Predatory on-line journals are stretching the envelope of creative and lucrative ways of making money from the web. And researchers desperate to get something published are their willing victims. At $1200 a paper it is now possible to bypass the irritations of referees and peer-review and copy editing and a long delay between submission and publication!
A respected Canadian medical journal that was sold to offshore owners last year is now printing scientific junk for hire, but still trading on its original good name.
Experimental & Clinical Cardiology was published in Oakville, Ont., for 17 years and had a solid reputation for printing original medical research. It was sold in 2013, and its new owners say they are in Switzerland, but do their banking in Turks and Caicos.
And for $1,200 U.S. they’ll print anything — even a garbled blend of fake cardiology, Latin grammar and missing graphs submitted by the Citizen.
The journal was flagged last month by Jeffrey Beall, a university librarian in Colorado who compiles a widely-followed list of “predatory” publishers. These are in the business of printing research that isn’t good enough for real science journals. They make it look legitimate, charging a fee to authors desperate to boost their careers.
Now this one has a special Canadian connection. As well, it is demonstrating a new and wildly profitable model for predatory journals.
Instead of running a cheap startup website and hunting for clients, it took over the identity — and readership — of an established business.
This is paying off spectacularly. Experimental & Clinical Cardiology published 142 articles in July alone, worth a total of $170,000 U.S. for one month. It operates online only and doesn’t bother with editing, so it has almost no costs.
The result is sloppy, or worse. Some articles are called “Enter Paper Title” — the layout instructions instead of the intended title. One is filled with visible paragraph markers (¶). Some authors’ names are missing.
Scientists are worried because academic journals do more than print research. They also screen it by sending it to independent reviewers — experts in the field who can weed out low-quality work.
But the “predatory” journals skip this step. They accept everything verbatim, making it appear that experts have approved it. …….
Experimental and Clinical Cardiology
Open access publishing is not without costs. Experimental & Clinical Cardiology therefore levies an article-processing charge USD1200 for each article accepted for publication.
It is all perfectly legal and they probably accept all publications providing the $1200 is forthcoming.
Tags: Experimental and Clinical Cardiology, Predatory publishing
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