Hundreds of thousands of scientists worldwide have published studies
in self-described scientific journals that don’t provide traditional
checks for accuracy and quality, according to a new journalistic
investigation.
Dozens of reporters from media outlets in Europe, Asia and the United States have analysed 175,000 scientific articles
published by five of the world’s largest pseudo-scientific platforms
including India-based Omics Publishing Group and the Turkey-based World
Academy of Science, Engineering and Technology, or Waset. In addition
to failing to perform peer or editorial committee reviews of articles,
the companies charge to publish articles, accept papers by employees of
pharmaceutical and other companies as well as by climate-change skeptics
promoting questionable theories.
Some of those publishers send
targeted emails to scientists who are under pressure to publish as many
articles as possible in order to obtain promotions and improve their
curriculum, according to the findings by Norddeutscher Rundfunk (NDR),
WDR and Süddeutsche Zeitung.
In addition to the German outlets, a
group of more than a dozen media organizations including the New
Yorker, Le Monde, the Indian Express and the Korean outlet Newstapa took
part in the investigation. The International Consortium of
Investigative Journalists facilitated the collaboration.
Although
the existence of these internet-based pseudo-scientific journals is not
new and has been warned against by universities and research
institutions, its recent rapid growth — with the number of publications
put out by the top publishers tripling since 2013 and involving some
400,000 scientists – set off alarms among former Nobel Prize winners.
The credibility of science is at stake,
said U.S. physician Ferid Murad, the 1998 winner of the prize in
physiology or medicine. Randy Schekman, a U.S. cell biologist who was
among the 2013 winners of the Nobel prize, said that he was horrified
that scientists were publishing in such journals. “This kind of thing
has to be stopped,” said Robert Huber of Munich, who was awarded the
prize in 1988. “If there is a system behind it, and there are people who
aren’t just duped by it but who take advantage of it, then it has to be
shut down,” said Stefan Hell, a Nobel laureate in chemistry.
Those
journals contribute to the production and dissemination of “fake
science” by failing to uphold basic standards of quality control, the
report said. In Germany alone, more than 5,000 scientists — including
those supported by public funding — have published their articles in such predatory journals, which have been increasing for the past five years.
While
those journals’ publishers claimed that a panel of scientists is in
charge of verifying the accuracy of the papers, the investigation showed
that articles are published within a few days of submission without any
vetting process.
In one case, an article in the Journal of
Integrative Oncology stated that a clinical study had shown the extract
of propolis, a secretion that bees use to glue hives together, was more
effective than chemotherapy in treating colorectal cancer. The study was
fake and the authors were affiliated with a research center that
doesn’t exist, Le Monde reported.
After the journalists questioned the journal about those findings, the article was deleted but an archived version is still available online.
Omics,
which published the journal in question, claims to have published over 1
million articles and is currently being investigated by the U.S.
Federal Trade Commission for alleged fraudulent claims, according to the Indian Express. A spokesman has denied any wrongdoing and defended the integrity of its publications.
Reporters
from the media outlets involved in the investigation successfully
published numerous non-scientific papers with the publishers whose
practices they were examining and also participated in several of their
conferences.
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