‘Collaborate now with worldwide physicians and scientists!’—the obscenity of predatory science

Most of us have been forced into home offices, onto kitchen tables, and among housemates, children and dogs, working from home in 2020. This created some hopeful future gazing towards a ‘new normal’ by many. The air was cleaner and quieter with air traffic reduced to pre-1960 levels. Streets were safer and airier so we could aspire to walk and ride our bikes forever. Many of us re-invented what family life might bring to us, rather than elaborate commutes. Some of us rediscovered the joy of cooking with fresh ingredients and kneading dough for your regular instalments of homegrown sourdough. For the more entertainment driven socially connected the locked down isolated sheltering in place might have led to jubilant streaming binge watching. Others mysteriously created work days that consisted of many relentless hours of staring at screens, zooming, skyping, webexing, pexiping, teamsing, ending the day with square bloodshot eyes and a spine that cracked and hurt.

One thing that certainly has not relented in this period was the never-ending avalanche of spurious messages inviting the Esteemed Wonderful Hardworking Doctor Recipient: quickly submit anything to an Open Access Journal, participate in a World Conference, join an Editorial Board or connect with Important Things Otherwise. ‘Collaborate now with Worldwide Physicians and Scientists’, Dr Nicky Miller wrote to me and thousands of others: I invite you to join LinQBio, The Global HealthTech Network, connecting physicians and scientists, start-ups, entrepreneurs.

Predatory publishing (and conference organizing) is a phenomenon that has been vigorously exploited by entrepreneurial types based mostly in China and India (although a front office postal address is often given in an anonymous US office block—a quick Google Maps Streetview search may show that their editorial offices are probably based in a garbage container or a piece of shrubbery).

THE PHANTOM OF SURVIVAL

The world seems to have gone completely mad in 2020. We are not just facing a pandemic that slays economies and populations. We continue to face a climate change disaster that cannot be brought under control. Both the pandemic and the climate emergency seem to be exacerbated by the rise of populist right wing political leaders in, for instance, the USA, Brazil and Hungary who seem supported by longer standing authoritarian human rights violating systems in Russia and China. All of this finds fertile ground and creates layers of horrid e-manure, in alternative facts, conspiracy theory, bots and trolls and a proliferation of hard to assess ‘evidence’. More people than ever before seem to challenge the rigour of the scientific enterprise; a phenomenon that is strengthened by ill-advised notions among the media that coverage of ‘controversial’ issues (such as climate change or responses to a coronavirus outbreak) needs to be ‘balanced’. Scientific fact is not an opinion. It cannot be balanced by another opinion. But ‘balanced’ controversy coverage has had detrimental impacts on popular support for intellectual and scholarly pursuits. The ‘suspect’ nature of science, in turn, is nurtured by the enormous proliferation of specious platforms for half-baked scholarship.

All of this often is reason for colleagues in the ‘serious’ business of scholarship and publication to scream in despair. The vigilance that we have called for earlier (Eckermann, 2017; de Leeuw, 2019) needs to be renewed and reinforced. In order to do this well, we ought trying to understand how we got here.

For centuries, ‘science’ was an enterprise that valiantly tried to make observable sense of the world. From the hominum universae of the Renaissance to the inventors of the early 19th century, men and women valued an all-round perspective that included a bit of literature and poetry, some philosophy, a dose of physics and star-gazing and occasionally a blip of the occult. Admittedly, some acquired fame in a particular area (such as Galileo and Copernicus in astronomy, Newton and Van Leeuwenhoek in natural physics, Emilie du Châtelet and Spinoza in philosophy, Avicenna in medicine and Vesalius and Harvey in anatomy) but a good thought, well phrased, was worth as much as the superbly executed experiment. From the ascent of the industrial revolution, however, it appears that this universality started to lose its shine. And by the second half of the 20th century, the infamy of ‘Publish or Perish’ was firmly enshrined in the belief system of all those that were trained in the knowledge systems of Western academia. Research by Garfield (Garfield, 1996) suggests that the phrase entered popular lore through the work of Marshall McLuhan who observed that ‘“Publish or Perish” is the beanery motto’—with ‘beanery’ a pejorative epitaph for the modern university. This firmly suggests that research, and its publication, is no longer a matter of intellectual pursuit, knowledge development, making sense of the world and even an aesthetic quest. Academic publishing has become an industry in its own right.

In capitalist lore, money makes money. The same truism holds for scientific publishing. Preconditions for plentiful publishing, many believe, are (i) grant funding and (ii) fame and glory.

The former is firmly enshrined in rules and codes that national and international research industries have formalized. Only particular sources of research income matter and are recorded in institutional repositories. Should you have won the lottery, or discovered a mother lode of gold in your backyard, at best you would be a lofty amateur academic. Real Scholarship (Capital S) hinges on a game of vacuous peer review in which at the end of a drawn-out expense of resources and inspiration about one-tenth of contenders emerges from the battlefield, and the remaining 90% are left licking their wounds, led to believe their efforts are not worthy. The scholarly fame and glory is premised on various layers of quicksand that include insidious implicit bias around gender, race, seniority, esteem and discipline, but mostly on the capacity to ‘rear mirror’ (i.e. ‘Objects in Mirror Are Closer Than They Appear’)—that is, inflate performance, slice the salami thin and exploit junior colleagues for personal career gain.

This may seem a slight exaggeration. These implicit biases surely are being addressed through properly accountable policies and processes, one would think. Peer review truly would identify the best of the best, the cleverest of the cleverest, the most Everest of the toppest and the bleeding edge of novel thought. In science, surely, screaming loudly cannot compensate for intellectual emptiness. Alas, especially for those who still believe in evidence, the truth (or rather, alternative fact) is different.

In May 2020, The Lancet published a study on the adverse effects of the use of hydroxychloroquine in the treatment of COVID-19. Very quickly, the paper attracted several dozen citations, and considerable notoriety for its authors. Some of the sordid background of this ‘research’ and the subsequent retraction of the article has now been well documented [e.g. by Piller (Piller, 2020)]. Much blame has been attributed to the ambitiously entrepreneurial personality of Dr Sapan Desai of Surgisphere, the company that claimed to generate and store reliable data from hundreds of hospitals around the world. Data that anyone very quickly should have realized were impossible to collect and validate. But Desai crafted a fancy-looking front, screamed loud and conned some malleable colleagues who needed a ‘high-impact’ publication in The Lancet. Desai probably thought that by shanghaiing a few famous and glorious names into the authorship he would also con The Lancet’s peer reviewers, and surprisingly he did.

Writes Piller (Piller, 2020): ‘You might say we should have stopped him, which now seems obvious’, Desai’s former colleague says. ‘We should have found a way to get together and say, “What’s going on here?” rather than allowing him to move from place to place. We should have done better as a medical community. We looked the other way.’

There are three lessons we can learn from this unsavoury event.

First, the quality assurance systems that we deploy, as reputable research publications, can fail. In fact, we are constantly under threat. About 15% of submissions to Health PromotionInternational are picked up by plagiarism detection software as regurgitated, recycled, half-baked papers. We, as editors, live in fear. The scholarly cheats are getting more shrewd every day, and our defences are under pressure. When the hoaxers are successful in masking their cunning schemes by making up fake data or fraudulent research procedures, our peer reviewers are our last trench on the battlefield. We need you to remain vigilant with us, too. Be critical, challenge everything we send out for review, and even when we have published materials, keep calling us out. We must applaud the editors of The Lancet for taking swift (retr)action as they must be facing duplicity and chicanery vastly more often than we do.

But this brings us to the second lesson. One of the most infamous retractions from The Lancet was a study on the relation between vaccination and autism. The paper was retracted and the author discredited. Surprisingly, however, vast tribes of gullible conspiracy theorists still believe in this existence of the connection between vaccination and an increasing collection of human afflictions. The anti-vaxxer movement is thriving and causes significant public health harm. All this in spite of the retraction of the deceitful paper. Again, militant vigilance is required. Health promoters the world over need to identify the reliance on malevolent and misleading pseudo-science. Retraction is not enough; proactive engagement must be part of the scholarly publication model. This is not the first time we argue this [e.g. (Tremblay, 2020)] and we will remain watchful.

Third, we all are too easily mesmerized by clever words, whirlybirds and bright colours. The spell and lure of ‘Surgisphere’ must have been unfathomable and irresistible. Neologisms (Fake News) and three- or four-word slogans rule politics more strongly than ever before (Make America Great Again, Stop The Boats or Jobs and Growth). In the academy, this is about “magical” (Pollitt and Hupe, 2011) “bullshitting” (Frankfurt, 2009) one’s way through scholarship. It is imperative that we include in the education of future generations of students, scholars and all who publish, meaningful and straightforward ways of magic and bullshit detection.

Particularly the concept of bullshitting as analysed by Frankfurt (Frankfurt, 2009) is worth a little exploration. ‘Bullshitting’ deploys a particular technical–rhetorical toolbox that is relevant to understanding the current science-averse discourse. Bullshitters seek to convey a certain impression of themselves without being concerned about whether anything at all is true. They quietly change the rules governing their end of the conversation so that claims about truth and falsity are irrelevant. The ways this happens are highly diverse and exacerbated by proliferation through social media [for a deeply upsetting glance into the dark minds of this see (Levine, 2017)]. Liars at least acknowledge that it matters what is true; bullshitters purposely confuse factfulness. Bullshit is a greater enemy of the truth than lies are.

Alternatively, we may wish to counter the assault by some magic ourselves.

BUILD YOUR OWN PREDATOR, BEFORE BREAKFAST: NO BATTERIES REQUIRED

Predatory journals and conferences prey on the patterns identified above with great neoliberal zeal. Here, the predatory publisher must have realized, is an opportunity to mine the needs and vulnerabilities of millions of aspiring academics and make a good dollar (or rupee/renminbi) out of it. Predatory publishers have tapped into the full force of the internet-based creative knowledge industries. They also exploit a scholarly business model where significant groups of scientists seem to be able to publish high-quality papers every 5 days over periods of years (Ioannidis et al., 2018).

One would think this is humanly impossible. For the last few years HPI, in line with standards elsewhere in the industry, asks authors who wish to publish their work in the journal to identify their role in the creation of the paper. We adhere to the Vancouver Criteria established by the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors in 1988. These specify that authors must do all of four things to be a (co-)author: play a part in designing or conducting experiments or processing results; help to write or revise the manuscript; approve the published version; and take responsibility for the article’s contents.

The criteria do not count supervision, mentoring or obtaining funding as sufficient for authorship. Ioannidis et al. studied hyperprolific authors and found that quite a few authors seemed to become super-publishers on becoming full professors, or department chairs (Ioannidis et al., 2018). They write: ‘It is common and perhaps expected for scientists who assume leadership roles in large centres to accelerate their productivity. For example, clinical cardiologists publish more papers after they assume director roles (despite heavy clinical and administrative duties). Occasionally, the acceleration is stunning: at the peak of their productivity, some cardiologists publish 10 to 80 times more papers in one year compared with their average annual productivity when they were 35–42 years old.’

Ioannidis et al. kindly—and in line with current transparency and accountability protocols—have made the data available that underpin their research (Ioannidis et al., 2018). A quick assessment of the field of public health, the area that health promotion plays in, shows that epidemiologist Albert Hofman is beyond hyperprolific. In a career spanning 35 years he published 1538 papers, that is ∼44 every year. He seems to have slowed down a bit since a record-setting publication in Science, in 2013. There, he co-authored with 201 others (Rietveld et al., 2013).

Hyperprolific publishing is feeding the predatory journal and conference model. With most academics now succumbing to the ‘publish or perish’ mantra and increasing numbers being quite ruthless in the way they do not just publish, but publish a lot, folk like Hofman and the other hyperprolifics do not set an example that is worthy of following. Its consequence is that predatory publishers and conference organizers become attractive platforms to ambitious, yet challenged, junior career researchers. In turn, they depreciate academic standards, both internally and outside the academy. Trust in scientific discovery and its publication efforts will wilt. Alternative facts may flourish in the minds of the malleable. Research and discovery do not matter anymore. Higher education will be considered a flimsy pursuit only deemed a hobby for suspicious intellectuals. Public funding for this dangerous fad will fade. The post-COVID-19 ‘new normal’ will look a lot like the Neolithic.

Admittedly, there are some challenges in identifying predatory journals and conferences. A helpful set of criteria to identify these things was produced by Eriksson and Helgesson (Eriksson and Helgesson, 2017). We list their 25 parameters in Table 1. Cobey et al. have scoped the nature of a predatory journal more precisely (Cobey et al., 2018), and Moher and Moher have set out a path to stop this business model that is so detrimental to the establishment of reliable research (Moher and Moher, 2016). They write: ‘Stopping predatory journals requires an international collaborative effort involving several groups acting together unambiguously. Editorial groups, such as the World Association of Medical Editors, and others, such as the Coalition for Responsible Publication Resources, need a united proclamation against predatory publishers. Publishers and editors, partnering with academic institutions and funders, need to develop educational outreach, including online Webinars, to let prospective authors know about the hazards of predatory publishers and their journals and how to avoid publishing in them. Funders should be explicit about not allowing their funds to be used to cover predatory journal APCs [Article Processing Charge – EdL]. Legitimate journals charging APCs could develop strong, clear, and explicit alternatives aimed at prospective authors to help steer them away from sham operations. Legitimate publishers working together could facilitate this by establishing a global fund to help defray APCs for prospective authors submitting to legitimate journals. To complement these activities requires additional research about predatory publishers and journals and the authors publishing in them.’

At HPI we embrace such an agenda. And if creative use of the knowledge industry is working against us, we better make it work for us, too. We could start by creating our own suite of predatory publications. We call on the global health promotion community to generate the nearly 100 000 potential permutations from our proposed Predatory Journal Generator (Figure 1), register the name as a web domain and have an auto-direct from that URL to our own (http://heapro.oxfordjournals.org/). It would redirect most if not all scholarly health promotion traffic to what we believe will remain one of the trusted health promotion research outlets.

But true to our health promotion roots, we also believe that to deal with the predatory decline of our world we need more creative and forceful political advocacy. This would require a strategic analysis beyond this anecdotal editorial of the causes and consequences of the deterioration and potential of the social and economic standing of the academy. In the recent past, we have published a very small collection of bibliometric [e.g. (Gagné et al., 2018)] and discourse analysis [e.g. (Porter, 2007)] research. These are tools that could be deployed with relative ease in the magic and bullshit detector endeavour, particularly when we would also be able to apply a power lens, that is, an analysis of who gains and looses in deploying certain (types of) arguments (Harris et al., 2020). We would be very happy to encourage such analyses, work with prospective authors and fast-track their rigorous research.

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