NYTimes.com: The Good, the Bad and the 'Radically Dishonest'
Glenn Hampson
Submitted for your consideration…
Still on the topic of predatory publishing, maybe we can glean some insights from this new study about liars and lying (see below link to the NYT summary) that can help us better understand what drives predatory publishing behaviors? That is, rather than cataloging these publishers according to the nature of their infractions (plagiarism, fake names, misleading emails, etc.), maybe evaluating the nature of their dishonesty is more helpful?
For instance, some predatory publishers exhibit “moral disengagement” by justifying committing occasional small infractions. To them, everyone is making a buck off of authors, so why shouldn’t they too? This group might be the most “benign” in terms of impacts on the scholarly publishing system because they’re still trying to create a viable product. The next worst group might be the “cheating non-liars,” who look for loopholes in the system by creating their own impact factors, their own slipshod “peer review,” their own preservation systems that don’t work, etc. And the worst group might the “radically dishonest” who (among other things) just take money from authors and never publishing anything.
With this kind of a hierarchy, the distinction between right and wrong in scholarly publishing might be made a little clearer, and we could then also consider different types of interventions, like capacity building for the sloppy, banning of the cheaters, and prosecution of the thieves.
From The New York Times:
The Good, the Bad and the ‘Radically Dishonest’
Lying and cheating behavior comes in several distinct flavors, a recent study found. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/15/science/psychology-dishonesty-lying-cheating.html?smid=em-share
David Wojick
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Glenn Hampson
This isn’t only about the ethics of publishing, David, but the ethics of truth, research funding, and research evaluation. There may well be large swaths of authors who---as you have advocated for years---are being well-served by this system, but there may also be wholesale pollution of research record taking place as well, not to mention distortion of the research funding and evaluation systems (one needn’t look much farther back than 2020 to see how much funding misdirection too place on COVID research, and the mixed results we’ve seen with regard to faster publishing but at the cost of also getting a lot more garbage in the system). We just don’t know the scope of this issue---we need more research. To your point, we certainly shouldn’t dismiss the entire system out of hand, but we also can’t simply embrace it as is.
You also make a good point about starting points---maybe a better way to look at this is to see what’s useful or potentially useful (like more journals that focus on issues of local research interest) and what’s clearly not (like journals that try to scam authors by having names that are one letter removed from an actual journal).
Best,
Glenn