How to Fight Fraudulent Publishing

There’s a short article on arXiv with the title How to Fight Fraudulent Publishing in the Mathematical Sciences: Joint Recommendations of the IMU and the ICIAM which is well worth reading. The abstract is not useful but the prelude reads:

Prelude. In November 2023, Clarivate announced that it had excluded the entire field of mathematics from the latest edition of its influential list of ‘highly cited researchers’. This prompted the IMU and the ICIAM to conduct a more thorough investigation into the problem of fraudulent publishing in the mathematical sciences (see [1]). Understanding the problem is one thing; finding a way out and regaining control is another. With the recommendations given below, we would like to start the discussion on how, as a global community, we can achieve this. We are all concerned. It affects the very core of the science we love so much. I.A.

arXiv:2509.09877

The paper correctly identifies predatory journals and citation cartels as two consequences of the effort to quantify and rank the quality of research through scientific ‘performance indicators’, in the form of bibliometric measures and suggests some possible remedies.

Many of the recommendations are already included in the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment (SFDORA). Many also apply beyond the mathematical sciences (which is why I dropped the Mathematical Sciences bit in the title of the paper from the title of this blog post) and it’s not a long paper so I suggest you read it.

In my view one of the most important steps to take is to ditch the reliance on such companies as Scopus and Clarivate, who have deliberately constructed a system that is so easy to game. All higher education institutes should follow the examples of the Sorbonne University in Paris and, more recently, Utrecht University in the Netherlands. The academic publishing racket is inherently fraudulent. Too many universities, and indeed researchers employed by them, are willing participants in the system.

#arXiv250909877 #CitationCartels #Clarivate #DORA #PredatoryPublishers #SanFranciscoDeclarationOnResearchAssessment #SCOPUS #SFDORA

Did anyone of you already receive #peerreview that was obviously created by #LLM? I can see how #predatorypublishers speed up their publication cycles, get rid of costly human interactions and deliver some seemingly plausible text to authors by just throwing manuscripts at a LLM and then let it generate reviews.

@academicchatter

Reflections on #PredatoryPublishers from a survey of researchers: whole spectrum of responses including those who understood the publishers were predatory but still went with them as a way to progress their careers through to those experiencing cyber crime

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-02553-1

Suggests institutions should take a lead in supporting #researchers to understand the #ScientificPublishing landscape better, and that needs differ in low- and middle-income countries

#ResearchIntegrity #Equity

[Pre-print] #Predatory Journals on #Twitter: The Lack of Community Engagement

By Andreas Nishikawa-Pacher https://goo.gl/scholar/2c5mz7

#PredatoryJournals #OAPred #PredatoryPublishers #publishing #research #OMICS #scholComm