For over three decades I have subscribed to an
academic journal which has unfailingly maintained appalling quality. A grab bag
of unreadable articles printed on awful-looking stationery – a very good
combination, I must say – with a drivelling editorial in laboured sentences adding
to the effect, the journal, in its four-decade-long history, has never made an
attempt to rise above subpar editing. If I still subscribe to the journal, it
is because the association of teachers that publishes the journal is doing good
work in promoting the teaching of English in this country. Besides, when
journals which are poorer in quality charge a fee for processing submissions,
this one doesn’t. That the journal has repeatedly invited me to contribute articles
is another factor that has often dissuaded from saying anything bad about it.
What broke this resolve was what I saw on the
cover page of the current issue of the journal last evening. Crowning the unaesthetically-designed
cover was the logo of an impact factor (IF) company with the metric assigned by
the company prominently printed in black on a light blue background in the
centre. The title page was also dominated by the IF: it carried not only the
logo of the IF company but also a photocopy of the certificate of IF obtained
from the company. Apparently, the journal was proud of its new acquisition.
Why shouldn’t it be? A journal being indexed
among scholarly journals of the world and its value calculated in scientific
terms and announced in the form of a certificate is a major landmark in the
growing reputation and credibility of the journal. And if the journal proudly
displays the metric assigned as well as the logo of the IF company which
assigned the value, what’s wrong?
Oh nothing. Except that the IF seemed
a fake metric and the company an impostor. I wanted to be doubly sure, so I
wrote to Jeffrey Beall, Librarian, Auraria Library,
at the University of Colorado,
Denver, USA, who is an authority on the subject; Beall's List of potential,
possible, or probable predatory scholarly open-access publishers is well-known in scholarly circles. Within
two hours, Jeffrey sent me a reply confirming that the IF company was an
impostor. The impact factor, he said in the mail, ‘is a completely fake metric... Don’t be fooled.
Xxxx is an imposter. If you use the xxxx impact factor, you will be telling all
researchers that yours is a fake journal.’
As a reviewing editor of a few reputable international journals for over
a decade, I have had opportunities to witness some of the disturbing trends in
the field of academic research in general and academic publishing in
particular. Five of them, which have grown to alarming proportions, thanks to
overt support and encouragement from third-rate researchers and academics, pose
a serious threat to academic publishing:
- Predatory open-access
publishing (accepting submissions, including hoax and nonsensical papers,
as a matter of course, and publishing them on payment of a fee with no
peer review [though peer reviewing is duly mentioned on the websites] and
without even editing)
- Selling and buying authorship
of papers – an extension of the widespread practice of ghostwriting theses
for money
- Hijacking journals
(counterfeiting scholarly journals and then spamming academics, especially
researchers who are desperately in need of publications in impact-factor
journals – a case in point is the hijacking of Revista CEPAL [CEPAL Review], a scholarly journal sponsored by
ECLAC, a UN agency)
- “Organizing” fake conferences
- Assigning fake impact factors
It’s the last that I’m talking about here.
This is what Wikipedia says about IF:
In any given year, the
impact factor of a journal is the number of citations received by articles
published in that journal during the two preceding years, divided by the total
number of articles published in that journal during the two preceding years.
For example, if a journal has an impact factor of 3 in 2008, then its
papers published in 2006 and 2007 received 3 citations each on average in 2008.
Fake impact factors are
produced by companies not affiliated with Thomson Reuters (TR). These are often
used by predatory
publishers.
Consulting TR's master journal list can confirm if a publication is indexed by TR, which is a necessary (but not sufficient) condition
for obtaining an IF.
And Jeffrey has confirmed that the IF company in
question is not affiliated with TR.
Aren’t the publishers and the editors of the
journal aware that the company whose services they have used for obtaining an
IF is an impostor?
For all I know, they are. You see,
academic publishing is by and large – I repeat, by and large; in sequestered pockets, brilliant research is going
on generating exceptional papers – a con game. According to an estimate by
Jeffrey Beall (https://scholarlyoa.com/2014/01/02/list-of-predatory-publishers-2014/#more-2846),
there were 477 predatory open-access journals in 2014; it was a huge leap from
225 in 2013. Assuming that they maintain that rate, there must be over 1500
such journals now. And if you include what Jeffrey calls standalone journals
without the platform of a publisher, the number may be 5000; it may be 10,000
if you add genuine but trashy journals carrying useless stuff. In the case of pay-and-use
journals, once you pay the submission fee (some journals even collect an
editing fee from authors and then publish their papers within a couple of hours!),
your paper is published – within twenty-four hours! Thus, you have a
publication in a “peer-reviewed” journal which has a fake impact factor for
good measure. But who cares if it is fake or genuine? Trashy journals also need
the IF status because they cannot hope to gain reputation by virtue of the quality
of their articles. Together, all these categories of people – publishers of
journals, fake IF companies, and third-rate researchers and academics – play a con
game pulling the wool over the eyes of a gullible system which can’t read but
can only count.
