email to > leave-52021-430248.781165b5ef80a3cd2b14721caf62b...@fsulist.frostburg.edu > > > > > --- You are currently subscribed to tips as: arch...@mail-archive.com. To unsubscribe click here: http://fsulist.frostburg.edu/u?id=13090.68da6e6e5325aa33287ff385b70df5d5&n=T&l=tips&o=52027 or send a blank email to leave-52027-13090.68da6e6e5325aa33287ff385b70df...@fsulist.frostburg.edu