Contesting Predators: Cleaning Up Trash in Science

The Menace of Predatory Journals

Research must follow the principles of integrity, ethics and transparency. A stringent peer review ensures that the findings of a published work are transparent and trustworthy. However, over the past decade there has been an explosion of sub-standard journals that bypass the established norms of peer review and the principles of publication ethics. This has led to considerable suspicion and lack of trust in the arena of published research. Several studies and sting operations have shown that India has become one of the hotspots where such dubious journals sprout and thrive, thus tarnishing the image of the whole nation in the context of scientific publications. According to 2015 estimates, > 8,000 sub-standard journals have published ∼400,000 articles every year, and more than one-third of these articles were from India. ^{1 –4}

The Indian Higher Education Sector

Universities and other institutions of higher education are the places where seeds of inquisitiveness are sown among young minds. If an attitude of questioning is nurtured, and if an environment that encourages the desire for unraveling the truth is provided, institutions of higher education have the potential to become excellent research centers. The Indian higher education sector is one of the largest in the world, in terms of both its size and diversity. It is a mixture of government-operated and private-operated not-for-profit institutions. As education is included in the concurrent list of the Indian constitution, both the central and the state governments have the power of making laws governing these centers. However, the University Grants Commission (UGC), a constitutional body that works under the Ministry of Human Resource Development, is responsible for the overall supervision of higher education and has a mandate of maintaining the standards of higher education. At present, India has ∼993 universities that include 47 central, 390 state, 124 “deemed to be universities”, 305 private universities, and 127 institutions of national importance. Accreditation for higher learning is overseen by the National Assessment and Accreditation Council along with other discipline-specific professional councils. ⁵

The Early Recognition of the “Pay and Publish Trash” Problem

Initially, Jeffrey Beall's blog on the potential, possible and probable predatory journals and publishers drew the attention of many academicians and researchers regarding the problem of the mushrooming of sub-standard journals. ⁶ After analyzing the situation, it became evident that UGC guidelines 2010 may have contributed to this problem, at least in part. In these guidelines, specific “Academic Performance Indicator” (API) points were allotted to different types of published articles for the purpose of evaluating the applicants for the recruitment and promotion in universities. Higher weightage for international journals seem to be a major reason for the sudden explosion of dubious international journals from predatory publishers operating from India. Furthermore, the UGC regulations of 2013 worsened the situation when publishing at least two articles derived out of one's doctoral thesis was made mandatory before a PhD degree could be awarded. Compulsion to publish pushed these teachers and research scholars to desperately submit their articles to these substandard journals. This situation resulted in the proliferation of dubious publishing houses and fueled the business of “predatory publishing.” ⁷ Hundreds of predatory publishers set up their operations in the vicinities of institutions, mostly in collusion with unethical and commercially minded faculty members. This further promoted the “pay and publish trash” culture. Since conference presentations also provided the participants certain API points, these publishers started operating the “scientific conference management” business too, where they gave away academic awards and certificates on a commercial basis, without applying stringent quality scrutiny. This led to many early career academicians and research scholars submitting their work to these dubious online journals, getting aggressively promoted through spam e-mails, false claims, and attractive advertising.

The Efforts of the UGC

Realizing the gravity of the problem, UGC took up an exhaustive exercise of preparing a list of credible journal titles. It came up with a list of ∼38,653 journal titles in 2017. However, since the list of journals other than those indexed with standard indexing databases such as Scopus and Web of Science was generated after inviting the recommendations from different universities, this list too was flawed. Many journals with dubious credentials found a place in the list because academicians with a compromising mindset wanted those journals to be there to ensure their promotions in the institutions.

A team of academicians led by author (B.P.) took note of this and developed an objective protocol to critically analyze this list of UGC-approved journals. In this study, 1,009 journals randomly selected from the list of 5,699 “university source category” component of UGC-approved list were analyzed meticulously. Out of 1009, only 112 journals secured a minimum essential score of 6 based on the protocol. Thus, it was noted that, ∼88.9% of the non-indexed journals from the “university source” category (a category that contained the titles supplied by different universities) did not satisfy the minimum of requirements. ⁸

This study drew the attention of the policy makers. As a result, ∼4000 journals from the “university source category” were removed from this list and the UGC decided to take corrective and preventive approach to bring effective control on the growing problem of predatory journals. The UGC issued a public notice on November 28, 2018, regarding the setting up of a Consortium for Academic Research and Ethics (CARE). CARE is a consortium of >30 Government Statutory Councils and Academic Bodies from multiple disciplines. The main task of CARE is to improve the quality of research in Indian universities and to promote academic and research integrity and uphold publication ethics. Savitribai Phule Pune University (SPPU) has been entrusted with the responsibility of journal analysis and the UGC has established a “Cell for Journals Analysis” at SPPU, Pune (UGC Cell, SPPU). INFLIBNET (Information and Library Network) Centre, Gandhinagar, serves as a supporting agency. Four regional universities are entrusted with the task of receiving journals for consideration of inclusion in the UGC-CARE list. CARE Universities include Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi (Northern Region), The M. S. University of Baroda, Vadodara (Western Region), University of Hyderabad, Hyderabad (Southern Region), and Tezpur University, Assam (Eastern Region). The journals submitted by CARE Members and CARE Universities are analyzed by the UGC Cell at SPPU as per the approved protocol. The “UGC-CARE Reference List of Quality Journals” (UGC_CARE List) is available at (https://ugccare.unipune.ac.in/site/website/index.aspx). Utmost care is taken to maintain the UGC-CARE list free from sub-standard and predatory journals. ⁹

Traditional Medicine Research: Contextualizing the Problem

India, apart from the conventional mainstream Western biomedicine, also officially recognizes six other traditional systems of health care, namely, Ayurveda, Yoga and Naturopathy, Unani, Siddha, Homoeopathy, and Amchi, collectively referred to as AYUSH. A separate ministry to monitor the education and practice of all AYUSH streams was established in 2014. There are ∼600 colleges under the umbrella of AYUSH that conduct graduate level programs. Out of these, ∼200 colleges offer post-graduate programs. On average, ∼20,000 to 25,000 AYUSH graduates and 2,000 to 2,500 post-graduates pass out from these institutions every year. ¹⁰ It is important to note that the phenomenon of proliferation of low-quality journals was accompanied with a growing interest in complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) across the globe. Of course, these two phenomena, in all probability, were independent of each other though they were temporally simultaneous. However, predatory publishers saw the CAM sector as a lucrative avenue as there were experts belonging to various disciplines who were interested in CAM modalities. These disciplines included pharmacy, phytochemistry, pharmacology, pharmacognosy, nanotechnology, new drug design, computational biology, physical education and sports, genetics, and others in addition to those under the AYUSH umbrella. From a rough estimate, there were at least 30 to 40 predatory publishers in India who published dubious journals dedicated to traditional medicine research. One publisher often published multiple journals of a similar nature but with different names. We arrive at this estimate based on a joint analysis that we performed while evaluating the initial UGC-approved list of journals in 2017.

A precise estimation of the damage these journals have done to this field is difficult for several reasons. First of all, the titles of many of these journals were often misleading and did not indicate anything related to the traditional systems of medicine. Second, there were numerous multidisciplinary journals that used to publish anything ranging from physics to engineering, including Ayurveda. The third, and probably a less important factor, many journals operated in “offline-only” mode while having a non-functional webpage. The most severe damage has been done by those journals that had a strong online presence and whose domain names were being indexed and displayed by popular search engines. However, it may be noted that similar publishers had started their operations in many other developing countries approximately at the same time. This possibly reflects a similar crisis in the higher education sector in those countries as well. This made the geographical boundaries virtually vanish when it came to predatory publishing. The most salient feature of such poor quality journals was the poor credentials of editors or section editors. Most of them did not have good publications from standard journals to their own credit. In contrast, many reputed names were included in the editorial boards without their consent or knowledge. In many cases, fake names and addresses from Western countries were given to create a pseudo international image. Most journals displayed misleading information about journal metrics and indexing. For instance, many wrote “Under the process of being indexed with PubMed” or “Included under NLM catalog”. Many agencies disguised as “international journal evaluating agencies” cropped up and “allotted” various types of so-called “impact factors” on a payment basis. Institute for Science Information, Scientific Indexing Services, Global Impact Factor, Cosmos Impact Factor, Universal Impact Factor and Cite Factor - are a few examples of such dubious attempts. Fake, low quality, or no peer review was the hallmark of most of these journals. Absence of any scrutiny for possible plagiarized content was another problem with these publishers. In short, the predators adopted all kinds of deceptive practices to lure gullible authors as prey. This mockery of research publication has caused severe damage at several levels adversely impacting quality of faculty and research students that may cause long-term damage to academia.

Academicians and Research Acumen

Admittedly, the extent of research acumen among the academicians from different AYUSH streams does not match the standards expected in modern science. Many times awareness of standard guidelines; appropriate methodology; ethical considerations; and understanding of epistemological, technical, and procedural requirements may be missing. Inadequate motivation and exposure to serious research, poor research infrastructure in AYUSH colleges, insufficient competent guides, low awareness regarding the importance of peer-reviewed literature, etc. are a few more aspects of this problem. As a result, desperate researchers choose to publish studies in predatory journals as an easy route to comply some regulatory requirements. A gross mismatch between the number of submitted theses or dissertations in various universities and the number of standard published articles derived out of them throws light on the scenario. ^11,12

The Expected Impact

In Indian Universities, only those articles published in the journals listed in the UGC-CARE list will now be considered for various academic purposes, such as institutional ranking, appointments, promotions of faculty members, membership of academic committees, award of research degrees, etc. It is expected that in the years to come, the supply line to predatory journals will dry up. Unethical nexus of academia and predatory journals will be reduced as the incentives disappear. As the emphasis has shifted from the “number of research articles” to the “quality of research,” it is expected that the academic scenario will improve.

Future Strategies

The problem of predatory journals is global. Its intensity may have been felt more in India and even more so in the CAM sector represented by AYUSH. The fight against predatory publishers is going to be a long and arduous battle given the adaptability of these publishers. In a public notice, the UGC has clearly stated that publishing with low-quality journals is no longer desirable and that academicians are encouraged to concentrate on the quality over quantity of publications. ¹³ A long term solution to this problem is only achieved through an increased awareness and a systematic effort to promote academic integrity. Predatory journals are becoming increasingly adaptive and invasive similar to drug resistant bugs. We need systematic efforts to educate authors and warn them to stay away from predators. The enemy of academia is within. More awareness and self-regulation shall remain the hallmark of success.