Mayo Clinic Proceedings – The Problem of Publication-Pollution Denialism, Arthur L. Caplan, PhD, Division of Medical Ethics, Langone Medical Center, New York University, New York, NY, Published Online: April 03, 2015 DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.mayocp.2015.02.017

“The world is facing a huge threat from pollution. The scientific community seems unable or unwilling to do anything about the problem and appears to be in a state of denial. The pollution crisis I’m describing is not the warming of the Earth’s atmosphere due to an accumulation of greenhouse gasses. It is not the tragedy of plastic materials accumulating in the oceans. It is not the air pollution that is overwhelming many major urban areas and contributing to respiratory and other diseases in the local populations. It is, instead, the pollution of science and medicine by plagiarism, fraud, and predatory publishing. If the medical and scientific communities continue to remain in publication pollution denial, the trustworthiness, utility, and value of science and medicine will be irreparably damaged. Harvard researcher Mark Shrime recently wrote an article entitled “Cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs?: The Surgical and Neoplastic Role of Cacao Extract in Breakfast Cereals.” The fake authors he chose for the piece were Pinkerton A. LeBrain and Orson Welles. Shrime submitted this fake article to 37 journals. At last count, 17 had accepted the obviously phony, nonsensical paper. John Bohannon did the same thing with a completely phony paper, with even more depressing results in terms of peer-reviewed acceptance to journals. The journals that took these gibberish-laden, concocted articles were scam, author-must-pay, profit-driven entities that nevertheless have every appearance of being legitimate journals. Jeffrey Beall, a librarian at the University of Colorado at Denver, maintains a list of what he terms predatory publishers. These publishers produce fake journals that recruit authors whom they will publish for pay, primarily for the purpose of providing profit for the publishers. These publishers are different from legitimate, indexed, peer-reviewed journals that use author-pay financial models to underwrite journal peer review, processing, and publication costs (eg, the PLOS family of journals). Predatory publishers are the direct descendants of vanity presses—book publishers whose authors pay for the privilege of publishing to give the false impression that they have written a book that has been vetted by a mainstream, reputable publisher. Beall estimates that 25% of all open-access journals are predatory. Why the recent proliferation of polluting journals? As Sarwar and Nicolaou observe, “Arguably, many researchers and departments may have equated the concept of ‘quantity’ rather than ‘quality’ with research success. The association between the number of publications and suitability for funding or career progression has been with us for a while. When applying for senior posts, surgical trainees are continuously questioned on the number of publications achieved, disregarding the quality of the publication or journal. … this attitude has predisposed to a massive rise in journal titles, many of which are of low quality and are poorly maintained.”