WWW.WAS.ORG • WORLD AQUACULTURE • JUNE 2016 21 Pharmaceutical Research) passed a stringent test of quality of Peer review by rejecting a fake article (Link1, Link2, Link3).” Obviously, rejecting a fake article cannot be considered the same as demonstrating the high standard of a journal, and the sting operation cannot be considered a stringent test of quality control. The author of the fake article calls it a spoof, and states: ‘Any reviewer with more than a high-school knowledge of chemistry and the ability to understand a basic data plot should have spotted the paper’s short-comings immediately. Its experiments are so hopelessly flawed that the results are meaningless’ (Bohannon 2013). Furthermore, neither the pseudonym used nor the alleged institute even exist, so the manuscript should have been rejected without the first line even being read. We leave the readers to their own conclusions about the validity of this test of ‘journal quality.’ Professions of altruism Some OA journals temporarily reduce or waive publication fees, ostensibly to provide all students and researchers with financially unrestricted access to publication of their work. Such appeals aim to provide some authentic, geographically heterogeneous manuscripts, allowing the journals to both gain some credibility and publish issues that might otherwise have been embarrassingly empty. Given the persistent lack of such heterogeneity (Shen and Björk 2015), the strategy has shown limited success to date. The following are examples (original grammar conserved): “SDI is determined to bring down OA publication charges for the sake of wide dissemination of peer reviewed scientific research. As part of this policy, SDI announces special discount on normal Article Processing Charge (normal APC is US$ 500) for any Manuscript submitted within 01 January, 2015 - 31 March, 2015.” (www. sciencedomain.org/page.php?id=publication-charge) “Because I do not only want to ask or demand for more open access but also to do something for those who would benefit more of it than others, I personally waived APC fees at ScienceOpen for early career researchers until the end of November as announced at the end of worldwide OA week in October.” (Form email from Alexander.Grossmann@ scienceopen.com, Nov. 17, 2014) “On this happy occasion we are delighted to inform you that OMICS Group is providing Discounts for the articles submitted on/before Jan 28th 2015 to Journal of Aquaculture Research & Development.” (Undated form email from JARD, editor.jard@omicsgroup.biz) Conclusion From the foregoing, it is clear that the ‘gentlemen’s agreement’ foundation of quality control has been so completely subverted that the scientific community has been flooded with journals having little or no quality control at all. Most readers who follow their own citation alerts know that their papers are now being cited to shore up dubious science in predatory journals. Since modern civilization only exists and can only continue to exist because of science, the danger posed by predatory OA journals extends to our civilization as a whole. A recent example may be found in the discovery that both Canada and New Zealand’s Departments of Health unknowingly partnered with a predatory OA journal to publish food safety research (news.nationalpost.com/news/canada/health-canadakept-predatory-publisher-despite-warning-about-shoddy-sciencefrom-government-expert). For science to remain credible, it is clear that the scientific community must adapt, confront and defeat the threat posed by predatory and pseudo-journals. To this end, we propose the following recommendations: For the scientific publishing community 1) Deal with the mortal threat first. The weaknesses and perversions of the JCR IF have been explored in many publications (blogs.nature.com/news/2013/05/scientists-join-journal-editorsto-fight-impact-factor-abuse.html, www.editage.com/insights/ why-you-should-not-use-the-journal-impact-factor-to-evaluateresearch, Amin and Mabe 2000, Garfield 2006, Simmons 2008, Casadevall and Fang 2015). This discontent culminated in the 2012 San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA). Since the time of the original meeting in December 2012, 700 new predatory OA publishers have appeared, representing approximately 7,700 new predatory journals, along with the new sham supporting structures. It has become clear that of the two perils: misuse of IF and predatory journals, the former is a well-known nuisance, while the latter is a new and mortal threat to science. Although IF is a very blunt instrument for the inappropriate tasks that most administrators seek to accomplish, it is the best (by virtue of being the sole) blunt instrument available to stop the spread of the predatory OA journals. We must therefore re-think our position on IF: scientists must choose between living with a nuisance that we could eliminate with some effort (IF abuse) or allowing science to become debased to the point of extinction (predatory OA journals). 2) Clean house. We must deal with the nuisance threat that led us to unwisely open the door to the mortal threat, i.e. set IF back to what it was originally created to do: indicate the journals that are most trusted and used by scientists23. While far from perfect, IF is currently the ‘least bad’ way of doing this, and the SFD should be revised to reflect this. Re-affirming the legitimate IF for its original purpose — the evaluation of the impact of scientific journals in their fields — will not only eliminate the predatory OA journals in one easy stroke, but it will also relegate the more dangerous pseudojournals to their well-deserved positions of obscurity. 3) Trust the wisdom of our elders. In the end, no totally objective criterion will ever unambiguously encompass and measure all of the dimensions of scientific journal quality control. All of these objective criteria have attempted to quantify an intangible yet irreplaceable quality evaluator: reputation. The best measure of journal quality will be that of seasoned scientists with a distinguished publication record spanning at least ten years. They will not be able to make fine distinctions between journals of substantially equal quality, but this is neither useful nor desirable anyway. They will, however, succeed in many ways that bibliometric indices cannot, e.g. by taking into account journal niche breadth (the best papers involving a particular taxon or group of organisms might be found in a journal devoted to that group (e.g. JSR), rather than in a more widely-cited general ecology journal. (CONTINUED ON PAGE 22)
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