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INDUSTRY & RESEARCH
How to get published without writing anything( except a cheque)
Fed up with repeated spam emails from faux journals seeking submissions, I decided to have some fun; the results were initially amusing but ultimately concerning.
By Peter Vamplew
As a computer science researcher, I first encountered predatory, spam-driven publishers during the 1990s, in the form of calls for academic papers for conferences with questionable standards that appeared to value profits over promoting quality research.
It was the influx of spam invitations to such conferences that in 2005 inspired US academics David Mazières and Eddie Kohler to produce their brilliant spoof paper“ Get me off your f---ing mailing list”. Their work consists of the title phrase repeated almost a thousand times in the format of a scientific paper, including in diagrams. Whilst they failed to have this paper published, they subsequently made it available online.
Recent years have brought an accelerating trend across most disciplines towards open-access publishing. These journals make articles available free to all readers but often charge authors a publication fee to cover costs. Whilst this has many benefits it has also led to a proliferation in low-quality and no-quality journals that rely heavily on spam emails to attract paper submissions.
The mailing lists for these spamming journals are inevitably almost impossible to unsubscribe from. One recently redirected me to the unsubscribe page for the newsletter of a South Australian primary school. Deleting these emails is a daily chore.
It was a particularly heavy spate of spam a few weeks ago that led me to reply to several emails with a blank message and a copy of Mazières and Kohler’ s paper. At best I hoped to get removed from the mailing lists; at least I might waste some of the spammers’ time.
To my surprise, six days later I received an email from the editor of the International Journal of Advanced Computer Technology( IJACT) accepting this paper for publication.
Somehow the“ highly selective” review process promised on IJACT’ s webpage overlooked the paper’ s lack of content, its prolific swearing, my failure to comply with the journal’ s submission processes, and the oddity that I wasn’ t named as an author.
Instead, IJACT sent me an acceptance letter, a review form that rated the paper’ s appropriateness to the journal as excellent and an invoice for US $ 150.
Once I had stopped laughing, I emailed Mazières to explain what had happened. Obviously I couldn’ t proceed with the publication when I wasn’ t the author.
Whilst this story is humorous, it also illustrates serious issues affecting the current state of scientific publishing. Apart from the irritation of spam email, the prevalence of predatory open-access journals poses a threat to the integrity of scientific literature.
By providing the illusion of a genuine peerreviewed publication along with their active recruiting of submissions, these journals prey on inexperienced researchers, who are increasingly under pressure to produce publications in order to maintain their career prospects.
Last year, one of my own postgraduate students submitted to a journal of this ilk without my knowledge. When they showed me the acceptance letter, I had to explain that having this publication on their CV may be more damaging to their reputation than no publication.
More broadly, the existence of these journals and their pretence of peer-review negatively affects public perception of the role of peer-review in the scientific process.
The comments on social media postings about this incident make for depressing reading. A substantial number of people are leaping on this example to discredit all peer-review processes and by extension the scientific findings they produce.
The scientific research community cannot allow our reputation to be further sullied by the actions of bogus journals.
So how best to combat them? With no centralised policing of academic publishing, I would suggest the only course of action is to starve them of submissions and, therefore, of funds.
We should also expose them wherever possible and educate junior researchers to avoid the pitfalls of submitting to these venues.
I would suggest the following tips to researchers looking for an appropriate journal for a paper submission:
• If the journal has emailed you looking for a submission, be sceptical, doubly so if they have offered you a position as an editorial board member
• Check the journal’ s website— many( but not all) predatory journals have websites that look unprofessional and have inconsistencies in areas such as their copyright policy
• Check lists of suspect journals, such as that maintained by scholarlyoa. com – if the journal appears on these lists, then I would investigate carefully before making a submission to it
• Check reliable sources of impact factor information, or discipline-specific white lists of journals such as the list of IT journals maintained by CORE
• Ask more experienced researchers for guidance.
And in answer to the obvious question— yes, I am still on their mailing list. ■
Peter Vamplew is an associate professor at Federation University’ s School of Engineering and Information Technology.
Campus Review contacted the International Journal of Advanced Computer Technology via the details listed on its website seeking clarification as to how Vamplew’ s email submission came to be approved for publication and offering an opportunity to comment. The following response was received:“ My email ID is hack but I am recover my mail ID. I am not accept this paper.”
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