Fake Academe: Fined $ 50.1 Million

Kip Hansen April 4, 2019

News Flash: “U.S. judge rules deceptive publisher should pay $50 million in damages”.

Appearing yesterday in Science magazine online is the news that “A U.S. federal judge has ordered the OMICS International publishing group to pay $50.1 million in damages for deceiving thousands of authors who published in its journals and attended its conferences. It’s one of the first rulings of its kind against one of the largest publishers accused of so-called predatory tactics.” [source: all italicized quoted text from Science mag ]

The OMICS group featured large in Jeffery Beall’s original list of “predatory open access publishing” in 2008.

“Judge Gloria Navarro of the U.S. District Court in Las Vegas, Nevada, granted summary judgment without a trial, accepting as uncontroverted a set of allegations made in 2016 by the U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) in Washington, D.C., in its capacity as a consumer watchdog. The ruling also bars OMICS from similar future conduct.”

OMICS and the many sub-groups of its 700 or so online journals, was found guilty of:

• FAKE PEER REVIEW: “OMICS, which publishes about 700 journals in scientific and other fields, advertised deceptively that it provided authors with rigorous peer review overseen by editorial boards. Instead, its journals approved many articles for publication in a matter of days with no substantive feedback to authors, FTC alleged. The judge relied in part on the findings of an investigation published by Science in 2013; its author, journalist John Bohannon, submitted a deposition to the court. Of 69,000 manuscripts published by OMICS from 2011 to 2017, the publisher provided evidence that only half had been sent out for peer review.”
• PAY TO PUBLISH: “Despite this lack of actual peer review, OMICS’s solicitations to authors didn’t make it clear enough that it would charge them to publish articles in its open-access journals. Some authors complained and asked OMICS to withdraw their articles, but OMICS refused, preventing authors from submitting them to other publications.”
• FAKE LIST OF REVIEWERS: “OMICS advertised its 50,000 reviewers as experts, but some never agreed to serve, and OMICS continued to publicly list some scientists as reviewers even after they asked to be removed.”
• FALSIFIED IT OWN IMPACT: “The publisher advertised that its journals had high impact factors, a measure of their editorial quality. But it didn’t sufficiently reveal that OMICS itself generated its own “unofficial impact factor” for some of its journals based on citations in Google Scholar. OMICS also incorrectly stated that its journals are indexed in the U.S. National Library of Medicine’s Medline and PubMedCentral.”
• HELD FAKED CONFERENCES: “OMICS organized scholarly conferences and advertised that prominent academics would attend. But a sampling of 100 conferences indicated that 60% named organizers or participants who had not agreed to serve in that capacity.”

[source: all italicized quoted text from Science mag ]

The depth of this fake journal problem is hard to convey — but the amount of the fine ought to give you some idea...........To Read More....