“There is a website lurking on the WWW from an outfit that calls itself ‘DOAJ Publications’ or ‘Doaj publisher’. They have a Twitter account too.
Please note that this company is not affiliated with us in any way nor sanctioned by us.
We have emailed the company to ask them to stop using the DOAJ name as we think it is being used to deliberately mislead people.
If you can help raise awareness by sharing this message, we’d be grateful.”
“Unfortunately, however, so far there’s still limited evidence on the efficacy of open research practices to minimize questionable research practices. These two related practices might involve different cognitive processes. Can we close the gap between QRP [questionable research practices] and ORP [open research practices] using metacognitive interventions, which have been shown to improve behaviour calibration in educational settings? The main goal of our Q2O Project is to gain insights into why researchers may commit questionable research practices, and how we can decrease these practices through metacognitive reasoning, and to what extent Open Science can help reduce those questionable research practices.’ …”
“A scholarly journal run by the Dutch publishing giant Elsevier has come under scrutiny for rejecting a paper submitted for publication because, among other reasons, it didn’t cite enough of the journal’s previously published papers.
The rejection letter, from the International Journal of Hydrogen Energy (IJHE), which is published by Elsevier on behalf of the International Association for Hydrogen Energy, reads: “while the subject is within the scope of the journal, there are only four citations to past papers published in IJHE out of 150 references cited.”
The letter came to light after microbiologist-turned-scientific integrity expert Elisabeth Bik posted it on Twitter on Jan. 19….”
“Leading international scientists who discovered articles written by artificial intelligence that have been published in their name have backed plans for legal action.
In recent months, academics at leading universities in Europe, North America and Australia have been alerted to low-quality scholarly articles – often little more than a page long, probably written by a language scraping algorithm – appearing in their name in titles published by Prime Scholars, an open access publisher registered to a west London address. …”
“Psychology journals are not immune to targeting by paper mills. Difficulties in obtaining peer reviewers have led many journals, such as this one, to ask authors to recommend peer reviewers. This creates a crack in the defences of a journal against fraud, if it is combined with lack of editorial oversight. This case illustrates the benefits of open peer review in detecting fraud….”
Abstract: Introduction:
During the COVID-19 pandemic, Merck Sharp and Dohme (MSD) acquired the global licensing rights for molnupiravir. MSD allowed Indian manufacturers to produce the drug under voluntary license. Indian companies conducted local clinical trials to evaluate the efficacy and safety of molnupiravir.
Methods
Searches of the Clinical Trials Registry-India (CTRI) were conducted to find registered trials of molnupiravir in India. Subsequent investigations were performed to assess which clinical trials had been presented or published.
Results
According to the CTRI, 12 randomised trials of molnupiravir were conducted in India, in 13,694 patients, starting in late May 2021. By July 2022, none of the 12 trials has been published, one was presented at a medical conference, and two were announced in press releases suggesting failure of treatment. Results from three trials were shared with the World Health Organisation. One of these three trials had many unexplained results, with effects of treatment significantly different from the MSD MOVE-OUT trial in a similar population.
Discussion
The lack of results runs counter to established practices and leaves a situation where approximately 90% of the global data on molnupiravir has not been published in any form. Access to patient-level databases is required to investigate risks of bias or medical fraud.
Abstract: Ratings and rankings are omnipresent and influential in contemporary society. Individuals and organizations strategically respond to incentives set by rating systems. We use academic publishing as a case study to examine organizational variation in responses to influential metrics. The Journal Impact Factor (JIF) is a prominent metric linked to the value of academic journals, as well as career prospects of researchers. Since scholars, institutions, and publishers alike all have strong interests in affiliating with high JIF journals, strategic behaviors to ‘game’ the JIF metric are prevalent. Strategic self-citation is a common tactic employed to inflate JIF values. Based on empirical analyses of academic journals indexed in the Web of Science, we examine institutional characteristics conducive to strategic self-citation for JIF inflation. Journals disseminated by for-profit publishers, with lower JIFs, published in academically peripheral countries and with more recent founding dates were more likely to exhibit JIF-inflating self-citation patterns. Findings reveal the importance of status and institutional logics in influencing metrics gaming behaviors, as well as how metrics can affect work outcomes in different types of institutions. While quantitative rating systems affect many who are being evaluated, certain types of people and organizations are more prone to being influenced by rating systems than others.
“In March, an editor at PLOS ONE noticed something odd among a stack of agriculture manuscripts he was handling. One author had submitted at least 40 manuscripts over a 10-month period, much more than expected from any one person.
The editor told the ethics team at the journal about the anomaly, and they started an investigation. Looking at the author lists and academic editors who managed peer review for the papers, the team found that some names kept popping up repeatedly.
Within a month, the initial list of 50 papers under investigation expanded to more than 300 submissions received since 2020 – about 100 of them already published – with concerns about improper authorship and conflicts of interest that compromised peer review.
“It definitely shot up big red flags for us when we started to see the number of names and their publication volumes,” Renee Hoch, managing editor of PLOS’s publication ethics team, told Retraction Watch. “This is probably our biggest case that we’ve seen in several years.”
The journal’s action on the published papers begins today, Retraction Watch has learned, with the retraction of 20 articles. Action on the rest will follow in batches about every two weeks as the editors finish their follow up work on specific papers. Corresponding authors on the papers to be retracted today who responded to our request for comment said they disagreed with the retractions, and disputed that they had relationships with the editors who handled their papers, among other protests….”
Abstract: Questionable research practices (QRPs) among researchers have been a source of concern in many fields of study. QRPs are often used to enhance the probability of achieving statistical significance which affects the likelihood of a paper being published. Using a sample of researchers from 10 top research-productive management programs, we compared hypotheses tested in dissertations to those tested in journal articles derived from those dissertations to draw inferences concerning the extent of engagement in QRPs. Results indicated that QRPs related to changes in sample size and covariates were associated with unsupported dissertation hypotheses becoming supported in journal articles. Researchers also tended to exclude unsupported dissertation hypotheses from journal articles. Likewise, results suggested that many article hypotheses may have been created after the results were known (i.e., HARKed). Articles from prestigious journals contained a higher percentage of potentially HARKed hypotheses than those from less well-regarded journals. Finally, articles published in prestigious journals were associated with more QRP usage than less prestigious journals. QRPs increase in the percentage of supported hypotheses and result in effect sizes that likely overestimate population parameters. As such, results reported in articles published in our most prestigious journals may be less credible than previously believed.
“Springer Nature today announces the release of PySciDetect, its next generation open source research integrity software to identify fake research. Developed in-house with Slimmer AI and released in collaboration with Dr Cyril Labbé from Université Grenoble Alpes, PySciDetect is available for all publishers and those within the academic community to download and use. …
Since launch, SciDetect has been used by a number of publishers and members of the academic community. For Springer Nature, it has scanned over 3.8million journal articles and over 2.5milion book chapters. Available as open source software, PySciDetect expands on Springer Nature’s commitment to being an active partner to the community, supporting a collaborative effort to detect fraudulent scientific research and protect the integrity of the academic record.”
Abstract: The impact factor is a popular but highly flawed proxy for the importance of academic journals. A variety of techniques exist to increase an individual journal’s impact factor but are usually described in abstract terms. Here, we investigate two of those: (1) the preferential publication of brief, citable, non-substantive academic content, and likewise for (2) review or meta-analytic content in the historical publications of the British Journal of Sports Medicine. Simple content analysis reveals an exponential rise in published editorial and other brief content, a persistent growth in ‘highly citable’ content, and dramatic drop in the proportion of empirical research published. These changes parallel the changes in impact factor over the time period available. The implications of this are discussed.
The number of publishers that offer academics, researchers, and postgraduate students the opportunity to publish articles and book chapters quickly and easily has been growing steadily in recent years. This can be ascribed to a variety of factors, e.g., increasing Internet use, the Open Access movement, academic pressure to publish, and the emergence of publishers with questionable interests that cast doubt on the reliability and the scientific rigor of the articles they publish.
All this has transformed the scholarly and scientific publishing scene and has opened the door to the appearance of journals whose editorial procedures differ from those of legitimate journals. These publishers are called predatory, because their manuscript publishing process deviates from the norm (very short publication times, non-existent or low-quality peer-review, surprisingly low rejection rates, etc.).
The object of this article is to spell out the editorial practices of these journals to make them easier to spot and thus to alert researchers who are unfamiliar with them. It therefore reviews and highlights the work of other authors who have for years been calling attention to how these journals operate, to their unique features and behaviors, and to the consequences of publishing in them.
The most relevant conclusions reached include the scant awareness of the existence of such journals (especially by researchers still lacking experience), the enormous harm they cause to authors’ reputations, the harm they cause researchers taking part in promotion or professional accreditation procedures, and the feelings of chagrin and helplessness that come from seeing one’s work printed in low-quality journals. Future comprehensive research on why authors decide to submit valuable articles to these journals is also needed.
This paper therefore discusses the size of this phenomenon and how to distinguish those journals from ethical journals.
“Here’s a supreme irony: the Creative Commons licenses were invented to enable a culture of legally safe sharing, spurred by the legal terror campaign waged by the entertainment industry, led by a literal criminal predator who is now in prison for sex crimes.
But because of a small oversight in old versions of the licenses created 12 years ago, a new generation of legal predator has emerged to wage a new campaign of legal terror.
To make matters worse, this new kind of predator specifically targets people who operate in good faith, only using materials that they explicitly have been given permission to use.
What a mess….”
“Here’s a supreme irony: the Creative Commons licenses were invented to enable a culture of legally safe sharing, spurred by the legal terror campaign waged by the entertainment industry, led by a literal criminal predator who is now in prison for sex crimes.
But because of a small oversight in old versions of the licenses created 12 years ago, a new generation of legal predator has emerged to wage a new campaign of legal terror.
To make matters worse, this new kind of predator specifically targets people who operate in good faith, only using materials that they explicitly have been given permission to use.
What a mess….”
“Assuming the details of this case are confirmed during the trial, they show how the digital copyright system takes on trust claims to ownership, if made in the right way – in this case, through an established royalty management firm. That trust contrasts strongly with a widespread reluctance by companies to recognise that people may be able to draw on copyright exceptions when they make copies, and a readiness to assume that it must be an infringement. It’s another example of how the playing field is tilted strongly in favour of copyright owners, and against ordinary citizens.”