At the outset it’s important to take stock of how the now ubiquitous term, “fake news” is used as a cudgel towards two mutually antagonistic ends,
- One, a nefarious and insincere attempt to discredit “truthful” news that is not to the accuser’s liking.
- Two, the laudable public-spirited goal to reveal outright fabrications trying to pass themselves off as real news.
Inherently cautious, science and medicine have evolved a highly elaborate publishing process with formal peer review as its foundational piece, which makes the nefarious usage of the term “fake news” rare within them.
However, recent years have seen a dramatic rise in outright fabrications, which fuels pseudoscience. Public understanding of science being weak to non-existent to begin with, such trends do no less than threaten to discredit genuine science, meaning the stakes are very high.
To understand how pseudoscience in academic publishing today threatens the scientific edifice requires understanding how we got here.
Mainstays Of Academic Publishing – Legacy Print Publishers & Their For-Profit Oligopolies
Academic publishing has been a money-making racket for quite some decades. In a nutshell, in the pre-digital era, the racket ran something like this (also recommend reading the hair-raising 1),
- Around the world, governments and non-profits largely fund scientific research.
- Using these funds, scientists do all the work reported in their papers and give it to academic publishers for free.
- Scientists even peer review each other’s work for free – evaluating the data, assessing its scientific validity.
- Middle men facilitating scientific output, academic publishers select unpaid peer reviewers, manage the commissioning, reviewing and editing process using paid editorial staff, and finally publish the paper in one of their print journals.
- Scientists often pay exorbitant page charges or submission fees as authors for the privilege of getting their papers published in these academic journals, sign over to them the copyright to their published work, and they and their employers pay even more exorbitant subscription fees to access many of these journals.
- The academic publishers then sell back this published work to government-funded university libraries and other research institutions. Ultimately, who pays? Largely governments, i.e., taxpayers.
Even as this preposterous model of socialized cost and privatized profit holds sway in academic publishing, the industry as a whole has also been consolidating with the result that a handful of large publishing houses now dominate the academic publishing landscape, each publishing thousands of journals across various scientific disciplines.
In 2013, Reed-Elsevier accounted for ~24%, Springer for ~12%, Wiley-Blackwell for ~11%, American Chemical Society, and Taylor and Francis for ~3% each of all the natural and medical science papers published that year (2).
Digital Expands Rent-Seeking Opportunity Within Academic Publishing
- The clamor and push for open-access, making academic papers accessible online to all for free, has placed a higher cost onto the shoulders of hapless scientists already caught in the maw of publish or perish.
- The dreaded and highly dubious APC, article processing charge, extracted for the privilege of making a scientist’s paper immediately open-access online, means digital academic publishers can make bank lolling in their office chairs, their even more meager work verily a breeze compared to the already meager work legacy print publishers used to undertake in bringing an academic paper out in print.
- Meantime, legacy print academic publishers have also quickly caught onto the money making potential of APC, adding it to their already obscenely bloated profit margins (3).
- Just pay extra for APC and your paper is open-access online in just about any academic journal these days. Not exactly the nostrum that open-access advocates had been campaigning for.
No wonder a detailed analysis suggested academic publishing has better profit margins compared to even the likes of Amazon, Apple and Google (1)! All the money, no risk to life or limb, no law enforcement on one’s back, leaving no pain, no gain for suckers, legacy academic publishing currently wallows in no pain, all gain, an ultimate in rent-seeking heaven.
Digital Opens Up Academic Publishing To New Online-Only Players, Many Of Them Predatory
Predatory open-access publishing – Wikipedia – behold the rise and rise of predatory open-access digital academic publishers. Digital technology flattened the prevailing cosy (for academic publishers, not the scientists) captive market in academia, making it easier for newer players, many of them predatory, to glom onto the juicy pickings ripe for the taking, rocket boosting the racket to stratospheric levels. Digital, online-only publishing is after all far cheaper than legacy print.
Increasing pressure to crack down against such publishers led the US FTC in 2016 to announce a lawsuit against the academic publisher OMICS Group, a lawsuit that’s still working its way through the system (4).
Updated April 6, 2019: A US Federal Court in Nevada (where OMICS is legally incorporated) has ordered OMICS International to pay the FTC a fine of >$50 million for engaging in “unfair and deceptive practices”, Hyderabad-Based OMICS Fined $50 Million for ‘Deceptive Practices’
Pseudoscience is the inevitable downside of the forced marriage between the albatross of the publish and perish imperative tied around scientists’ necks and predatory online academic journals. A 2018 global investigation by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists reported (below from 5, emphasis mine),
“Dozens of reporters from media outlets in Europe, Asia and the United States have analysed 175,000 scientific articles published by five of the world’s largest pseudo-scientific platforms including India-based Omics Publishing Group and the Turkey-based World Academy of Science, Engineering and Technology, or Waset. In addition to failing to perform peer or editorial committee reviews of articles, the companies charge to publish articles, accept papers by employees of pharmaceutical and other companies as well as by climate-change skeptics promoting questionable theories…
Some of those publishers send targeted emails to scientists who are under pressure to publish as many articles as possible in order to obtain promotions and improve their curriculum, according to the findings by Norddeutscher Rundfunk (NDR), WDR and Süddeutsche Zeitung.
In addition to the German outlets, a group of more than a dozen media organizations including the New Yorker, Le Monde, the Indian Express and the Korean outlet Newstapa took part in the investigation. The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists facilitated the collaboration.
Although the existence of these internet-based pseudo-scientific journals is not new and has been warned against by universities and research institutions, its recent rapid growth — with the number of publications put out by the top publishers tripling since 2013 and involving some 400,000 scientists – set off alarms among former Nobel Prize winners.
Those journals contribute to the production and dissemination of “fake science” by failing to uphold basic standards of quality control, the report said. In Germany alone, more than 5,000 scientists — including those supported by public funding — have published their articles in such predatory journals, which have been increasing for the past five years.”
Coda
The scientific article as the be-all and end-all of a scientific career makes academic publishing a captive market. As Stephen Buranyi wrote in the Guardian in 2017, to control access to the scientific literature is to control science (1). That reality means predatory digital academic publishers stand to reap profits off of pseudoscience at the expense of science for the foreseeable future unless lawmakers seriously crack down against them.
Bibliography
1. Is the staggeringly profitable business of scientific publishing bad for science?
2. Larivière, Vincent, Stefanie Haustein, and Philippe Mongeon. “The oligopoly of academic publishers in the digital era.” PloS one 10.6 (2015): e0127502. The Oligopoly of Academic Publishers in the Digital Era
3. Shamash, Katie. “Article processing charges (APCs) and subscriptions: Monitoring open access costs.” Jisc, May (2016). https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&…
4. Federal Trade Commission begins to crack down on ‘predatory’ publishers
5. New global investigation tackles poisonous effects of ‘fake science’ – ICIJ
https://www.quora.com/Is-there-fake-news-in-medicine/answer/Tirumalai-Kamala