In the PEPS Editors' blog in October 2015, I confessed that it was a laboratory policy not to refuse the favor to review papers submitted to scientific journals and that the consequence at the time was to review regularly double digits number of papers every year. Since 2016, the number of reviews has drastically decreased and is now far less than 10. I do not know why a sudden change has taken place but imagined an English translation of my text in the blog could make editors to feel a little sorry for inviting me for review. However, the number of peer-reviews to proceedings and abstracts for international meetings for the acceptance has become three-digits per meeting at the same time and the total time cost may become the same as before. When serving as a convener to a session of the Fall Meeting of the American Geophysical Union more than a decade ago, I confess that I rejected two submissions out of 40 to 50 and the rate of acceptance was about 95%. As the Society of Petroleum Engineers sets the ceiling in the number of acceptable papers up to 30% of the total number of submissions, peer-reviews of abstracts and proceeding papers for engineering international meetings are very important to reject submissions that do not deal with researches beyond a certain scientific datum. The reviews to submissions to scientific journals or engineering society meetings are to ensure the quality of research publications. The system of peer-reviewing is purely supported by anonymous reviewers responsible for maintaining the level of the academia, and I would like to deal with the review system as a topic from a standpoint a little higher than last time. The contents are from what I give to students in the class of engineering ethics in the Undergraduate School of Engineering, Kyoto University.
Seven years have passed since Mr. Jeffrey Beall of the University of Colorado at Denver (UCD) created the word "Predatory Journal." According to Butler (2013), Mr. Beall noticed a rapid increase in the number of direct emails to invite people to submit manuscripts to open journals around 2008 and numerous grammatical errors in the messages that triggered Mr. Beall to jump into the predatory journal problem. Mr. Beall used a set of criteria (Beall, 2012) to list up predatory journals and publishers and continued to publish and update what is called the Beall's List on a web site in UCD until the end of 2016. The number of predatory publishers in the Beall's List was 18 in 2011 has reached 923 on December 31, 2016. No researchers who were watching the site have not at all been noticed but the site was suddenly closed in January 2017 this year (Silver, 2017a) and seven months have passed since then. The readers may remember a lot of speculations for reasons of the sudden site closure and complaints when the Beall's List was suddenly lost. Since June this year, the list of predatory journal and publishers based on different criteria from the Beall's List was published for sale by a private company in the United States (Silver, 2017b). I feel that there really was a demand to the list of predatory journals and publishers in the academia.
In 2013, an article dealing with the results of a survey on peer-review of open access journals was published (Bohannon, 2013). Mr. John Bohannon assumed a false biologist Ocorrafoo Cobange of a false institute Wassee Institute of Medicine and wrote a paper to claim "a chemical substance extracted from lichens has shown anticancer properties." The manuscript he had prepared included mistakes and defective figures easily distinguishable by whom studied high-school level chemistry. Two months after the submission of the manuscript to 304 open access journals, 157 journals have accepted the paper for submission and 29 journals seemed to be derelict. Surprisingly, the rate of acceptance of his fake paper was 57% (52% even including 29 discontinued). Mr. Bohannon has included publishers in the Beall's list and it was also reported 82% of the predatory publishers have accepted the fake paper. The rate of paper acceptance by the publishers in the Beall's List have proven the applicability of the Beall's List. It was also surprising to see a journal published by Elsevier accepted the fake paper.
As is clear from the publication of the Beall's List and the findings of Bohannon (2013), researchers who want to have their papers printed and publishers who wants to earn what are paid by authors share the common objective to publish papers and the combination of the two risks research misconducts. There seems to be even cases in which fake impact factors are shown on the web site of such journals. Any changes in publishers such as in the intention for a reputation, for the presence, the succession of publisher's owners, or editor-in-chief, could influence the level of acceptance of submitted manuscripts, in which journals could risk becoming predatory. In academia, which is made up of maintaining the quality of research results, the number of papers and the impact factor of journals for which the publication of papers is done have been implicitly regarded as criteria for evaluation of researchers for a long time. However, it is interpreted that a whistle was blown to ask us if it is necessary to monitor the journals and publishers in terms of scientific values as a function of time by some means. At the same time, I think that it is necessary to recognize the importance of peer review process in maintaining academia's research level.
In Kuroki (2016), it is stated that Japan is the world fifth country in the retraction rate of papers. The rate of paper retraction has a big gap between the world fifth and sixth and it is an urgent task necessary to take prompt and effective countermeasures in countries down to the world fifth place including Japan. It is the Internet that cultivated the ground of predatory journals, but at the same time that founded a workplace for the disclosure of research misconducts. In order to gain the confidence to research integrity, I would like to propose editors and reviewers of PEPS to keep a sense of responsibility and enthusiasm and remind them how the peer review plays a big role in the advancement of science.
Beall, J., 2012, Criteria for Determining Predatory Open-Access Publishers (2nd edition), available at https://web.archive.org/web/20130603123106/http://scholarlyoa.com/2012/11/30/criteria-for-determining-predatory-open-access-publishers-2nd-edition/ (accessed on August 20, 2017).
Bohannon, J., 2013, Who's Afraid of Peer Review?, Science (04 Oct 2013), 342 (6154), 60-65, doi: 10.1126/science.342.6154.60.
Butler, D., 2013, Investigating journals: The dark side of publishing, Nature, 495, 433–435 (28 March 2013), doi: 10.1038/495433a.
Kuroki, T., 2016, Kenkyu-Fusei (Research Misconduct: translated by Hitoshi Mikada on August 22), Chuko-Shinsho 2373, Chuokoronsha, 302pp., ISBN: 978-4-12-102373-5. (in Japanese)
Silver, A., 2017a, Controversial website that lists ‘predatory’ publishers shuts down, Nature News (18 January 2017), doi: 10.1038/nature.2017.21328.
Silver, A., 2017b, Pay-to-view blacklist of predatory journals set to launch, Nature News (31 May 2017), doi: 10.1038/nature.2017.22090.
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| Professor Hitoshi Mikada, Graduate School of Engineering, Kyoto University PEPS editor in the solid earth science section |
