Abstract
Not so long ago, a well institutionalized predatory journal exposed itself by publishing a hoax article that blew the whistle for its devastating influence on the academic affairs of a small country. This paper puts that experiment in context, gives all the important details and analyzes the results. The experiment was inspired by well-known cases of scientific activism and is in line with recent efforts against predatory publishers. The paper presents the evidence in detail and uses it to analyze the publishing practices of the offending journal, using established criteria for assessing predatory publications. That journal somehow acquired an impact factor and charged money to publish thousands of “scientific” papers without any peer review. Since the impact factor is the major official evaluation criteria for scientists in Serbia, these papers disturbed the whole academic evaluation process. Credentials acquired by those publications form a strong obstacle to institutionalized reasoned efforts against such practices. This case warns the whole community of the long lasting damage when journals with low publishing ethics are taken seriously.
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Notes
International Journal of Very Important Multidisciplinary Research is, obviously, a pseudonym. The journal name, as well as the names of persons, dates and other identifying details have been changed.
Daisy gardening has been used in this paper for anonymization purposes, as a replacement for the actual scientific field of the journal.
This is only anecdotal evidence, but it is telling.
Official information is not fully transparent, the fee ranged from around 250 EUR in the beginning to around 1200 EUR in December 2012.
A group of words in Latin starting with “Lorem ipsum”, used by publishers to test the appearance and practicality of a publication proposal.
The meaning of hermeneutics is “the theory of text interpretation, especially the interpretation of biblical texts, wisdom literature, and philosophical texts”.
The authors have nothing to do with this action, nor they know who made the article publicly available.
The article also inspired a cottage industry of video parodies, such as https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zzP6RtBspNA and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b3eeeGvWr-8.
Romania is in a different time zone, GMT+2, so it was already 18:30 in the offices of IJVIMR. The editors had already finished their work day.
Sensitive but unimportant data, such as bank account numbers, has been marked out in all documents.
It appears from the invoice that one can order the authors for 290 EUR. The reader should be assured that such transaction is not possible.
The message is quoted verbatim, the bold formatting appears in the original message.
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Merriam-Webster online dictionary defines omerta as “code of silence”. According to Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Omerta), Omerta is a code of silence that seals lips of men even in their own defense and even when the accused is innocent of charged crimes. A Sicilian proverb says: “He who is deaf, blind, and silent will live a 100 years in peace”. In this article, the term is used metaphorically, as a literary figure. The article does not imply that any illegal or criminal activity has been performed by any party involved.
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Djuric, D. Penetrating the Omerta of Predatory Publishing: The Romanian Connection. Sci Eng Ethics 21, 183–202 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11948-014-9521-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11948-014-9521-4