Editorial pubs.acs.org/ac
Buyer Beware! Think Twice When Selecting a Journal (Or Attending a Conference)
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I
am not sure about you, but I am receiving multiple e-mail invitations every single day to publish in journals having impressive sounding titles or to attend conferences held at exciting locations, sent from publishers/groups that I have never heard about. Sometimes, the organizing committees and advisory boards include people I know. After looking into many of these invitations, typically via Web searches, I find that many are considered predatory. I now ignore these e-mails. Thus, it was with delight I noticed the section in the October 4th issue of Science on the topic of “Communication in Science: Pressures and Predators.”1 As an editor, I find this is a fun, must-read section, but in many ways, it also causes me some anguish. I suggest you read the article by John Bohannon entitled “Who’s Afraid of Peer Review.”2 He created and submitted a fictitious and fatally flawed article to 304 open access journals and had it accepted by 157 of them. While one could argue this is a fault with open access publications, many of the more responsible open access journals handled the manuscript well and rejected it quickly. Not to name names here, but some of the acceptances of the faux research article were from well-known publishers. The issue appears related to the proliferation of journals whose funding comes from accepting articles and charging (in some cases undisclosed) publication fees. Of course, this issue is not new, and if you want to read more on this topic, look at an interesting essay by Michael Stratford published in the Chronicle of Higher Education last year.3 Obviously none of us like to receive a rejection when we submit a manuscript, whether the rejection is from the expert opinions of an Associate Editor or based on the comments of peer reviewers. However, the alternative of having little or no peer review is much worse, a practice that can have a serious, negative impact on the credibility of all scientific publications. Thus, be glad that Analytical Chemistry rigorously reviews all manuscripts, so that when you read our articles, you can be assured of their scientific rigor. The reason for the proliferation of these questionable publications is simple: there is money to be made. So I guess it should not be a surprise that the same can be said for some organizers of scientific meetings. Now we see a proliferation of predatory meetings, sometimes organized by the same groups as the questionable publications4 that do not deliver the science or attendees promised. It remains up to us as responsible members of the scientific community to prevent their spread by carefully considering invitations to attend meetings from profitbased groups before accepting. Here’s to hoping that these are short-lived phenomena.
Views expressed in this editorial are those of the author and not necessarily the views of the ACS.
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REFERENCES
(1) Communication in Science Pressures and Predators. Science 342, 2013, 56−82. (2) Bohannon, J. Who’s Afraid of Peer Review? Science 2013, 342, 60−65. (3) Stratford, M. Predatory’ online journals lure scholars who are eager to publish. Chronicle of Higher Education, March 4, 2012. (4) Beall, J. Critical Analysis of Scholarly Open Access Publishing, http://scholarlyoa.com/2013/01/25/omics-predatory-meetings/.
Jonathan V. Sweedler © 2013 American Chemical Society
AUTHOR INFORMATION
Notes
Published: October 21, 2013 9983
dx.doi.org/10.1021/ac403287h | Anal. Chem. 2013, 85, 9983−9983
