Why predatory publishing grew and what it does to the literature
Predatory journals have multiplied because researchers are pressed to publish and an author's fee gives a publisher reason to accept anything, and the bogus science they carry harms the scientific literature, public trust in science and the work of the medical writers who build on it.
How large the business has grown
The number of predatory journals has risen dramatically, and so has the number of articles published in them. Since 2009 the number of journals identified as predatory has grown rapidly, and spam emails soliciting papers for predatory journals and conferences appear regularly in researchers' inboxes. Since Jeffrey Beall first began to expose the threat that predatory publishers pose to scholarly publication, the number and sophistication of journal predators have grown.
When Beall began issuing warnings, predatory publishers and stand-alone journals numbered about 20 at first and later hundreds, and the harm was proliferating. In 2014 there were more than 400 predatory publishers and more than 300 stand-alone predatory journals. In 2017 there were 8,000 predatory publications, with an output of more than 400,000 articles a year. Given the exploitative tactics of these publishers, one account holds that the numbers must since have become considerably higher and may weigh more heavily on legitimate scientific scholarship. Of approximately 28,000 scientific journals, an estimated 8,000 to 10,000 were predatory, including potentially 1,200 to 1,500 predatory medical journals.
Data from the Northern German Broadcasting Network suggest that some 400,000 scientists from all fields worldwide have published in such journals. One company, OMICS, accused of platforming predatory and low-quality journals, prides itself on publishing over 700 journals that generate tens of thousands of articles a year. The problem has grown so big that the US Federal Trade Commission obtained a ruling of $50 million against OMICS for deceptive business practices. In that judgment, given in 2019, a federal judge ordered OMICS International to pay $50.1 million to resolve the Commission's allegations of deceptive claims and hidden article processing charges, and to cease operations in the United States. The publisher responded by creating many smaller publishing brands, such as Sunkrist, to hide the association with OMICS International, so the action, though significant, is held to have had no significant impact. For example, when a subsidiary of OMICS International acquired Pulsus in Canada and its two dozen medical society journals, including Cardiology, the journals' quality declined.
What drives the growth
The success of open-access publishing in science and medicine opened the door to a new type of fraud, fuelled by researchers' need to publish their results to advance their careers and to improve their chances of obtaining funding. Open access has limitations, among them the author-pays model and predatory publishing itself, and it has no clearly defined quality mechanism or peer-review process as rigorous as a conventional subscription-based journal's. Because journals accept a publication fee from authors, open access may also create a potential conflict of interest, in which publishers may want to maximise revenue by accepting a fee for anything and everything and so exploit the author-pays model unprofessionally.
Predatory journals have boomed because most universities and institutions evaluate researchers by their publication output, which forces researchers to publish often and regularly to maintain their professional standing. In some countries, professional advancement in science and medicine is tied directly to the publication record through a points system. Many universities and research institutions require PhD students to publish their work in a journal, whatever its quality, before awarding a degree. In that setting, a journal that promises quick publication can be very attractive, especially to less experienced researchers who are unaware of the risks. In the rush to publish, some scientists turn to so-called predatory journals, which have extremely high acceptance rates and do not really engage in peer review.
Medicine and the biological sciences are the most fertile fields for predatory publishers, because there they can charge higher article processing charges and take advantage of the publish-or-perish, high-churn culture. The medical research community was hit hardest. Predatory publishers targeted grant funds, knowing that authors could use them to cover article processing charges, and took advantage of the pressure-to-publish culture of medical research, appealing to busy clinical researchers with a fast, easy route to publication. They proliferated in medicine, often launching one journal per specialty from a list of every specialty taken from a hospital's department listings.
Who publishes in them
Authors from wealthy countries publish in predatory journals too, although predatory journals used to be thought a concern of low- and middle-income countries. An analysis of 1,907 biomedical articles in predatory journals put the United States, the United Kingdom, Japan and China among the top ten countries of the contributing authors.
Some authors who submit to predatory journals know what they are doing, and use them to enhance a curriculum vitae, to respond to the pressure to publish and to please institutional administrators who take no measures to stop this waste of human, animal and funding resources. Some researchers use predatory journals deliberately, paying to increase their number of publications solely to advance their careers, with no concern for ethics or scientific accuracy. Big fleets of predatory journals exploited researchers, but some researchers also took advantage of their fast, easy and often cheap publishing route.
Other authors are legitimately mistaken, unaware that they have submitted to a predatory journal, and even seasoned researchers can unknowingly fall prey to predatory publishers. Although early-career researchers are more likely to be preyed upon, more experienced scientists are not exempt and may be targeted to serve as editors or reviewers. The victims of predatory publishers were often researchers in developing nations, hungry to publish for career advancement, eager to network with peers from developed nations, and willing to pay article processing charges or meeting registration fees out of their own pockets. Researchers who publish in predatory journals often become their defenders.
How little it takes to be published
Researchers setting out to expose predatory journals have shown how easy it is to scam a way to a publication or onto an editorial board. In 2013 John Bohannon had a fake and flawed research article accepted by 157 of 304 open-access journals, contingent on payment of publication fees. Katarzyna Pisanski and colleagues created a profile of a fictitious scientist named Anna O. Szust, with a CV clearly unqualified for an editorial role, and applied on her behalf to the editorial boards of 360 journals; oszust is the Polish word for fraud. In many cases a positive response came within days or even hours. Four titles immediately appointed her editor-in-chief, and at least a dozen journals appointed her an editor conditional on some form of payment. Graduate students at MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory created SCIgen, a program that generates gibberish science papers, as a parody of the journals and conferences that spam researchers for submissions, and papers it generated have been accepted for presentation at scientific conferences.
In March 2020, four days after receipt, the American Journal of Biomedical Science and Research, a publication of the OMICS group, published an article linking COVID-19 to the consumption of Zubat, a Pokémon character. Gregory House M.D. was one of its authors and Winnie the Pooh one of its references, and its text stated that epidemiologists believe it highly likely that a journal publishing the paper does not practise peer review and must therefore be predatory.
Such sting operations illustrate both the lack of scientific rigour and ethical practice and the for-profit nature of predatory journals. Because they tend to be brazen and hilarious, they are highly shareable among professional and academic networks and on social media once the deception is revealed.
Harm to the scientific literature
Predatory journals and their publishers employ practices that undermine the quality, integrity and reliability of published scientific research, and they pose a serious threat to the peer-reviewed medical literature itself. They are an obvious danger to the integrity of the scientific method, and conflating their articles with genuine scientific content wastes knowledge, time and resources and undermines the value of legitimate published research. Predatory journals are a global and growing problem that contaminates all domains of science, and a waste of human, animal and funding resources.
The activities of predatory publishers allow bogus work to be quoted and to enter the literature, and bad science as a starting point may lead other investigations astray. The growing number of articles in predatory journals has possibly even led to their citation in policy documents and medical guidelines. Researchers build their own research on published data, so when those data come from a questionable or predatory journal, without peer review and with no guarantee of meeting scientific criteria or data quality, any results built on them are invalid too. Those who publish good research in predatory journals unintentionally upgrade the bad and false science also published there.
The open-access model has been co-opted by a number of predatory publishers who have flooded the scientific literature with low-quality research that is poorly reviewed, if at all, and at times even fraudulent. In one view there is no better example than the hype built around the anthelmintic ivermectin against COVID-19 on the basis of "published clinical trials". Publishing research that is pseudoscience, poorly done or falsified can eventually erode the medical literature to the point that truth is not discernible. If predatory publishing proliferates, the ultimate result will be harm to the scientific literature: legitimate research carried out with the best of intentions might be lost if it is not recorded, cited or made accessible in the long term, and the scientific record is at risk of being corrupted.
Harm to trust in science and to society
Predatory publishers harm science and society as a whole, and publications in predatory journals harm science and medicine. By publishing bad science and making it available, predatory publishers undermine trust in science and scientific progress. Predatory journals take away money that taxpayers or grant-giving charities made available as part of research grants. When uninformed patients in desperate situations get hold of unfounded, bogus research, they may turn to ineffective and harmful treatments.
Because most predatory journals do not perform a proper peer review, they serve as a venue for badly conducted science, and conspiracy theorists use them to publish: anti-vaccination campaigners spread their theses there, and climate change sceptics publish papers there that serious journals have rejected. Unethical companies publish pseudo-studies in predatory journals and use the apparently genuine scientific reference to market ineffective and potentially dangerous treatments.
Should the growth of predatory journals continue unabated, science may come to be viewed with suspicion. If the public, politicians and the media can no longer tell good science from bad, science will lose its impact on society, and this loss of trust may negatively influence funding decisions and the availability of an adequate research infrastructure.
Harm to medical writers' work
The practices of predatory publishers undermine the credibility of science, and this directly affects medical communicators, because they are part of the scientific endeavour. Medical communicators make science accessible. If their sources are fouled with bogus science, the texts, documents and summaries based on them will be bogus too, and the work of medical communicators will be devalued. Medical communicators may have thought of predatory journals as a peripheral phenomenon, and that perception needs to change.