Scholarly publishing threatened?

How many invitations did you receive last week to publish your latest research data in a journal with a name very similar to those of our classic scientific journals? The reason for this generosity must be the high chance of cheating researchers so that they pay article processing charges. These journals have been denominated 'predatory journals' and have interested a Canadian librarian, Charles Beall, to a very high extent. The so-called 'Beall's list of predatory journals' has become widely recognized (1), and today it contains more than 1000 titles. Since the number of 'invitations' seems to increase constantly there must be some authors that are accepting these offers. This might also be one reason for why traditional scientific journals have been facing decreasing numbers of submissions for a while. So when such offers appear in your inbox, do consult this Beall's list. If indeed, which most often is the case, you find the journal on that list, you should forget about submitting anything to them. There is a great risk that besides losing some money you will also lose control of your manuscript. It might just disappear in cyber space or be blocked/lost in a production process that goes on forever. One more threat to scholarly publishing is that of the shortcomings of the peer review process. That aspect was the subject of a debate article a couple of years ago by Hanna Norsted in a neighbourhood journal (2). The title of her paper was 'The Death of the Scientific Journal', and it focused on the fate of a spoof article fabricated by John Bohannon of Science. It was submitted to 304 open-access journal, and interestingly more than half of the journals accepted the article for publication. To what extent this flaw of the peer review process was caused by peer review fraud or not was not looked at. Perhaps that was because the phenomenon has become so much highlighted lately by all the retractions that had been found to be published after peer review fraud (3). This was first reported four years ago when an East Asian researcher admitted that he had invented e-mail addresses so that the review requests all landed in the inbox of himself or his friends. By such means he produced faked reviews that were submitted to the editor very quickly, and they were always in favour of acceptance of the manuscript. After that other …