Peer Review on Michael’s Domain

Did we publish in a predatory journal?

Thu, 03 Aug 2023 00:00:00 +0000

When I get a manuscript review request, I first look at the journal where the request comes from. More often than not, I do not know the journal’s name. After all, perhaps 25000 scientific journals are published on our planet. If the request comes from a predatory journal, I mostly reject it. Sometimes I accept to expose myself to the nonsense deliberately (it’s at the same time funny and frustrating). But how do you know whether a journal is predatory or not?The question has been asked a lot over the last few years, e.g. in this Nature commentary . In the article, leading experts have come up with a definition. Predatory publishers:

The 12-month embargo falls

Wed, 07 Sep 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Under Barack Obama, the 12-months-rule was instituted, which demands that any research that is using US-federal funding must become freely accessible to the public at the latest 12 months after its publication ( https://www.science.org/content/article/white-house-unveils-long-awaited-public-access-policy ). A new executive order by Joe Biden is now getting rid of the 12-month-rule requiring immediate availability starting at the latest on December 2025. Other notable improvements of this executive order concern the requirement for machine readability, metadata annotation, and raw data availability. Furthermore, these new rules do not only affect journal articles but include from now on also book chapters and conference proceedings ( https://www.theverge.com/2022/8/26/23322194/white-house-ostp-open-access-federal-research-policy-update ).Many for-profit publishers object because their license to print money is slowly eroding. What they do not mention is, that the highest-skill work done in the whole publishing business - namely article writing and peer review - is still done entirely for free by academics around the world. If publishers would need to pay market prices for authors’ and reviewers’ working time, they would - without exception - all go bankrupt within a year. Every academic spends a significant amount of working time on writing and reviewing other academics’ manuscripts WITHOUT ANY REIMBURSEMENT. In fact, many of us do this job in the evenings and on weekends, because we are fully booked with grant application writing, administration and teaching during our regular working time. Many of these manuscripts are then published by for-profit publishers, which go on to monetize the results of research write-ups and the peer review process, which has been paid by taxpayers’ money.Some for-profit publishers do a valuable and fantastic job to improve the accessibility and quality of their authors’ works. Others seem to be in it mostly for the money. Among the latter are unfortunately also many Open Access journals . The elephant in the room is SciHub. Even though my university pays for access to most journals I need, the access is so obfuscated and temporarily dysfunctional, that I frequently have to resort to Sci-Hub in order to get a PDF article from a journal, to which my university subscribes. Alternatively I have used ResearchGate and #icanhazpdf to get electronic reprints, but SciHub is by far the fastest and most reliable option. More about Sci-Hub: https://www.zmescience.com/other/feature-post/sci-hub-effects-academic-publishing/ .

MDPI peer review reviewed

Wed, 24 Feb 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Finally, our most recent review got published in the journal Biology. For my taste, its title is too long: Proteolytic Cleavages in the VEGF Family: Generating Diversity Among Angiogenic VEGFs, Essential for the Activation of Lymphangiogenic VEGFs . On top of this, the title contains an abbreviation: VEGF.Most publishers are in for the moneyThis is the first time we published with MDPI . Although the criticism of MDPI has not entirely gone away after its 2015 vindication from Beall’s List , the critique is now mostly centered around the accusation that MDPI is after the money and not the quality. That said, most publishers are in it for the money. Especially the stock-market listed publishers are by law forced to be in it for the money: Elsevier, John Wiley & Sons, etc. And many others such as Springer Nature are desperately trying to become also a member of the stock-market listed club. We as scientists could probably use a little bit of this attitude because we are naturally bad at making money (we can generate knowledge, but not revenues).Concerns over review qualityAdditionally, MDPI’s review process has been criticized as being not very rigorous. What was our experience? Our paper was apparently scrutinized by four reviewers and you can read the reviewers’ comments here: https://www.mdpi.com/2079-7737/10/2/167/review_report .**How did we experience the reviewers’ quality of feedback?**Three out of the four reviewers gave real feedback. Reviewer 3 could be - for all what matters - replaced by Grammarly.com or the Microsoft Word spell checker. Reviewer 2 focuses also almost entirely on style and presentation. Don’t get me wrong: Good style and presentation are very important! But, first of all, let’s get the science right! The remaining two reviewers were apparently not extremely familiar with the research topic vascular biology. This agrees with my own experience, that I often get requests from MPDI journals to review papers outside or only tangential to my area of expertise (which I immediately reject since I anyway have too many papers to review).You could argue in favor of MDPI, that our manuscript was already quite good when we first submitted it. But please: we cobbled this together in a hurry during the month of December and I know that there are still quite a few errors (which we realized a few minutes after the paper was published).We wanted to try an Open Review, but failedIt strikes me that we had opted for open review (i.e. only to use reviewers that were agreeing to publish their identity together with their reviews). However, none of our reviewers revealed their identity. There is probably some fine print somewhere that says that the editor can override this choice when no reviewers are found that agree to give up their anonymity. To a certain extent, I can feel the editor’s pain. It is difficult enough to find good peer reviewers in the first place, because - despite many attempts for a change - reviewing manuscripts is not rewarded in the current scientific system. Is it fast? Imho, some of it was too fastThe review process was fast. The revisions were even faster. And the publishing was much too fast. I was terrified when I saw that we might not get a second set of proofs. The first proofs had to be modified extensively because the layout had changed the image placement. As a consequence, almost all the references needed renumbering. Moreover, during the proof generation, some parts of the figure legends got mistaken as body text. Therefore we had to shift large portions of text around during the proofing. And if you ever have used Word, you know that this is nothing to be excited about. At least, MS Word doesn’t crash anymore as it used to do in the old days. Back then, pushing the Crtl-S key combo after every minute of editing was outsourced from the brain to the spinal cord. But also this time, Word did not disappoint us by introducing unwanted formatting changes that were impossible to undo.None of us managed to have even a look at the second proofs this Monday before the paper went online, after which the link to the second proofs expired. We have lots of other things to do: prepare lectures, participate in faculty meetings, take care of students, and - last but not least - we occasionally also like to do some research. Fast publishing is not a virtue in itself. But it certainly helps to keep the expenses in check.**After the game is before the game.**And this time it’s not a review, but original research and we will choose another publisher. The experience was definitely not a catastrophe, but I can clearly see that such an over-streamlined process can go wrong once in while with less scrupulous authors. And there are many examples (see the Wikipedia entry ).For those interested, here is the link to the translation of the Norwegian article discussing the MDPI quality issue.**UPDATE (15.01.2022)*After this experience, a scientific analysis of MDPI journals was performed, looking at self-citations, citation cartels, special issues, APC charges, and review- and acceptance times: https://doi.org/10.1093/reseval/rvab020 . I only became aware of this article more than half a year after its publication. The take-home message of it is that MDPI , as well as the publisher OMICS Interntional , engage in editorial behaviours that fall under the umbrella of predatory practices. At the same time, their operation “has reached such a level of sophistication that they totally or partially comply with the formal criteria that serve to differentiate between predatory and legitimate journals”. The authors of this analysis use the term “non-evident/hidden predatory publisher”.At the same time, many legitimate and respected scientists are working on the Editorial Boards of MDPI journals. I personally know quite a few. As always, the truth is not black or white but some shade of grey. Besides, this article was published by the reputable publisher Oxford University Press , which could be interpreted as a conflict of interest. *

Predatory publishing - where to draw the line?

Wed, 21 Jun 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Zinni It seems that many researchers recently received an invitation to join the editorial board of the new open access journal ContROL (“Continuous Research Online Library”). The sheer number of invitation might be already a bad sign as the choice of the editorial board is a delicate one and mass emailing is arguably not a good method to assemble a high-quality editorial board. I get frequently similar requests, and when the e-mail message doesn’t clearly identify such a request as spam, I used to have a look at Beall’s list to see whether the publisher or journal has associated “red flags”. Some red flags are easy to identify. If you are an expert in the field but have never heard of the scientists who are supposed to do the expert work. One also could look at the publication record of the people to evaluate their previous work. However, nobody has the time to do that and that’s where Beall’s list came in handy.However, Beall’s list has disappeared this January from the internet. It was last updated on January 3rd 2017, but soon after that, all content was taken down. The January 3rd version is - thanks to great work of the guys at the Internet Archive - still available from here , but obviously it is not updated anymore. Nobody knows exactly why Beall took down all the content, but rumors have it, that Beall himself got threatend by parties which have a vested interest in predatory publishers remaining unnamed (read more e.g. here: http://retractionwatch.com/2017/01/17/bealls-list-potential-predatory-publishers-go-dark/).There are lot of “new” publishers out there who want to participate in the lucrative business of scientific publishing. It doesn’t really matter whether they use the open access model or not (when they are open access, they can e.g. earn on hefty “article processing charges”). Getting enough sufficiently qualified reviewers for the peer-reviewing process is hard work for the established journals and thus the peer-reviewing process of many new journals is more often than not less than rigorous.I also do not like it if it’s unclear who is behind a new open access journal. I feel an ethical dissonance if someone advocates open access, but all information about the journals background remains closed. In my opinion, there is at the moment not much need for more (open access) journals. Instead, most serious and reputable open access advocates are rather trying to improve the existing ones. One could conclude, that the relative amount of predatory journals among all newly established journals is steadily increasing and Google Trends support this notion. How can I figure out whether the ContROL journal is legit or not? I have checked out a few of the people from the Advisory Board and they appear to be real scientists with real track records of various quality. However, even reputable scientists occasionally end up on the editorial board of such journals (sometimes with and sometimes without any action on their part). That said, there is no clean demarcation line between predatory and honest publishers. Even some of the “reputable” publishers engage occasionally in some shady and controversial practices. That’s why Beall’s site lists “potential, possible, or probable predatory scholarly open-access journals”.Beall’s list has been criticized, but much of the criticism can easily be dismissed. An especially low-level attack on Beall’s integrity is e.g. the site http://scholarlyoa.net (note the similarity of the URL!), where some unnamed person(s) engage in ad-hominem attacks, logical fallacies and exaggeration in order to discredit Beall’s work. I myself doubt that the people behind this site are true friends of Open Access publishing. Throwing dirt does not do a favor to Open Access publishing. Maybe this site could even be a misguided, under-cover action by proponents of conventional publishing to discredit Open Access. There is valid criticism of Beall’s work , but none of it challenges the concept that somebody needs to monitor Open Access publishing (in the same way people are monitoring and criticizing the big commercial publishers). Maybe I should ask the publisher of ContROL a few questions. Mainly, why they still see the need for a new OA journal. ContROL promises in addition to the journal some kind of associated scientific social media and promotion platform. However, also that territory is already covered (by ResearchGate and Mendeley ). I was perplexed by the hefty “membership fee” that you need to pay in order to use their services ( https://control.zinianz.com/membership ). But unless you publish several articles per year, it seems to me overpriced. Even though they mention that they have waivers from the Article Processing Charges, I could not find any details. Why would they hide this information? Researchers from financially challenged countries need to know the costs upfront! Such lack of transparency is exactly the opposite what open access needs to achieve. The “membership fees” might also prevent the associated services from succeeding. Getting traction with a scientific social media site is difficult (even if your services are free and backed by the most powerful publisher in the world). Likely, the promised benefits won’t become reality.