Well, they’ll spam you when you’re trying to be so good
They’ll spam you just like they said they would
They’ll spam you when you’re trying to go home
And they’ll spam you when you’re there all alone
But I would not feel so all damned
Everybody must get spammed. — Bob Dylan, almost.
OK, this one’s funny. A few years ago we had a post, “It’s . . . spam-tastic!”, reporting on a scam where they send personal-looking emails to scholars to get them to pay $3000 or so to get their articles published in a journal that no one will read. They are parasites on the goodwill of academia, and each such bit of spam degrades that trust, drawing from the non-bottomless aquifer of the cooperative scientific enterprise.
At the time of this writing, that post has 43 comments, several of which are by other academics that received this spam solicitation.
OK, here’s the funny part. Today I was going through the moderated comments, and . . . I see a spam comment on that post, from the same spam publisher I was exposing! I did not approve the comment. I sent it straight into the spam folder.
It’s funny, but on second thought it’s not so funny, it’s sad. I see their webpage with their fake journal, and I think of the researchers who got conned into giving them $3000 . . . it just makes me want to cry. I’m a researcher, I want people to read my articles, I understand this desire, and it breaks my heart to see scammers exploiting it. I feel the same way as I do about those people who advertise health supplements on late night TV or whatever to scam Grandpa out of his social security checks.
If only our research academics could be made aware of this through better education.
What might be worse is finding out that those poor academics paid $3000 to be published and were rewarded by getting tenure and a promotion. Scams exist for a reason – not to excuse the scammers in any way – but if you want to eliminate it, you need to look at why there is a demand for the scam to begin with. Better education may not be the answer.
Meanwhile, people who sell fraudulent and dangerous medication have started to publish allegedly scientific research in such predatory journals. They use them as a selling point.
The whole academic publishing game feels like a scam being perpetrated by publishers on academics. Here’s the business as I see it.
Step 1. Academics donate papers to journals. For free.
Step 2. Academics donate their time to edit and review these papers. For free.
Step 3. Publishers collect the papers that pass review into journals and distribute them back to the academics. For a very high charge.
Some journals have figured out they can simply charge academics and their institutions directly to donate their papers. For instance, Nature Publishing lets you ransom your own article back for $1K to $10K. It’s called “open access”.
And here’s the rub. Journals like JMLR have shown that you can self organize, cut out the publisher, and get rid of the charges in step (3). That is, free and open access (there are some costs, but they’re modest compared to publisher charges). Oh, and then there’s arXiv, which lets you cut out steps (2) and distributes articles for free (again, not free to run, but massive and very cheap compared to publishing).
Step 1 is incorrect: Academics do not donate papers to journals for free — they *pay* the journals page charges. This is true even of non-profit, professional society journals. For example, a paper I was working on today, to resubmit to Biophysical Journal, will if accepted cost us “$75 per printed page” plus “$400 per figure printed in color” (because those color bits are costly!), so around $1000 total. A recent paper we published in open-access, non-profit eLife (https://elifesciences.org/articles/71105) cost us a staggering $3000.
Link to the biophys. j. page charges: https://www.cell.com/biophysj/faq