Another candidate for a bad English predatory spam award

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David Wojick

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Aug 1, 2022, 9:23:43 AM8/1/22
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 Maybe not as bad as the last one. Runner up?

David

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From: Biostatistics and Biometrics Open Access Journal <bios...@juniper-publisher.org>
Date: August 1, 2022 at 9:08:29 AM AST
To: "dwo...@craigellachie.us" <dwo...@Craigellachie.us>
Subject: Your Transcript

 Dear Dr. David Wojick,

I am sure you're quite busy, but I would appreciate if you could take a moment to my below request.

Well, our Biostatistics and Biometrics Open Access Journal (BBOAJ) is scheduled to release its Upcoming issue, but we are in deficit of one article so is it possible for you to support us with any of your manuscript to achieve this goal?

Appreciate if you could provide your acknowledgment within 24 hrs.

Await your submission.

Regards,
Ruby Simmons
Assistant Managing Editor, Biostatistics and Biometrics Open Access Journal (BBOAJ)
ISSN: 2573-2633 |Impact Factor:0.883
Phone:+1-805-200-4030 |Fax:1-855-420-6872
www.juniperpublishers.com|bios...@juniperpublishers.com

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Alicia Fatima Gomez

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Aug 2, 2022, 6:12:08 PM8/2/22
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Dear all, 

a very usual sign for predatory journals is to add a fake impact factors. This is one of those cases. Besides the fact that they want "your acknowledgment within 24 hrs"... 


All the best, 

Alicia 

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David Wojick

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Aug 2, 2022, 6:39:01 PM8/2/22
to Alicia Fatima Gomez, osi20...@googlegroups.com
This is true except some non-indexed journals calculate their own impact factor, which may be accurate. 

David

On Aug 2, 2022, at 6:12 PM, Alicia Fatima Gomez <in...@aliciafgomez.com> wrote:



Glenn Hampson

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Aug 2, 2022, 7:29:36 PM8/2/22
to David Wojick, Alicia Fatima Gomez, osi20...@googlegroups.com

Well, technically, no. The Journal Impact Factor is a trademarked product that is owned and operated by Clarivate. There are no personal impact factors (well, there are, but they aren’t official JIFs). Also, only journals listed in the Science Citation Index Expanded (SCIE) and the Social Sciences Citation Index (SSCI) receive an Impact Factor from Clarivate. So, if a journal is making one up, they aren’t listed. Which isn’t at all to say they’re predatory---just that they’re too new, too small, or too insignificant (relatively speaking) to merit having an “actual” JIF. It’s a wildly abused and misused metric that we’ve complained about forever, but it doesn’t appear to be going anywhere soon.

Glenn Hampson

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Aug 2, 2022, 9:24:53 PM8/2/22
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Or maybe what we need is yet another journal impact metric!—-this from Richard Poynder’s tweet: https://twitter.com/rickypo/status/1553987139859353600?s=21&t=QkzZrRaoqoMNFnDQLyliLA

Sent from my iPhone

On Aug 2, 2022, at 6:02 PM, Glenn Hampson <gham...@nationalscience.org> wrote:

 Not sure that’s true either because Clarivate uses one dataset for all calculations—self-counts may not be accurate—but I defer to the publishing experts here. In any event, as Lisa just tweeted (https://twitter.com/lisalibrarian/status/1554071262246445057?s=21&t=QkzZrRaoqoMNFnDQLyliLA) this focus on JIFs was supposed to disappear in the OA age. Hardly.

Sent from my iPhone

On Aug 2, 2022, at 5:04 PM, David Wojick <dwo...@craigellachie.us> wrote:

 It may be a trademark violation but it can still be accurate.

David

On Aug 2, 2022, at 7:29 PM, Glenn Hampson <gham...@nationalscience.org> wrote:



Well, technically, no. The Journal Impact Factor is a trademarked product that is owned and operated by Clarivate. There are no personal impact factors (well, there are, but they aren’t official JIFs). Also, only journals listed in the Science Citation Index Expanded (SCIE) and the Social Sciences Citation Index (SSCI) receive an Impact Factor from Clarivate. So, if a journal is making one up, they aren’t listed. Which isn’t at all to say they’re predatory---just that they’re too new, too small, or too insignificant (relatively speaking) to merit having an “actual” JIF. It’s a wildly abused and misused metric that we’ve complained about forever, but it doesn’t appear to be going anywhere soon.

 

From: osi20...@googlegroups.com <osi20...@googlegroups.com> On Behalf Of David Wojick
Sent: Tuesday, August 2, 2022 4:41 PM
To: Alicia Fatima Gomez <in...@aliciafgomez.com>
Cc: osi20...@googlegroups.com
Subject: Re: Another candidate for a bad English predatory spam award

 

This is true except some non-indexed journals calculate their own impact factor, which may be accurate. 

 

David


On Aug 2, 2022, at 6:12 PM, Alicia Fatima Gomez <in...@aliciafgomez.com> wrote:



Dear all, 

a very usual sign for predatory journals is to add a fake impact factors. This is one of those cases. Besides the fact that they want "your acknowledgment within 24 hrs"... 


<image001.png>

Glenn Hampson

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Aug 3, 2022, 12:01:14 PM8/3/22
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Thanks for the JIF fact-check Michael. I missed this before sending my last email---reading my in-box in the wrong direction!

 

To all OSIers---I hope your summer has being going well. I owe you an update on the OSI2022 Global Researcher Congress. Overall, I think the effort was worthwhile. The number of participants ended up being a lot lower than I had hoped, but even so, the feedback we received was interesting and helpful.

 

My main takeaway so far is that we’re on the wrong track. As we know from many previous surveys of researchers, the research community wants their work to matter. To the extent that open access efforts can help with this, great, but for the most part these efforts and policies mostly go unnoticed and are less important than a whole host of other factors (like improved infrastructure support and collaboration). The biggest stressor seems to be APCs. Publishing research has become unaffordable for much of the world.

 

By far, the notion that it is necessary to permit unfettered information reuse---the kind of reuse allowed under a CC-BY license---was disliked by the overwhelming majority of researchers. We know that CC-BY-NC-ND is the most popular license, but to me anyway, starting with CC-BY as the default (as in Plan S, the UN Open Science Policy, et al) and then backtracking to something less extreme seems like we’re waging an ideological battle rather than promoting policies intended to help researchers. I’ll resurrect this idea from OSI2017 that a more positive and proactive approach may be to create a CC-EDU licensing framework whose default setting is free reuse and sharing within research and academia with restrictions on commercial and derivatives.

 

What did resonate with this group was OSI’s observations that open exists along a spectrum of outcomes, that publishing is a critical part of the research process, and that long-term sustainable solutions can’t be one-size-fits-all and must involve closer consultation with the research community. So did the idea of focusing on issues instead of solutions (e.g., using all kinds of open approaches and collaborations to help cancer or climate change research), and making sure the research world doesn’t split into those with means and those without.

 

There’s a lot more to unpack here. I’ll be working on this for the next few months, and will circulate a report to you in the Fall with the general findings. I’ll also draft a final policy summary for your review and comment, incorporating these findings into the broader observations and recommendations that OSI has put forward over the years. This will probably be our last big policy paper---not “big” in the 140 page sense (I’ll try to keep this one under 10 pages so it’s actually readable), but big in the sense that it will represent the final policy recommendation of this group. I would be happy to include dissents in the annex.

 

To all the writers and policy wonks in this group, if you’re interested in working on this paper, let me know. Maybe there can/should even be different sections (e.g., a view from libraries, publishers, funders, etc.)?

 

With best regards,

 

Glenn

 

 

Glenn Hampson
Executive Director
Science Communication Institute (SCI)
Program Director
Open Scholarship Initiative (OSI)

 

 

 

 

 

From: Michael Clarke <mtcl...@gmail.com>
Sent: Tuesday, August 2, 2022 7:16 PM
To: Glenn Hampson <gham...@nationalscience.org>
Cc: David Wojick <dwo...@craigellachie.us>; osi20...@googlegroups.com
Subject: Re: Another candidate for a bad English predatory spam award

 

Glenn is correct. It is not possible to have a self-calculated journal impact factor. To calculate the JIF you need the specific Clarivate index (SCIE or SSCI). You could use another index (CrossRef, Dimensions) to source your citations and make a two year average but that is not a JIF, it is just an average. The JIF calculation is dependent on a proprietary index. 

 

Note: the above is not an endorsement of the JIF just an explanation. 

 

 

Simon Linacre

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Aug 3, 2022, 4:08:50 PM8/3/22
to Glenn Hampson, David Wojick, osi20...@googlegroups.com
A few points on this:
- It is possible to estimate a journal's Impact Factor if you have access to Web of Science, which is something publishers do to see if a journal has a chance of being accepted. This estimation, as Glenn points out, is not the Impact Factor, just an estimate of how a journal would perform if it was accepted into WoS
- The journal in question states its 'Impact Factor' is 0.883 - you can get a quick and dirty estimate of a journal's citation rate through Harzing's Publish or Perish software using Google Scholar as a data source. In this case, the journal published 24 articles in 2019-2020 that have received a total of 12 citations all-time (ie not just in 2021 required for the Impact Factor), so even with Google Scholar counts (which count everything rather than just WoS-indexed journals), its highest possible Impact Factor could only be 0.500 (but is more likely to be 0.000)
- A study published in THE today shows that where you publish still matters to academics (https://www.timeshighereducation.com/news/academic-reputation-still-driven-journal-prestige-survey?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=editorial-daily&mc_cid=7b41f8875c&mc_eid=0c5faf57e2), so not only is the IF here to stay for a while yet, so are predatory journals ripping it off



To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/osi2016-25/75124EA8-A2A6-476F-91BF-7DC8D516C929%40nationalscience.org.


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Michael Clarke

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Aug 3, 2022, 4:08:56 PM8/3/22
to Glenn Hampson, David Wojick, osi20...@googlegroups.com
Glenn is correct. It is not possible to have a self-calculated journal impact factor. To calculate the JIF you need the specific Clarivate index (SCIE or SSCI). You could use another index (CrossRef, Dimensions) to source your citations and make a two year average but that is not a JIF, it is just an average. The JIF calculation is dependent on a proprietary index. 

Note: the above is not an endorsement of the JIF just an explanation. 


David Wojick

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Aug 3, 2022, 4:39:13 PM8/3/22
to Michael Clarke, Glenn Hampson, osi20...@googlegroups.com
The JIF is proprietary but the jif is not. That is, the term "impact factor" or IF has become an ordinary language concept that refers to a specific calculation, not to a specific product. In fact I suspect most of the researchers using the term are unaware of the product. As I said before, we can even ask whose data gives the most accurate estimate of impact factors. 

I am reminded of our discussions of the term "open access" where people argue that their specialized technical concept is the definition of the widely used ordinary language term. It is not. Language has its own way of going, if you like. 

David

On Aug 3, 2022, at 4:08 PM, Michael Clarke <mtcl...@gmail.com> wrote:



Biagioli, Mario

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Aug 3, 2022, 9:06:39 PM8/3/22
to Michael Clarke, Glenn Hampson, David Wojick, osi20...@googlegroups.com
Michael, I agree that the JIF is proprietary.  Still, what is owned is not the calculation but the "JIF" trademark.  Because it would be very difficult (in my view impossible) to get a patent on the JIF calculation as a so-called "method", metrics companies try to protect their indexes through trademarks -- to protect the name rather than the method, which remains in the public domain.

So one can come up with the exact same number that Clarivate calls the JIF (by dividing citations by the number of citable items), but you simply cannot call it JIF.  (In the same way you can produce and sell water faucets but cannot call it "Delta"). We keep thinking of the JIF as numerical indexes (which they are) but we all know that they function as badges or "brands", and are protected as such -- that is, as trademarks -- by Clarivate and other metrics providers.  (Parenthetically, I'd think that Clarivate could go after fraudulent providers of JIFs claiming trademark infringement rather than the falsehood of the number).

Clarivate may try (or maybe already does?) to contractually prevent WOS users from using the data from WOS to do those calculations.  Still (again hypothetically) one could find that data oneself, however laborious that could be, as it was in the olden days of scientometrics.  In sum, I think it would be possible (though not necessarily viable) to calculate a "non-JIF" factor that is informationally identical to the JIF without calling it "JIF" -- same index contentwise, but not trademarkwise.

There has been an interesting article in Clarke & Esposito's latest newsletter (2nd section at: https://www.ce-strategy.com/the-brief/brand-extension/) about Clarivate's decision to give JIFs to journals currently on their "emergent journals" index, while simultaneously NOT ranking these "emergent" JIFs vis a vis the "classic" JIFS in Clarivate's other indexes:


"Perhaps most confusing, as Clarivate will retain ESCI as a separate index, while the journals listed there will receive a JIF score, they will not be ranked against journals in the same subject category in SCIE or SSCI. Which suggests there will now be multiple sets of JIF rankings for scientific journals in Clarivate’s Journal Citation Reports (JCR): the current SCIE and SSCI journal rankings and a separate list of rankings of ESCI titles. This is likely to lead to a lot of confusion..."

My guess is that Clarivate is trying to claim a fast-expanding market sector -- "emergent journals" -- by providing them JIFs, but at the same time making sure that these "junior" JIFs don't dilute the distinctiveness of the "traditional" JIFs.  To me this is comparable to a fashion house that, while using its brand on all of its products, tries also to differentiate those product lines, like making sure that Armani Collezioni is not mistaken for Emporio Armani, etc.  Paradoxically, Clarivate is creating a lot of confusion precisely because it tries to differentiate the value or distinctiveness of its different JIF-based indexes without giving them different names.  It is not a calculation problem but a trademark/branding problem, which they don't seem to be handling well.

So, yes, JIFs are calculations but trademarked calculations that are produced, sold, and used as branding devices.

Mario



Mario Biagioli
Distinguished Professor, School of Law and Department of Communication, UCLA

New book:
Academic Brands (Cambridge, 2022) 
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