How predatory academic journals endanger science

Transcriber: Chelsea He-Chen
Reviewer: Larisa Esteche

We’ve all gotten scam emails.

Those emails that usually start by saying
something convincing, like,

“Dear sir, I’m the admiral
of the Spanish Navy”

or “I am your brother,” “the long lost
Duchess of Moldova,”

or even “Hello,
I recently came into the acquisition

of a valuable barrel
of turbine lubricant.”

Those emails that are usually as full
of murky promises of gold bullions

and emeralds as they are spelling errors,

creative punctuation, and demands for
a wire transfer via Western Union.

Well, last spring, I was the proud
recipient of one of those emails,

from a man named Sunny.

Except, my email from Sunny didn’t sound
like your typical scam email.

Sunny didn’t have any gems
or emeralds for me.

He didn’t even introduce himself
as a foreign prince.

Instead, this is what Sunny said to me,
“Dear Bradley,

The journals of the US-China Education
Review A and B, two award-winning

peer-reviewed, multidisciplinary
periodicals published in English by

David Publishing Company, etc., etc.,

welcome you to submit
original manuscripts

reporting innovations or investigations
in the Education area.

We are very interested in your research.

If you have the idea of making
our journal a vehicle

for your research interests,

please feel free to send the electronic
versions of your papers or books to us.

Sunny H., Assistant Editor.”

Sunny didn’t want my money.
At least not yet.

Sunny wanted a research manuscript.

I have to say, I was intrigued.

As a scientist, it’s my job to publish my
work in academic journals like this one.

Imagine the longest, most heinous
book report you ever did in high school.

That gives you a pretty good idea of what
it is that scientists like me choose to

voluntarily spend every
day of our lives doing.

Conducting experiments, performing
research, and reporting

the results of our studies
in scientific journals.

Except, the US-China Education Review
didn’t seem

like your normal academic journal.

There were the spelling errors and the
weird punctuation in the email.

There was the name
of the journal itself,

the US-China Education Review A and B,

an academic journal with apparently
a varsity and a JV squad.

And there was the fact that
Sunny had, inexplicably,

attached a one hundred page
hospital protocol

describing the precise mechanisms
for disinfecting sewage and

sealing the dearly departed in
leakproof corpse wrapping sheets.

I’m not kidding.

I was beginning to suspect that Sunny’s
operation might not be totally aboveboard.

But I had to find out for sure.

So I did what any self respecting academic
who cares about their future

and reputation and the research
community would do.

I made up a seven page paper,
complete with fake figures,

fake tables, and 44 fake citations
to submit to the journal

just to see what happened.

The general theme of my paper followed the
plot of the TV series Breaking Bad.

The TV show, which,
if you’ll remember, is about a

high school chemistry teacher
who uses his science knowledge

to make and sell drugs.

In my case, Walter White,
this chemistry teacher, was my co-author.

The primary finding from our research
was that, and I quote,

“Low achieving students may particularly
benefit from this new model of teaching

chemistry in the
secondary education setting

through the ‘hands-on’
process of manufacturing

and distributing methamphetamine.”

Essentially, enlisting your students
to help you make and sell drugs is

an effective way to teach
science in high school.

I was submitting to an education journal,
after all. That’s just the start.

In my methods, I dig deep
into the geography of

the New Mexico desert where
the study took place.

A region which, as we all know,
is tropical,

with 13 feet of rainfall a year
covered in magic trees

and situated within the Galapagos Islands.

I go on to espouse the

educational benefits of instructor
nudity, well known from the literature,

and discuss my choice for statistical
analysis of the data.

Namely, those statistical techniques named
after Pokémon that can be conducted

using the powerful statistical
software Microsoft Paint.

In my results, I graphed the relationship
between taking Walter White’s chemistry

class and learning valuable skills
in chemistry like, well,

like making drugs and using firearms.

In my discussion, I pushed back on

the idea that this new pedagogical
style might be

a little hard to implement in your
typical high school setting.

After all, it can be so funny.

Essentially, I did everything I could
to make this the worst paper

ever written in the history
of education research.

Any legitimate academic reviewer asked
to review this article would have

immediately thrown it in the
trash, or maybe called the police.

So you can imagine my surprise
when, a few weeks after

I sent this paper to Sunny,
he got back to me.

Letting me know that my paper—and
once again, I just want to stress this,

my paper about the educational value of
students going in the desert and using

and making drugs—had been accepted to
the US-China Education Review A.

That’s right. A. I didn’t
make the varsity squad.

I was floored, but I wasn’t surprised.

You see, from the start, I had
suspected that Sunny was

a representative from what is known
as a predatory scientific journal.

In the niche world of academic
publishing fraud,

these groups pose as legitimate sources
of scientific information,

sending mass emails to
scientists like me

in the hopes that we will send
them our research,

which they will then publish online
without reviewing its validity.

These groups make money by charging

the scientists that publish in these
journals hundreds of dollars in

processing fees after the
article gets published.

It’s a devious scheme because it can be
incredibly hard to tell whether or not

a scientific journal is real.

Predatory journals have all the trappings
of a real academic journal.

They have slick websites that can
look like the real thing.

Their emails, in more capable hands
than Sunny, can look legit.

And it doesn’t help that real scientific
journals, like Science and Nature,

also charge scientists to publish
in those journals.

So, it’s understandable that
it can be confusing.

In the same way that normal email
scams prey on elderly people

or people less familiar with technology,

predatory scientific journals prey
on inexperienced researchers

or those who might not speak English
as their first language.

But there’s just a small problem with this

because the difference between a real
journal and a predatory journal is huge.

Real journals actually go through
the essential legwork of

reviewing scientific studies before
they’re sent out into the world.

This ensures that only high quality
research makes it to publication.

But that’s just the start. You see,

the problem with predatory journals
goes much deeper than this,

to the heart of how we know what is true.

You see, right after I published my fake
paper in the US-China Education Review,

at first I was elated.
I thought it was hilarious;

a fake journal posing as a legitimate
source of scientific information

had published a bunch of nonsense,

and anyone that read my paper
would recognize that.

I had proven that they were
a predatory journal.

But, after my little stunt, a knot really
started to form in my stomach.

It no longer seemed so funny

because at the same time I was writing
this silly paper last spring,

something much more serious
was going on in the world.

A deadly new coronavirus
had started a pandemic.

Thousands of people were dying every day.

And doctors had few tools
to battle the outbreak.

In response, scientists like me were
rushing to publish our work

in real academic journals,
like the New England Journal of Medicine,

sharing new treatment options
for treating the disease.

But, something very different
was going on

in the underworld of academic publishing,
in predatory journals.

In July of 2020, one
predatory journal published

an article claiming that 5G radio
signals can spontaneously lead to

the creation of the coronavirus.

Essentially, cell phone towers
caused COVID-19.

Now, this sounds ridiculous.

And it is! I mean, there’s no possible
mechanism for a radio wave

to make a virus.

But, you’d be forgiven if you saw
this study floating around online,

flipped through a couple of pages,
and thought it might be legit.

I mean, look at this page! Look at those
equations; that looks like science!

It’s total gibberish, but
it looks like science,

and thousands of other people
thought so too,

and this article was shared across every
corner of the internet: Twitter, Facebook,

Instagram, even made the front page
of some conspiratorial news sites.

If this paper had been submitted
to a real academic journal,

it would have been immediately rejected.

But, by bypassing the scientific review
process, bad actors were able to spread

disinformation online under the guise
of something that looks like science,

and this wasn’t the only
time this happened.

A recent study published in
a real scientific journal

found that more than
300 papers related to COVID-19

had been published in predatory journals
since the start of the pandemic. 300.

A family member of mine even sent
me one of these articles,

this one claiming that the virus had
been deliberately manufactured

in a Chinese lab.

It was later uncovered that the
authors behind this article

were tied to a group of people, one of
whom has since been banned from Twitter

for calling for various prominent public
health officials to be beheaded.

Maybe not the kind of people we want
to be getting our science from.

You see, this is the difference
between a normal email scam

and predatory academic journal scams.
In a normal email scam,

They’re stealing your money.

In predatory journal scams,

they’re stealing your money, and
they’re stealing our ability

to discern the truth.

This should scare you. There’s people
out there deliberately misusing

the system of scientific publishing
to spread disinformation online.

I, for one, refuse to stand for this.

My job as a scientist is to find out
things that I know are true

because that knowledge enables
us to make decisions and to

progress socially as people in society.

Scientific data informs the creation
of new technology,

informs how governments make decisions,

even just helps us delight in a better
understanding of the world.

But, I now think that part of
my job as a scientist lies

almost in doing the opposite,

in deliberately publishing things
that I know are not true

in order to root out sources of
disinformation, and I’m not the only one.

Scientists all over the world

are standing up against predatory
publishers and getting them taken offline

by deliberately publishing
nonsense in the journals.

One researcher from Washington has
published a number of articles

as their dog: their Staffordshire Terrier.

Including on such doggish topics as
the importance of

asking for written permission from the
dogs before we take them to the vet

to get neutered.

Another researcher
in Australia successfully

published an article in a predatory
journal that consisted,

I kid you not, entirely of the phrase “get
me off your f-ing mailing list” repeated

over and over and over again.

And this is funny, but I think
it’s also really important

because there are people
and groups out there

that deliberately want to deceive us

using disinformation. Disinformation
is a means of social control.

Disinformation leads to cynicism,
and cynicism leads to apathy,

and apathetic people, the easiest
people in the world to control.

But, we don’t have to stand for this,

and so I think it is incumbent upon each
of us to do everything we can to stand up

against disinformation,

whether that means deliberately publishing
nonsense in predatory journals

to root out sources of disinformation,
supporting high quality journalism,

or even just being a skeptical consumer
of the news you read on social media.

We can do this.

And, actually, to that last point,

if your uncle or somebody is like sharing

an article online about educational
benefits of kids going in the desert

and making d- just please ignore that.
Thank you.

(Applause)