Incentives, Scams, and Fakes
As fakery abounds, the root cause is the same — a quick score and easy getaway
A recent story in Nature Index discusses the ongoing problem of hijacked journals and hijacked publisher web sites. The freelance journalist in Australia in what appears to be his first story for Nature Index does a good job outlining the problem, and even its root cause, but misses the mark when it comes to advice to rectify the problem, even though the answer is all too apparent:
The purpose of a hijacking is to generate money quickly by charging illegitimate article-processing fees to unsuspecting researchers.
Just as with predatory publishers, hijacked journal sites are incentivized by the APC model of “pay to play publishing.”
Perhaps the most interesting is wileypublisher.com, a site clumsily appropriating the name of a publisher that kind of hijacked itself recently via its strategically questionable acquisition of Hindawi.
We’re not the only industry suffering from this technique, with Macmillan Publishing — one of the “Big Five” book publishers — suffering the same problem. And for the same reason — for self-publishing services to hoodwink authors into paying directly for publication services.
The move to author-pays — in scholarly publishing, and in self-publishing of fiction and other genres — has smudged what was once a bright line. That is, securing a publisher meant that someone had agreed to assume risk on the author’s behalf. Now, the author may be shouldering the financial risk.
Worse, the smudged line makes it hard to determine what is a “legitimate” OA publisher. For example, Hindawi/Wiley, MDPI, Frontiers, and other scholarly publishers experiencing mass retractions due to what certainly seems some culpability on behalf of the publisher, no refund has ever been issued as far as I know. Authors are SOL, money remains in the accounts of the publishers involved.
Sites of journals and publishers are being hijacked so scammers can make a quick buck and make an easy escape. Their reasons and motivations are the same as predatory publishers, which are the same as exploitative publishers, which are getting along the smooth spectrum toward mega-journals and so forth.
It’s all related.