Today's the first time that the National Audubon Society has been featured on this blog! The story is ornithological (sort of) but it's mainly a parable about predatory journals. The journalist for the Audubon Society tells the story of ornithologist Daniel Baldassarre, who published an article in the legitimate-sounding Scientific Journal of Research and Reviews (SJJR). The Audubon journalist explains that there are several odd features to this empirical article.
The published article, “What’s the Deal with Birds?”, includes the following abstract:
Many people wonder: what’s the deal with birds? This is a common query. Birds are pretty weird. I mean, they have feathers. WTF? Most other animals don’t have feathers. To investigate this issue, I looked at some birds. I looked at a woodpecker, a parrot, and a penguin. They were all pretty weird! In conclusion, we may never know the deal with birds, but further study is warranted.
The journalist explains:
...the sample size—a woodpecker, a parrot, and a penguin—... seems suspiciously small. The main figure, a graph plotted along an x-axis ranging from “weird beak” to “looks like a fish,” with a red line labeled “the deal,” is a textbook example of dadaist absurdity. The prose veers wildly between academic terminology and gormless observation. “This is the first study I am aware of to attempt to quantify the deal with birds,” Baldassarre writes. “Unfortunately, the results were ambiguous, although Bayesian approaches may prove useful in the future...When presented with weird behavior, birds exhibited a multimodal response including physical aggression and duetting, both of which were repeatable across highly variable contexts.”
How did such a ridiculous article get published? Turns out that Dr. Baldasarre was trying to prove a point--some scientific journals are not legitimate--they are predatory, and will accept anything.
...the SJRR is a predatory journal, designed to bilk unwary academics out of money, and Baldassarre’s paper is a joke—quite literally—at their expense.
[...] Baldasarre first had the idea to submit a joke paper in early February, when the latest in a long line of emails from one of these scam journals landed in his inbox. He slapped together the first iteration of “What’s the Deal With Birds”—a couple of paragraphs in the cursory format of a manuscript—only to see it rejected, perhaps as an obvious parody. Undaunted, he inserted some selections from an earlier legitimate paper to pad it out and resubmitted it to SJRR.
[...]While SJRR initially demanded a $1,700 publication fee, Baldassarre was eventually able to bargain them down to nothing.
You can access the original paper, including its full-color figure, in its predatory-journal-glory here. (Oh no! It looks like SJRR might have taken it down, given all the negative publicity. Here is an independent link.)
Questions
a) What is a predatory journal and how is it different from a legitimate journal? (Hint: Use the terms peer review and high quality science in your answer.)
b) If you're doing your own library research for a literature review, how can you know if an article you'd like to use is in a predatory journal or not? One way is to ask your librarian. If you are a student, go to your university's library home page, and find where you can access online help from a university librarian. It might be an online chat, a help desk, or an email consultation service.
c) One potential way to check if a journal is predatory is to use Beall's List. Go there and try typing in the name of the journal (Scientific Journal of Research and Reviews) in this bird story, or try the name of the journal's publisher, Iris Publishers. Does Beall's List consider this journal or its publisher to be predatory?
d) Visit the homepage of SJRR's publisher, Iris Publishers. Now visit the homepage of two legitimate publishers, Sage Journals and PLOS, both of which publish legitimate science journals. Just by looking at the websites, can you tell which publishers are legitimate?
e) Predatory journals make money by charging authors (as much as $2000) to publish their articles. But importantly, just because a journal charges the authors for publication does not mean it is predatory. For example, the journal PlosONE is a legitimate journal that charges authors to publish their work. PlosONE is open access, meaning that anybody can access PlosONE articles for free--you don't have to have a subscription via a university library (i.e., the expenses of publication are transferred from libraries to researchers). Visit the PlosONE webpage and find an example of a (presumably legitimate) psychology article there.
f) Draw a Venn diagram or concept map depicting the relationships among the following concepts: predatory publishers, legitimate publishers, predatory journals, legitimate journals, authors pay to publish, open-access, peer reviewed.
