It's a Fifth Tuesday of the month, my chance to break free from the shackles of AAP Grand Rounds and rant about anything I want! [N.B.: This posting has a lot of external links, but I'll think you'll enjoy exploring them and may find some useful sites you didn't know about.]
Sometime in the first half of January 2017, a valuable Internet resource for monitoring quality in scientific publications, Scholarly Open Access, disappeared.
If you took the time to click on the link in the previous sentence, you can see what's left of it. Another important publishing watchdog, Retraction Watch, gave us a glimpse of the official disappearance reason from Jeffrey Beall, a librarian at Colorado University and blogger at Scholarly Open Access. This relatively bland official statement sure sounds like threat of lawsuits by publishers drove Mr. Beall off the Internet, but that's just my speculation.
What's going on here is something I started noticing a few years ago, when I began receiving unsolicited emails from editors of journals I never heard of, asking me to submit articles on any subject at all. They went straight into my junk email list, but the steady stream of these solicitations hasn't stopped. Investigating all this led me to Beall's List of Predatory Publishers.*
What's a predatory publisher? To put it simply, these are publishers that try to induce authors to pay for getting their articles published, but in a situation that subverts the normal peer review process. The pay-for-publication model itself isn't necessarily predatory behavior; journals need to pay their costs somehow, most do it by selling advertising space, by subscription fees, and/or by having a publication fee for authors. One legitimate publisher of open-access journals with a publication fee is the Public Library of Science (PLOS) group of journals. What the predatory journals do, however, is make a mockery of the peer review process, either by having no peer review at all, by having the manuscript authors review their own submissions, or simply by utilizing unqualified reviewers. In many instances, articles end up being retracted when such practices are exposed; that's what Retraction Watch, mentioned above, keeps an eye on. Fake reviews occasionally happen to mostly legitimate publishers, so it seems nothing is entirely safe.
In this era of facts and "alternative facts," how does the earnest clinician know what to believe? Well, if a researcher reports fake results, there's not much we as consumers of the medical literature can do, other than hope the crime is exposed when other researchers are unable to replicate the results. However, if it's a matter of predatory publishing/fake reviews, that's what I'm hoping Evidence eMended helps you with. If by reading this blog you feel a little bit more comfortable knowing how to critically read an article (not just the abstract), you'll be better positioned to see some gaps in the authors' logic. Unfortunately, we won't have Beall's List to help us anymore, but it's good to see Retraction Watch is still going strong.
*Did you wonder how I led you to this posting of the 2017 Beall's List, when the entire site has been taken down? Well, if someone had the foresight to archive important pages, they are still out there somewhere. A really handy resource is Wayback Machine, you just enter the web address of the site that's been taken down and voila, you can see some views that have been saved in cyberspace. (I suspect the name of that site was a twist on the WABAC Machine from my favorite cartoon series of all time.)
