MARCIA DAY CHILDRESS: Good afternoon.
I'd like to welcome you to today's Medical Center hour.
Question for you.
Have you ever received an unsolicited email
from a publisher you've never heard
of inviting you to submit a paper
to a journal with a generic but believable-sounding name?
Or how about a random invitation to a conference abroad
or at an airport hotel?
If you're like, me your answer to this question
could be all the time, several times a week, even daily.
Such invitations have become common enough that just in case
we're tempted to just forego opening these invitations,
some now bait our inboxes and our curiosity
with patently un-academic words.
Just last week, for example, one of my journal invitations
ostensibly came from Monica Lewinsky of Bill Clinton fame.
Now these publishers may advertise their journals
as open-access and they may promise
to make your work visible to well-known indices.
They often also claim impact factors,
and they tout editorial boards staffed
with leaders in your field.
All they require of you is a modest fee,
an author's processing charge, in order for them
to deliver the lifeblood of academic career--
a peer-reviewed publication.
There's just one catch, the journals are fake.
These journals are, frankly, predatory,
and to confuse matters somewhat, they're
sometimes associated with the broader open-access movement.
This Medical Center Hour, Predatory Publishing
from Fake Academia to Real Extortion in Scholarly
Publishing, tours the strange world of predatory publishing.
Our tour guide is Brandon Butler,
director of information policy for the UVA library.
He keeps a keen eye on these developments for us
and for the institution.
But, as he will argue, the fake journals and bogus conferences
are just a distraction.
As he'll clarify, the Academy faces much more
serious challenges today as it wrestles
with how best to share research and knowledge.
At issues here are institutional and disciplinary relationships
with the most well-established scholarly publishers
and with open access.
These matters bear heavily in universities' and academic
disciplines' core reputational concerns.
In addition, they can have very real consequences
for individual faculty seeking to report their scholarship
in a fiercely competitive academic marketplace,
and to qualify for and earn career advancement.
I'm Marcia Day Childress from the Center for Biomedical
Ethics and Humanities delighted to welcome you here today.
I'm also pleased to report that Mr. Butler has
no financial conflicts of interest to disclose.
He's merely here to guide us into the realm
of predatory publishing.
Welcome, Brandon.
BRANDON BUTLER: Thank you so much, Marcia.
So, thanks everybody for coming.
It's really a pleasure to speak with you all today.
Let's see, how I get my slides up.
MARCIA DAY CHILDRESS: They will come up.
BRANDON BUTLER: They'll come up.
OK.
So, I'm going to talk to you a little bit
about predatory publishing, and I'm
going to pull a little bit of a fast one on you
and I'm going to talk about a lot of other publishing stuff
that I think is interesting.
And I'll see if I can draw a straight line from those things
to predatory publishing, but first I
want to talk about my childhood.
When I was a kid, I was not raised by satanists,
or by Geraldo, sadly.
But I was raised in an environment of moral panic.
Off and on, my childhood, whether it
was music or the role playing games I liked to play,
there was this sense that all these things
may be infused with Satanism, that I
may become a victim of his dark movements on Earth.
My parents, thankfully, were not hardcore concerned about this,
but it was in the air and every now and then
I had to sort of explain to Mom and Dad
that I'm still a good kid, I just
play this game with the dice and it's
easier than going to dances.
So there was the devil worship thing
and my parents worried about that
and we talked about that sometimes.
They were also smoking a pack-and-a-half a day,
and we didn't talk about that at all.
It was so interesting to me.
This is a vintage cigarette ad.
I thought about all I'd read and I said to myself
either I quit smoking or I smoke True.
And I decided to smoke True.
My parents were kind of like that.
They were concerned about satanism,
but they were a pack a day, and it seemed to me
like there was--
maybe they could turn their eye from one ball to the other.
My argument today is that we're in a similar situation
with regards to academic publishing.
There are indeed bogus conferences and fake journals,
and they are in your inbox.
They want your money, they want your time,
they are trying to divert you, and to waste your time,
and it is annoying and obnoxious,
and I'm going to try to talk a little bit
about that phenomenon and help you avoid
getting trapped by these guys.
Sometimes researchers are duped by these folks,
sometimes they use these folks to dupe other people.
This is a handy-dandy way to build up your resume.
But they have little or nothing to do with open access.
That is a core point that I want to make.
They have little or nothing to do with open access
and they are a marginal phenomena compared
to a couple of other really pressing issues
for academic publishing that I want
to turn to and compare to the specter
of predatory publishing.
In particular, they are dwarfed by unsustainable business
models.
These unsustainable business practices
of traditional for-profit publishers
are actually twisting the academic record
and bankrupting the library.
Sustainable posing as possible, but it's
going to require coordinated conscientious effort
in the academy, and the library can help
and I'll end with playing to some
of the things we do to help you make sustainable choices.
There is a case for panic, though.
There was Andrea Denton, superstar librarian here
in health sciences, brought this article to my attention
just the other day and it was just too perfect.
It is exactly the thing I was thinking might exist out there.
Predatory Publishing: an Emerging Threat
to the Medical Literature.
Two Harvard professors, senior practitioners at Mass General
Hospital, published in Academic Medicine,
a big, reputable, well-known, well-read venue,
and they say, "The health of our medical literature which
is intimately linked to the health of our patients
is facing a serious threat.
While practitioners around the world
use the literature to inform high-stakes decisions,
the literature we rely on is in trouble.
Retraction rates are on the rise,
irreproducible research is far too common,
and there is a flood of inconsequential publications."
Things are bad.
And they are distracting our attention high-value
scholarship.
"Academic medicine must identify the root causes"
of all of these troubles and quickly implement
effective solutions.
We are in trouble.
Maybe it's the predatory journals.
And I say one of the threats to the academic literature
comes from its dilution.
An enormous volume of papers may be accurate,"
but they are not very informative and not very
consequential and we are inundated with this garbage
research.
Interesting.
It's accurate, but it's garbage.
Anway-- published and often pushed to readers.
So what is this garbage research?
What do these predatory journals look like when
they're in your inbox?
Well, here's one when I got.
The Journal of Social Sciences: the Centre
of Excellence for Scientific and Research Journalism,
call for paper.
And they have lots of things that
try to make them look really important and legitimate.
There are supported sites, just a laundry list.
If you've heard of it, our journal was in there,
it's indexed by it.
Every important place where your work can be found were there.
We have an impact factor, whatever that is, if you can
if you think it's important we've got one.
And we've got one for you.
So they go up there solicitations with this stuff.
I got one from the conference business, is another big one,
in addition to journals you can go
present to conferences in exotic places like Istanbul, Turkey.
And the conferences are extraordinarily wide-ranging,
I mean this is really Renaissance people who
attend these conferences.
They're interested in accounting, banking, economics,
it's all it's all there for you so it's a wonderful place
to go.
It's a feast for the mind as Judge Bork said, to be topical.
And I got one-- we got one literally just the other day.
Asian Research and Development Wing.
Well, let's figure out who are these folks.
I went to their website and it's all about the conferences.
That's all they do.
That is their core business-- is facilitating these conferences.
They've got them all over the world, any day of the week.
If you want to go to a conference you can fly to one.
I got one literally yesterday, got that one yesterday.
The patient letter from China.
So these things are fun to mess with,
and people have messed with them.
They are sort of like the folks who
enter into a dialogue with the Nigerian email scammers
and then post them on their web site.
It is interesting to experiment with these journal
organizers, and conference organizers,
and see what you can get away with.
So here a paper that was accepted
by one of these journals--
Atomic Energy Will Have Been Made Available
to a Single Source.
Sounds science-y.
There are some balls running into each other and then fly
fleeing in the opposite direction
per the rules of science.
There is an abstract.
The abstract is extraordinarily opaque word salad.
"Atomic Physics and I shall not have
the same problem with a separate section for a very long way."
Who here hasn't had that thought?
How did this thing come to be?
That's one of the best parts of this story.
Who wrote this journal article?
Siri did.
The person who came up with this test
started writing sentences with science-y sounding words
like atomic physics and then just took the AutoCorrect
suggestion from the iPhone for the remainder of the sentence.
So I'd say, "Nuclear-- accept, accept, accept, accept,"
and then I've got a paragraph, and then, "Physics--
accept, accept."
So you generate a whole paper with Siri
and it was accepted within a few hours.
There's your acceptance.
Dear Dr. Iris Pear--
Siri Apple backwards, right--
Dr. Iris Pear, pleasant day to you!
Thank you for your interest in submitting
an abstract for the upcoming scientific session,
we are so glad for you, etc., etc.
So that was pretty good.
But get a load of this, it gets better.
This is fun, I could just do this all day.
Brace yourselves for some profanity, that's
part of the entertainment here.
That is another article that was accepted
by one of these journals.
It was an article that was generated
by a few scientists for the express
purpose of testing journals.
And they sent these things out any time
they get a solicitation, they send it out
and it is accepted over and over again.
It is very, very science-y.
Only in format, not even in content.
Read the title of the dang paper.
But if all you're looking for is 20 pages
with a one-inch margin and two columns, you're business.
They did include a figure, which I think really illustrative
and helps you get to the heart of the thesis.
So of course, The Guardian picks this up.
I mean, this is fun.
The journalists love to cover this stuff, it's wacky,
it's zany.
And it's a good story, and it's totally fraudulent.
And the feds have noticed, so the Federal Trade Commission is
now investigating this group--
OMICS International, which is a huge group.
When I was doing research for this talk,
trying to find things like what are some of the highest impact
factor open access journals?
Well, if you search "high impact open access journal"
the first 12 results are for OMICS International.
They have SEO'd that term, they are
very good at finding people who want
to publish somewhere please, and then selling them
what they want.
But the FTC's brought charges against these people.
They're engaged in fraud.
So what is it that's fraudulent about their activities?
Well, often prominent editors that are listed
have never heard of this your journal.
It's sort of The Isaac Asimov Journal of Speculative Fiction
and Mr. Asimov has never heard of this journal.
So that was one very common trick-- is just fake editors.
Fake journals with fake editors.
Another is to falsify impact factors.
Those numbers are just made up.
They're not generated by the ordinary authorities who
generate impact factors, they're just falsified.
Lies about the platforms where those things are indexed.
"We're going to be in Pub Med, we're
going to be part of the Science Direct package,
we're gonna be this, we're here, there, and everywhere.
Total, again, just lies.
This is fraud.
As fraud as it gets.
Hidden fees that spring up-- this
is how they really get you.
They accept your paper, they said
once there's gonna be $150 author processing charge,
and you say, OK, fine, you walk through that.
And they say there's another $200 open-excess charge.
What is that?
I thought the APC was the open-access fee.
And so the issue is more and more fees.
It's just classic, not-terribly creative,
the things that scammers do.
They lie to you, and they surprise you
with money demands.
And then finally, the fraud that's actually,
in a way, most concerning is-- at the end
of the day, the CVs of the people who publish there.
Those are padded CVs.
These are not legit credentials, but if you
publish in one of these journals knowingly,
then you're defrauding your institution and that's,
really, in a way, what a lot of this world is all about.
It's a collaboration between fake journals
and fake academics who are willfully working together
to secure promotions and positions.
Why does this happen?
Where do all these people come from?
One big reason is the publish-or-perish incentives
of academia.
We have to get those lines on our CVs to get tenure.
And this is like a pretty cheap and easy way to get a line.
The economy of academia wants this in some way.
It creates the incentive for this.
The other is just a steady increase
in the global supply of PhDs.
There is no stopping the global output of graduate schools,
despite, perhaps, less of a need for all of these people,
and less of a need for all of them
to always high-impact research all the time,
and yet that is the standard by which there are judged.
Developing countries, in particular,
where academic evaluation is sort of arbitrarily tied
to an international publication.
There are countries where--
you publish in a domestic journal, that's
not going to get you promotion.
So you have to publish in a journal from somewhere else.
But we don't actually look at the journals
from somewhere else before we decide that you get tenure.
And so the need to have a somewhere-else but not
any particular need to have that somewhere-else be
rigorous means somebody is going to provide it.
This is the economy.
And it's easy money, most importantly.
Finally, that changing businesses--
I'm sorry, changing business models and changing technology,
I think this is a big one.
That is, into the breach created and the uncertainty created
by real change, in some ways, as I'lld argue later,
needed change.
Into that uncertainty, these guys step and they are now
soliciting papers in ways that they hadn't been before,
offering to publish them in ways that they hadn't been before,
and because of uncertainty about the way publishing really works
right now, and the ways it should work or could work,
there's an opening to take advantage of technology--
like email, like the web--
to create scam businesses.
It's not the first time.
Technology has a long and illustrious history
with flim-flam and scam artists.
I love this guy on the left, that's John Romulus Brinkley.
He is a real character.
I learned about him from a podcast
that I listen to called Reply All, that's
sort of about the weird, bizarre history of internet
and technology stuff.
And Brinkley was the guy who was a doctor-ish,
and he developed a practice in Texas
and he built his practice around his radio station
when radio was new.
And he sold people a cure for impotence.
And people heard about this cure on this sort
of magical new technology and it was right there on the radio,
right next to the news, and they thought, well,
that must be true, too.
The news is true, this guy is coming to me live,
100,00 watts of power, right into my home,
it's kind of like magic.
Maybe it's real.
The email scams are, of course, a very familiar thing, too.
These latest-- these predatory publisher e-mails
are just one version of a million different kinds
of e-mail scams.
As Marcia was saying, sometimes the worlds collide
and you get a predatory publisher
who will also sell you Viagra.
And then we also have a world of fake,
news which is a similar kind of phenomenon where
it is-- we are in a media environment
where things are changing, it is difficult to tell
who is credible and who is not, and bad actors
will step into that context and take advantage of uncertainty.
So how can you avoid these guys?
How can you protect yourself from their solicitations?
There are, luckily, some very good tools
out there online that will walk you
through very quick and easy tests
that you can do to avoid getting scammed by these guys.
One of my favorites is the web site ThinkCheckSubmit.org.
They've got a really nice checklist of different factors
that you can apply to the journal
to tell things that will tip you off.
Take a look at the editors that they list, go
look at the editor's web site, does the editor claim
affiliation with this journal?
It's stuff that when you think about it it's obvious,
but when you're in a hurry and you've
got other things to do it might not be so obvious.
So ThinkCheckSubmit is a great resource,
it walks you through those kinds of things.
There are publisher associations where
open access and other kinds of publishers
have banded together to say, look,
we are the we are the real ones and those associations are
a nice signal.
So, the Coalition on Publishing Ethics,
the Directory of Open Access Journals, the Open Access
Scholared Publishers Associations.
If your journal is not participating
in any of these kinds of efforts,
again, that's a bad sign.
There was another entity called Publons,
which is an entity that evaluates publishers and helps
people interact with publishers in different ways,
and Publons has also published a list of the criteria
that it uses to decide which journals it will partner with,
as well as publishing that list of journals that they partner.
And so those are some of the kinds of resources
that you can consult to learn a little bit more
about who's got a white hat and who's got a black hat.
So why is predatory often in the same standards as open access?
I want to explore that for half-a-second here.
Open access journals are free online to the public.
That is what it means to be open access-- available online
free to all.
Author-pays is a common business model,
although not a universal business model.
Many open access journals do not require author processing
charges, but that is a business model
and it is a business model for a very well-regarded journals.
There is nothing scammy about asking an author to pay,
rather than asking a reader to pay.
In fact, as I'll explain later, it's not a bad model.
Open access journals do experiment with peer review.
There are open access venues where
you can go ahead and publish your pre-print review,
and then people will appear peer-review it later,
and, for reasons again I'll discuss later,
that's not a bad idea.
It helps to cure some of the other dysfunctions
in scholarly publishing.
It's an important experiment, anyway.
But these are things that open access journals do,
and into that world where authors pay, where we're
publishing is a matter of getting online for free,
and where sometimes peer review looks different
than it used to, or maybe doesn't exist in the way
that you've seen it.
Into that breach is the uncertainty
that the predatory guys step, and they
try to masquerade as legit open access publishers.
Jeffrey Beal is a scholarly communications librarian
who used to keep a kind of authoritative list of what
he called predatory open access publishers,
and it may be due to his list, more
than anything, that predation and open access are
associated-- excuse me, associated with each other.
And the list was a really interesting and useful
resource, and it was used by a lot of people
for a lot of good things, but if you
read some of the other things Beal
wrote it was clear that he was not a fan of open access
generally, and I believe it was part of his agenda
to associate open access with predation.
And I think that's an unfortunate byproduct
of his work, which again was quite useful to a lot of people
for a lot of reasons.
And again, all of the journals that you see,
and all of the anecdotes that you hear,
these people call themselves open access.
So it's hard to disentangle the real from the crummy,
and the honorable from the scam.
But we know that open access journals can be
high quality and high impact.
Some of the highest quality, highest impact journals
in a lot of fields are open access journals
including in medicine.
PLOS Medicine and BMC Medicine are in the top 10
for the five-year impact factor in medicine category.
So there's nothing about open access
that undermines something's credibility or makes it,
necessarily, scammy.
The mega-journal model that PLOS One follows, emphasizing
validity and speed over the bias to success and novelty,
again, is actually a very useful intervention
in the scholarly communication landscape.
It really counteracts some of the other problems I'm
going to describe in a minute.
This is a good actor, it's the definition of a good actor.
Somebody that's really trying to make the world a better place.
So I want to try to--
I hope, if nothing else, you will disentangle predation
from open access as a result of this talk.
So should we panic?
I want to return to our Harvard friends
from the very beginning.
They issued the call to arms-- we are in trouble.
Our literature is under attack.
There is a delugs of bad science.
In the introductory passages of that piece
the authors quote to big editors of big journals
to help motivate the notion that the academic literature is
in trouble.
The first is Dr. Marcia Angell, she
is a former editor-in-chief of the New England
Journal of Medicine.
And Dr. Angell writes, "It is simply
no longer possible to believe much of the clinical research
that is published."
Wow.
That's terrifying.
She did say that.
That is terrifying.
Why did she say it?
Had nothing to do with predatory journals.
If you read the article from which that quote is pulled,
the reason she is worried is that drug company funding
has skewed the research in many areas.
And she walks through some of the research showing
that industry-sponsored trials published in medical journals
consistently favor sponsor's drugs.
37 of 38 positive studies are published.
Of 36 negative studies, 33 are either buried or spun.
Well, it didn't work the way we thought it did,
but boy, gosh, look at this secondary effect.
It worked in a way.
So it is a completely separate phenomenon
and a separate problem, and the journals
and the articles that are susceptible to these problems
are the big ones.
That's part of what's alarming.
It's the prestigious journals, it's
the people you've heard of that are publishing
bad science in this way.
The other quote is from Dr. Richard Horton,
the editor-in-chief of The Lancet.
And again, Dr. Horton says, "We have
to recognize what a growing number of academics
are beginning to fear.
The case against science is straightforward,
much of the literature maybe half, is simply untrue."
May be simply untrue.
Again, get terrifying.
Oh my God.
When Dr. Horton talks about the literature,
though, is he talking about OMICS?
Is he talking about the Journal of Journals Studies?
The Monica Lewinsky Edited Journals?
No.
He's talking about the stuff that normal scientists
write for normal journals.
It's a problem with traditional publishing and the way
that we all do our work in academia right now.
In the quest for telling a compelling story, which
you can tell I like to do, too, scientists too often
sculpt their data to fit their preferred theory.
Journal editors deserve their fair share of criticism.
We have an unhealthy competition to win
a place in those select few journals,
and that requires showing impact, novelty, etc.
That is what's skewing the research
and making it difficult to rely on the outcomes, at this point.
Part of the problem is that no one
is incentivised to be right.
We're incentivized to be first.
We're incentivized to be best, most compelling.
But no one is incentivized to be right about something
that was--
perhaps another of putting it is-- no one
is incentivized to admit they were wrong.
Fraud and quality issues haunt traditional scholarly
publishing.
Elsevier published six fake medical journals
that were created by the pharmaceutical industry.
They had published six journals that published nothing
but articles curated by the pharmaceutical industry
to tout the effectiveness and utility of their drugs,
and they got caught doing it and they had to fess up.
But they did it.
Elsevier, BMJ, and BioMed Central
published journals about acupuncture.
I don't know how you feel acupuncture,
but maybe that's a problem.
Big deal packages are bloated with these titles, journals
that nobody reads.
Though expensive journals-- journals
that were in the library are told are very expensive
but then no one reads them.
What is going on here?
The deluge is coming from big publishers who are padding out
these big deals with journals full of stuff
nobody cares about.
Retraction Watch is this is reporting
an explosion of retractions.
Those retractions, again, are in reputable journals.
That's why it's alarming.
People are retracting their citations
in phony predatory journals.
The reproducibility crisis, which is that this is ground
zero for finding and talking about that
here in Charlottesville.
This is Brian Nosek at the Center for Open Science.
That crisis is a crisis because it's research we care about.
Cures for cancer.
And we can't do again what they did the first time
and prove that there really is a cure.
Right The reason this is alarming is
because it's real science that being undermined.
And on the other hand, there's been studies
of the scam journals to show--
longitudinal studies show that this is not
a major phenomenon in the US.
It looks a major phenomenon in your inbox.
It looks like a major phenomenon in your inbox, and when you get
caught it's embarrassing.
And when someone you know accidentally
submits to one of these things, it's terrifying.
And when you send a Siri-regenerated article
The Guardian will write about it because it's cute.
But a longitudinal study published
in BMC Medicine, open-access journal,
said predatory journals have indeed rapidly grown.
They are putting out a deluge of garbage.
That's scary until you realize the regional distribution
of publishers and authors is heavily
skewed away from the US.
Asia and Africa contribute 3/4 of the authors, the US 6%.
The things that are published in these scammy journals
are not US scholarship, by and large.
3/4 of the publishers of these journals are not in the US,
or in Europe, or in North America.
Bio-medicine is the third-largest field, though,
so that may help explain why your in-boxes in particular
are so full of this stuff, and why it was in a medical journal
that the call was sent out about this phenomenon.
Again, it feels real.
It is real in your inbox.
But out in the world, not so much.
So something I can agree about with the authors of that piece,
is that one response to low quality publishing
would be to focus on high quality publishing.
But it turns out high quality publishing is expensive.
Access to really prestigious journal literature
is hard to get.
So your practicing doctor wants to know the cutting edge
stuff has a hard time getting to it if they don't have
an institutional affiliation that gets
them those expensive journals.
Many physicians turn to journals,
in part, because they are free.
A free journal is much more accessible to them.
And so a solution would be trying, maybe,
to make the high quality literature more
accessible to the folks that need it to do their jobs.
The real predation in publishing is the cost of access.
The Big Deal and Serials Crisis are real.
They have haunted libraries for decades, now.
Journal prices increased 273% over an 18-year period.
Four times faster than inflation.
It is just-- we are getting killed
by a cost of these journals.
For-profit publishers charge 5 to 10 times the cost
per citation, meaning indexing the cost of production
to how much of an impact these journal actually have,
how often are cited.
5 to 10 times as expensive for us
to subscribe to a for-profit location
versus a nonprofit publication.
All of that difference is not quality.
Controlling over quality, we are just paying for their profits.
And there is an oligopoly, now.
The top five publishers accounted for 20% of papers
in the 1970s, more than 50% of papers
today are published in the top five.
UVA is no exception to this ecosystem.
We are caught in it.
The four big deals-- are deals with Elsevier, Wiley, Springer,
and Sage--
crowd out everything else in our collections budget.
We spent 43% of our collections budget on those four people.
Big deals from those four publishers
eat 43% of our budget.
40% goes to other journals, and then 17%
go to those dusty old paper things.
The books.
Don't really buy as much as we used to.
I can localize this for you guys.
The Elsevier deal and the Medical Center.
Responsibility Center Management--
you may have heard of it now--
you guys get to pay the library, or better yet, I think we just
bill you directly for this one, and so this is not,
"oh poor library, I'm really sorry to hear
about your budget, good luck with that."
This is your money, and it is $590,000 this year,
for that one big deal.
And the cost is just going to go up.
We have a five year agreement with Elsevier,
and by the end of that agreement we'll be paying $685,000.
Over the life of that agreement, 3.175 million.
And it's just going to keep going up.
This used to just be library budgets
but now it's your money.
What better things could you do if you had $3.175 million?
What could you do?
Who could you hire?
What kind of research equipment could you get?
And the profit margins tell you where all that money is going.
They have skyrocketed thanks to the big deals.
Elsevier had a 17% profit margin in '91,
they have a 39% profit margin now.
Probably more, because it only goes up.
It has not gone down in that entire time period.
They are recession-proof.
2008?
They didn't feel it.
Sprinter Science and Business Media, 35%.
Wiley, 28.
Taylor & Francis, 37.
These are insane profit margins.
This is just profit taking.
This is monopoly behavior.
It's right up there with drugs, and cars, and iPads.
These are some of the most profitable business
in other sectors.
Pfizer is the most profitable business
in pharmaceuticals with a 42% margin, Reed Elsevier right
behind them at 39.
Bigger than Apple.
Apple's margins are 37.
And then we have Taylor & Francis and Springer,
and then poor old biggest bank in the world, the Bank of China
can't do as well as Elsevier.
29%.
Wiley right behind them at 28, and the car industry
is a piker at nearly 10.
These are extraordinary.
And the real kicker of this whole thing
is that all this stuff should be free.
This is what really drives me nuts.
We can talk about whether they should be cheaper
or should be more reasonable.
It really should be free.
The publishing ecosystem made a lot of sense in 1970.
Authors and universities would give their copyrights
to publishers for free, as we still do.
Editors at universities would give their time,
and peer reviewers would give their time, again,
all for free, generally.
The vast majority of cases.
Libraries give money to the publishers
and buy back-- but what do the publishers do?
They do really important stuff that we didn't want to do.
They managed all that paper, all that ink, all those trucks,
all that process of back and forth,
moving paper around, managing peer reviews, was really hard.
Like a lot of things, it's not so hard anymore.
The internet makes it possible for all of that stuff
to be, essentially, in-house.
There are service providers that can support peer review
at a level that is comparable to the big guys
for a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of the price.
If we invested in those kinds of service providers,
we could cut out all those profit margins
and reinvest them in other parts of the university.
So there are two real challenges to the scholarly literature.
One is prestige research is too damn expensive.
High quality research is very expensive for the reasons
I described.
And the other is that journal publishers and promotion
and tenure committees have a significance and impact bias.
That's really the underlying force
that is driving publish and publish fast,
is driving them to change what they publish
to bury bad results, to tweek bad results,
to make things un-reproducible, and so on and so forth.
Open access, actually, far from being
a problem or a predatory threat to our ecosystem,
has the answers to these problems.
We can decouple prestige from costs.
For the reasons I described just a moment ago,
we could publish things very efficiently.
Make them free to the reader.
Cheap to the author, or free to the author.
If we take some of the what institutions are spending
on publishing and spend that instead on the infrastructure
to support publishing.
If we can decouple publication from impact,
again, the sense that everything that we publish
has to be novel and compelling.
Publish negative results, confirmation studies,
sorry about the typo.
Other less-sexy but still important work.
We have to change the incentives around publication.
Open up the whole research lifecycle.
Make art make your data, your software,
everything you do more visible.
All that stuff is not really supported
by the traditional system, but it's something
that the tools are coming together now.
There are lots of strategies to promote open access
and to try and make this change happen.
You've probably encountered funder-mandates,
I know the NIH is a major funder here.
Open Research Funders Group is another big entity
that's trying to push that shift toward open access.
The Gates Foundation, the Heart Association.
There are open access policies, and even some in some places
mandates, where institutions pledge
that all of their faculty output will be made open access.
And there are even boycotts.
All these things, they're nibbling around the edges
but we're still not getting there.
It's slow-going.
I think some of things that I'm more excited about are
creating more open outlets.
Open publishing is coming to UVA.
We are investigating journal platforms
to support open journals.
Anyone here who is an editor at a prestigious journal,
or who would like to start a new prestigious journal,
come and talk to us.
We will give you a hosting platform that
is sustainable and friendly.
We have the Center for Open Science
here in Charlottesville, providing
all kinds of interesting tools to open your whole process,
again, to make everything about your research
more visible, more reproducible.
There are pre-print servers, hugely interesting
and useful in other disciplines, and they're
starting to get a foothold here in medicine.
There's the Bio Archive, which is an open pre-print server.
You can post your research there for free,
and anyone can read it.
And it, again, helps accentuate access and visibility.
And finally we have institutional repositories here
in the library.
We have Libra and Libra Data, where
you can make your research more visible.
There are lots of local and national resources
that are interested in these questions.
Talk to your Health Sciences librarians,
they are your experts in-house.
Andrea's here in the room, and I know
there are just tons of people here
are super talented, super knowledgeable,
who would love to talk with you about all these issues.
Again, we have our IR--
Libra.Virginia.Edu.
Dave Ghamandi is our open publishing librarian,
and, like I say, he would love to hear from you if you
want to publish something, start a new journal,
explore a monograph.
We have the Center for Open Science right down the street.
And SPARC, who is a major national leader on open access
publishing.
So, I hope that wasn't too much of a switcharoo for you,
and I hope you enjoyed hearing from me.
And I think we've got a few minutes for questions,
if folks would like to ask.
MARCIA DAY CHILDRESS: Well this is fascinating,
and I hope that some in our audience have questions.
Not only, perhaps, about the fake conferences but
about some of these very legitimate concerns
that go right to the heart of our academic system.
So when I call on you to offer comment or raise a question,
please identify yourself.
AUDIENCE: Well, John Snikey.
So, two questions that came to mind.
One, at the very beginning you talked
about the dilution of science in the literature and everything
with too many journals, and yet then with open access
and not peer review, then you're just
kind of putting anything out there
and it sounds like you're diluting it more.
So that's my first question.
The second one is--
even with these open access journals, a lot of them,
legitimate ones like PLOS One and everything,
charge $1,000 to $2,000 to publish.
That doesn't sound very friendly,
whereas journals-- other ones that I submit
to-- you'll say probably are hidden charges,
they're largely free.
So $1000 hit is pretty big out of a budget for my grant, so.
BRANDON BUTLER: Yeah.
So those are both great questions.
So for the first question I think,
though I didn't say this explicitly,
I think you've identified a tension--
a really clear tension between on the one hand
and one of the problems, in a way,
I think, again, if you read the Lancet
editorial, a lot of the studies on reproducibility,
studies on the ways that the scholarly literature is
influenced, what you see is a big driver that distorts things
is exactly what you say that the bias towards impact,
in the sense that only the best things should be published
and only the most compelling things should be accessible.
And so, if you want to if you published,
you should make your work really good.
And I think that envisions an elite system where there could
be the best journals, and if you just
read those you'll learn all the best information.
And that should be the model.
We should filter out as much as possible
and only get the best stuff.
But trying to achieve that model where we're not
deluged with too much information
is part of what has created all the problems I described,
so we're caught in this tension.
I think it's at least defensible that maybe we
should embrace the deluge more than trying to fight it.
And that there is more--
we're likely to be better off if we
let more stuff get into the open,
so that we're not biasing results.
So that we're not giving people reasons to change the way
they report what they find, and then
afterwards sifting through and filtering that stuff.
So more things get published, yes,
and then we need additional filters
and additional commenters to surface things that are maybe
more impactful and so on.
But we don't want the publishing to be tied directly
to the impact, because that's what
creates the warping influence that I described.
APCs are interesting.
It's a business model, there are some
in the scholarly communications world that
think it's the right way to go.
So if you want to read more about that,
there there's an initiative called OA 2020 that
is based primarily in Europe.
But there are some libraries here
in America-- at UC Berkeley, their dean
of libraries, Jeff MacKie-Mason, is an economist.
He is a fan of this notion of author-processing charges,
and the idea is that, rather than paying subscriptions,
we have authors pay.
Journals will compete in exactly the way you describe.
You say well I don't want to pay $1,000, I want to pay $500.
And journals would in some ways compete for your dollar
and sell you access at a lower price.
Others worry that authors don't really
have that much more market power than libraries,
and if Cell wants you to pay $2,000,
then you'll pay $2,000 because it's Cell.
So I'm sympathetic to that question,
and I don't know there's a very good right answer to APCs
or not APCs, low APCs or high APCs.
I think it's just something we're wrestling with.
AUDIENCE: I am Robert Chevalier Pediatrics.
I get about five to 10 of these fake journal requests per day.
And the ones that have an unsubscribe choice,
I do that and it has helped in the past, but most of the ones
recently don't have that option, so how do you have to--
delete is the simplest thing, which is what I do,
but do we have to divert them all to the trashcan?
BRANDON BUTLER: I'm afraid that would be my suggestion, that
is these guys, as I mentioned earlier, they
have their-- some of them anyway, and there's a spectrum.
There was a wonderful New York Times article,
it's in suggested materials and it's on my last slide.
There is an area of gray where some of these journals
are not intentionally fraudulent,
they're just sort of borderline, and it's hard to say.
But for the folks there are just no better than the Nigerian
scammer guys, you have to treat them like spam.
Just like you wouldn't unsubscribe from the Nigerian
folk.
Saw your head shaking, I'm ready.
AUDIENCE: I am Wladek Minor, Molecular Physiology.
I think that there are--
you raise similar issues.
But the main issue, in my mind, is that 50 years ago, science
was very elite.
If even 20 years ago, if somebody
would come here to the college at 9 PM, all labs were full.
At least half full.
Now, if you will come at 9 PM, there are not too many people.
So, 20 years ago or 50 years ago, science was dedication.
Now it's another job.
If people would like to work eight to five,
and unfortunately there's no way to make science when
you are working eight to five.
So when we treat this as another job--
administration is asking me, "How many papers did you
publish last year?"
This is the basic question.
And it's not too important, what was the impact of this paper.
And I think that, I'm sorry to say, that you are wrong.
It should be very strong coupling
between publication and impact.
The problem is how we measure impact.
And, in my mind, the only way to measure impact is RCR.
Something which, NIH introduced now.
And I can assure you that if you would publish
in some open science journal, yes you
may have many citations which are really--
I never heard such rubbish as in this paper.
But you will not have legitimate number of citation
from lousy paper.
BRANDON BUTLER: So I think you identified
something really important, and my colleague and friend
over at the Center for Open Science,
Jeff Spies is really good at this.
If he ever comes and talks to you, you should listen.
And we should arrange for him to come and talk.
He is a scientist and he's really embedded in your world,
and the theme of his talks, repeatedly,
is that the values of science--
like the deep values, the 50-year-old, 100-year-old,
300-year-old values of science--
require openness.
And that it is only the sort of pursuit
of elitism and career-ism that have intervened and actually
taken openness out of the center of the scientific agenda.
And so, I would argue that you're absolutely right.
That it is about a change of culture,
and about getting back to a certain professional vision
of what scholarship is, that is less careerist and more
about pure devotion to knowledge and sharing.
But I think that change leads toward openness and not
towards for-profit closed access.
AUDIENCE: Thank you, really enjoyed the talk.
Terrific.
I too am subjected to five to 10 requests
for publications or talks a day, it seems.
So I have a comment and a question.
The first is a comment, and this is maybe
for other people in the audience that are experiencing the same.
This just occurred last week, I missed an invitation
to a real scientific conference where
I would be a plenary speaker, speaking at the National
Academy of Sciences, and I missed the original one
thinking it was a scam invitation.
I think I probably auto-deleted it.
Then they requested again, I was on in service,
and I came back to it a week later
and since they didn't hear from me
they retreated the invitation.
So you have to be careful on what
you're culling from your inbox, is the one cautionary note.
But the question I have, is I'm interested
in the pre-print experience, and exactly what you see that role.
I actually had as an interior author
we did go through that process with open archive--
however you pronounce that Cold Springs Harbor acronym.
It was sort of interesting.
I wasn't quite sure exactly what to do with it.
Our collaborators at Oxford were really interested
in strong proponents of it.
I'd still, and I actually didn't object to it
because I felt like our study was not
something that was at all easily reproducible, that putting it
out before it been under peer review
would not endanger the publication from being accepted
in the end, but was still sort of a funny process of putting
something up-- and it was picked up.
Again maybe the 2000-and-teens era
then we started to hear tweets about it.
So it was sort of a very somewhat uncomfortable
experience as someone that's not a millenial.
I just want to see you could comment on that.
BRANDON BUTLER: Yeah, it's so interesting.
And some of my library friends are smiling because they--
I think this is such a cultural thing,
from discipline to discipline.
In the physics world, pre-prints are like second nature.
Everything you do, you put it up on archive, Bio Archive
and SOK Archive.
All of these pre-print servers are all
derivatives of the original archive
that Cornell created for physicists.
And it's just what one does, and one shares one's work
on the pre-print server and that's a great way
to find out what's happening.
You can get RSS feeds, you can see what people are doing.
And it's really a matter of each discipline changing
its expectations and the ways that it consumes and produces
to begin to incorporate these new ways of sharing.
So it's foreign it's foreign, it's just
something that has not been done in this discipline,
and one of the hardest things about all of this
is it's just a series of collective action problems,
and coordination problems.
Where it doesn't make much sense unless everyone
jumps at one time.
You have to all hold hands and commit
to this new way of being.
And it's weird, and it's very hard,
and it's very inconsistent with the kind
of academic temperament and freedom.
It's hard to pull these levers.
But if it's any consolation, people who do it, love it.
And come to love it.
The communities-- the physicists love Archive,
and if you read that editorial on The Lancet,
physics is a model that the author alludes to.
The title is What Is the Sigma Five for Medicine?
And in physics, the standards for significance
are extremely high, and reproduceability and so on.
The community in physics has really
driven itself toward more rigor after a series
of embarrassing scandals in particle physics,
in particular.
And so it's just a culture change.
I wish I had an easier answer but I think the bottom line is
it will take a collective move, and the funders are the ones
driving it, as I-- you mentioned it was a funder and it was a--
that's one way to move things from the top down,
is for a person with a money to say
this is what we're gonna do.
AUDIENCE: John Colbert from Madison.
I have talked to several different editors of journals
in the past few months.
And I've discovered that they all
seem to send the papers that they get out
for examination for plagiarism.
So what about that as a part of this scandal thing?
And you could presumably publish hundreds of papers
if you borrow it from other people.
BRANDON BUTLER: Absolutely.
And plagiarized papers are one very easy way
to crank out a lot of papers.
And there are a handful of very-- and I love this,
I'll give you a little sidebar.
My real day job is I'm a copyright lawyer.
The things that I'm really interested in in addition
to all of this stuff is fair use.
And thanks to fair use in copyright law,
there are tools, now, that make it very easy
to check for plagiarism.
They work like a kind of Google search index
for existing papers out in the world,
and it's very easy for a professional journal that
wants to to catch plagiarists.
And that may be one thing, actually I
think that's one of the criteria that either ThinkCheckSubmit
or Publons--
you want a journal that is doing that
as part of its review process.
And there are Turn It In, I think is one. iThenticate.
We at UVA have a subscription to one of the big ones that folks
can use for their classes, and for their own journals
that they run.
This is something that technology
has made it much easier to catch people if you want to.
Some people don't want to.
AUDIENCE: Kara Knight.
Actually one way to be alert that it may be a bogus journal
is they'll often ask you to pay for the services of one
of those authenticate-- that's one of the first thing they
ask you is you go out and buy that service to do that.
That was one way I was alerted to a scam.
The other thing, I just want to mention, though,
is you mentioned best a lot, and I just
want to say that I would feel that best is represented
by truth or validity, and it's not
by the peerage of the journal because we know the New England
Journal of Medicine has published
some bad studies, some bad research.
So if we keep our eye on the ball, that
best equals truth or validity, that
should be our guiding star.
In any decision or any process we go through.
Given that, I think clinicians find
it very hard to be good at critical appraisal real time.
And so, I believe that the stakes are higher than physics
when we're talking about clinical care.
So it's a very messy--
it's just even more complicated, I think,
in the medical sciences.
And I may just feel that way because it's my area,
but I think that I'm still a little concerned
about group peer review.
I think in principle it sounds great,
but at some point somebody's got to say I know how to do this,
and I'm good at doing it, and I find these flaws.
And then stop it from getting further.
Thank you very much for the talk.
BRANDON BUTLER: Absolutely.
I thank you.
And I agree, and I think that's shift away from--
the definition of best you give is right,
but I think you highlight the exact same tension
from the earlier question.
That is, if we want to reward all valid or true research,
then we do let through a lot of research that may not
be as helpful to someone who needs
to make a choice in a hurry.
We need new filters and new ways of serving people who
need that kind of information.
Clearly, though, The Lancet and New England Journal of Medicine
are not satisfied that they're doing a good enough job,
so we're in the moment of change.
AUDIENCE: I think that we should be very careful with comparing
physics to biomedical science.
I am a physicist who moved to biomedical science,
so I know a little about physics.
BRANDON BUTLER: You know more about both than I do.
AUDIENCE: In physics, you have sometimes in CERN
or in Fermilab, you have experiments--
10,000 people are working on one experiment.
And outer leads is longer than the paper.
So they have to do per prints to be promoted
or to show that they are doing something.
And in biomedical science, you have
labs were post-docs are not allowed
to speak to each other about the project.
So you see that the fields are different.
The fields are different, and also you mentioned about this--
big pharma who are paying for skew the results.
In physics, nobody can do that.
There is no
[INTERPOSING VOICES]
So the scandals are not--
we can to discuss that in private--
BRANDON BUTLER: It makes me think of-- another thing
that I think is really strange and a root cause
of all this stuff is that the law of publishing is copyright,
and copyright cares about authorship, and creativity.
Copyright is primarily for novelists, really that's
the paradigm case of copyright.
Copyright wants you to be John Grisham.
10,000 people working on a physics experiment
is not John Grisham.
But the product of that work is a copyright-protected piece
in intellectual property that is treated like a John Grisham
novel, and it belongs to Reed-Elsevier
until all of those people are dead and 70 years after that.
It is insane.
It doesn't make any sense at all.
And that's another big reason that open access
is so interesting.
And I think a compelling thing to explore
is that it decouples the dissemination of research,
which is one kind of activity that can vary in the ways
that you describe from all of the other things
that copyright is about, which, again, works
in a completely different way.
And it is absurd that Reed-Elsevier has the ability
to get the same kind of monopoly profits out of a physics
article that Warner publishing has
to get out of a Beyonce album.
But we treat them that way, and they
treat us that way, that is we the consumers pay
through the nose for that copyright monopoly privilege.
So I think that difference is a really
interesting and important one.
MARCIA DAY CHILDRESS: I'm afraid we're at the end of our hour,
but I would like to think Brandon
Butler for a wonderful talk, including
those insights into the publishing industry's profit
margins and our library's budgets, which I've
heard about over the years as these charges have gone up,
and I agree these are difficult problems that
have an impact in various sectors of the institution.
We invite you to join us next week for the last Medical
Center Hour of the semester, which is also
the Joan Echtenkamp-Klein Memorial
Lecture in the history of the health sciences.
Welcome back to UVA Paul Lombardo,
who is now at Georgia State University College of Law.
He will be talking to us about the continuing relevance
of America's eugenic legacy.
So please join us here next Wednesday, the 29th,
and again thank you to Brandon Butler.