Predatory Publishing: Know the Difference Between a Financial Scheme and Scholarly Dissemination

Dr. Brasington

New faculty members are not the only victims of predatory publishers. Richard Brasington, MD, rheumatologist and fellowship program director at Washington University in St. Louis and associate editor for The Rheumatologist says he was duped by a journal asking him to edit a special issue in his area of research.

After reaching out to a group of colleagues and working closely together over a series of months to finalize a collection of articles, they submitted the work, but received no word on any peer review or editing. Following multiple unanswered emails, Dr. Brasington investigated the publisher more extensively and discovered it had a “horrible reputation as an unscrupulous money maker rather than being a legitimate academic entity.”

Eventually, he and the other authors received requests from the publisher for payment to receive copies of their articles, which they ignored.

“I was trying to do a service by curating this journal issue on an important focus around interstitial lung disease, and it was a great combination of research, but I think it has disappeared,” he admits. “To be honest, I was incredibly naive, and this was very embarrassing. I recruited super experts in the field; unfortunately, they didn’t know any better than I did.”

Established publications from professional societies are fighting predatory publishers. The ACR’s peer-reviewed journal, Arthritis & Rheumatology (A&R), has been in a trade infringement dispute with a publisher whose name is extremely similar to the ACR’s publication title and is sending out solicitations to rheumatologists who have mistakenly believed they were being contacted by A&R, according to Nora Singer, MD, a rheumatologist in Cleveland, Ohio and chair of the ACR’s Committee on Journal Publications.

“These journals are trying to take advantage of the College and other established and well-known institutions to imply that their journal is sponsored by that professional society—and it’s to this that we object,” Dr. Singer explains. “Nobody is saying publishers shouldn’t have the right to seek out new research to publish, but they shouldn’t launch their product off the back of a society that has put in years of hard work to establish a strong reputation.”

There is concern among Dr. Singer and her colleagues on the ACR committee that with so much research being produced, there is no way to publish everything. If a researcher has their work rejected by an established journal, they may be lured in by a journal with a less than stellar reputation to get their work out there and not realize it’s really a predatory publication with a pay-to-publish scheme.