Much has been said and written about the menace of predatory journals – which are open access journals that draw a hefty fee from academic authors and lack standards of peer review and transparency. While many open access journals do function with a high level of professional rigour, it is not unusual to spot predators. Concerned about this, some researchers carried out a sting operation to expose the defaulters. Their article reporting on their findings is published in journal Nature ( http://www.nature.com/news/predatory-journals-recruit-fake-editor-1.21662#/b4 ) .
Rsearchers Piotr Sorokowski, Emmanuel Kulczycki, Agnieska Sorokowska and Katarzyna Pisanski, when they were together at University of Wroclaw in Poland, carried out a sting operation to expose such predatory journals.
In 2015, they created a fake profile of a scientist by name Anna O. Szust, and added fake credentials – degrees, book chapters, research interests that included theory of science and sport, cognitive sciences and methodological bases of science. They supported this with accounts in social media.
The sting operation involved sending out an application to be an editor from this fake person to 360 journals. Then the responses were tracked and categorised as No response, Rejected and Accepted. The names of the 360 journals were sourced from three directories - JCR (Journal Citation Reports), DOAJ (Directory of Open Access Journals) and Beall’s list (A list of predatory journals compiled by University of Colorada librarian Jeffrey Beall. This blog was taken down by him earlier this year with no reasons being given.)
In principle, anyone could check databases to see that she had no work cited in journals nor had she any prior experience; it was relatively easy to check that the application was from a fake entity.
The results were that while no JCR listed journal responded positively 40 from Beall’s list and 8 from DOAJ accepted the application.
The irony of the thing is that even the name of the person carried a clue. Oszust in polish means “Fraud.” Unfortunately, the journals did not sense this and fell for the ploy, exposing the lack of rigour in their assessment of the potential reviewer.
