Websites that masquerade as peer-reviewed journals are cheating scientists out of money and cheating the rest of us out of the scientific review process.
The scientific journal Nature, one of the most highly regarded, peer-reviewed publications in the world, is warning scientists—and the rest of us—that two online versions of journals bearing real names are nothing more than fronts for fraudulent businesses that accept money to put virtually any content online.
Once online, the articles look scientific and bear the apparent imprimatur of the official publication. But in fact, they’re all fake, and the people behind some of the real journals, which have used the same academic business model for hundreds of years, in some cases, are getting a little ticked off about it. Some people suspect other “journals” besides the two cited by Nature are engaged in similar practices to defraud scientists and the researching public, as this article in the New York Times suggests.
Here’s how it works: One journal, Archives des Sciences, a multidisciplinary journal founded in 1791 and published by the Society of Physics and Natural History of Geneva, didn’t have a website. Some criminals decided to create a website and display the Archives des Sciences name, logo, postal address, and so on. Scientists would then submit articles for online publication consideration, sending up to several thousands of dollars in cash to the website.
Of course, their articles never actually got published by the real Archives des Sciences, only on the fraudulent website. And the money, well, that appears to have been sent somewhere in Armenia. The poor researchers got nothing for their money, because the publication wasn’t real.
But ordinary people who rely on the Web for research often can’t tell the difference. We tell students that scientific articles published in peer-reviewed journals can usually be trusted more than websites like ours or Wikipedia, which lack credibility on official matters and are generally not reviewed. This has now changed because of the proliferation of online journals. Many are real, but some are not, and it’s quite impossible to tell the difference between online content that is reviewed by peers of the author and that which is essentially purchased just as car companies buy ads on newspaper websites.
If you have access to Archives des Sciences in a library, for example, you could check the print editions. By making a few comparisons, you would notice great discrepancies between the articles in the online, fraudulent edition and the print edition. But today, who has time to check all the print editions?