Jan Seal-Roberts, Publishing Director at Adis, provides an update on predatory publishing and its risks.

Recorded 4 October 2017 at a MedComms Networking event in Oxford. Produced by NetworkPharma.tv

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ABSTRACT:

Predatory publishers, i.e. publishers who unprofessionally exploit the author-pays model of open access (OA) publishing for their own profit, are indisputably the ‘bad guys’ of scholarly publishing. Yet predatory publishing is big business – a 2015 survey showed that it represented 30 per cent of the open access market, with 8,000 predatory journals together publishing more than 400,000 articles per year. The damage it causes is considerable. Authors are duped, thinking they are submitting to a reputable journal, and their reputations can be significantly damaged. Reviewers are misled, key opinion leaders (KOLs) are often misrepresented and may be hounded, and reputable publishers feel tarred by the same brush.

Predatory publishing is inevitably undermining the integrity of scientific scholarship. Publishing in Nature recently, David Moher et al characterised 2000 biomedical articles from over 200 journals thought to be predatory, and found that less than 10% of studies claiming to be RCTs described how patients were allocated, among other alarming findings, concluding that ‘little of this work will advance science’ and that it is ‘too dodgily reported’.

Predatory publishers can be difficult to recognise. A cross-industry initiative – the Think. Check. Submit. checklist encourages authors to check potential offenders’ websites, which invariably reveal tell-tale signs of fraud. The Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) publishes a whitelist of quality open access journals, which can serve to confirm or deny suspicion. Medcomms professionals should also warn clients to look out for predatory conferences, which are on the increase.

Note; this talk updates Jan’s previous presentation from November 2016, The perils and pitfalls of predatory publishers at https://networkpharma.tv/2016/11/11/the-perils-and-pitfalls-of-predatory-publishers/

Written by Penny Gray, Freelance Medical Writer

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We are building a library of free webcasts, like this one, for the global MedComms Community and others at http://www.networkpharma.tv and we’d welcome your suggestions for new topics and speakers.

Full details of this MedComms Networking event are at http://medcommsnetworking.com/event_041017.html

Jan’s presentation (PDF format) is at http://medcommsnetworking.com/presentations/roberts_041017.pdf

Jan’s Linkedin page is at https://www.linkedin.com/in/jan-seal-roberts-20658914/

More about Adis can be found at http://www.springer.com/adis

Filming and technical direction by Mario Crispino, Freelance Cameraman & Editor

[For the avoidance of doubt: this video is intended to be freely accessible to all. Please feel free to share and use however you like. Cheers Peter Llewellyn, Director NetworkPharma Ltd and Founder of the MedComms Networking Community activity at http://www.medcommsnetworking.com]