The Vanity Press in Academia – Source: securityboulevard.com

I’ve never been a regular resident of the ivory halls of academia, but Mich Kabay recently made me aware of an article about legitimate scientific journals driven to distraction by being flooded with commentary apparently reflecting a surge in the use of artificial intelligence rather than legitimate research and analysis. The Science article claims that Shoddy commentaries-a quick and dirty route to higher impact numbers-are on the rise and goes on to explain that AI-generated content floods literature with poor-quality publications, casts doubt on metrics. And that reminded me of an article I wrote over a decade ago that is no longer available. It concerned a journal paper submissions scam for which even a quasi-academic researcher like myself was evidently considered a suitable target. As the Science article referenced above and the Guardian article referenced at the end of this post suggest, the problem hasn’t gone away.

I wrote the now unobtainable article from 2013, for a security research organization, in response to an avalanche of emails inviting me to submit a paper to one of a large number of named open access, peer-reviewed online journals. This also gave me the opportunity to join the gang as an editorial board member or reviewer.

I’m retired now, of course. Obviously, I haven’t stopped writing since you’re now reading this (well, I hope someone is), but hardly anything I write now is for payment, since I’m no longer paid for research and consultancy, and can’t be bothered to waste time hunting for sponsors/patrons/publishers that could be spent on the more interesting task of actually creating something. However, when I still worked in the security industry, mostly as a consultant to the anti-malware company ESET, people and publicationsoutside the company did quite often invite me to write, edit or review for them. Well, that was the theory, anyway.

When I did get requests to write for outside organizations they were usually rather more precise about which site or publication wanted my contribution. They certainly didn’t invite me to choose from various obscure publications in disciplines of which I had no experience whatever. They didn’t usually expect to pay me for my efforts, but that’s not unusual: those who write articles and papers published by a security company often also write on behalf of the same company for reputable third parties like the security research organizations, local and mainstream press, and specialist security magazines. Such a third party, like its audiences, gets a wider spread of expertise than they would if it only published content from in-house staff, especially if the external writer already has a reputation. But it works for the security company and the author, too. They get a wider audience than they would from an industry blog, and both are regarded as sharing knowledge within the research community and beyond, rather than just publishing marketing content.

However, in this case it was my money that was wanted, not my expertise or reputation, such as they were. The spammer didn’t even seem to know what my field of expertise actually was. This isn’t, in itself, unusual. At one time, when my job title at a well-known medical research charity was ‘Security Analyst, I got a request from a teenager in the US for information on my job as a securities analyst, not at all the same thing. Not to mention countless mails and letters addressed to Dr. Harley. Still, since what expertise I could claim in those days included quite a deep knowledge of computer viruses, it was not surprising that sometimes people assumed that I was more knowledgeable about real virology and other aspects of biology and medicine than I ever claimed to be. I had, after all, been working in a medical research organization, the National Health Service and so on. However, no reputable scientific/academic periodical would have contacted me on the basis of such a superficial acquaintance with my work history and catalogue of past publications. Let alone invite me to work on periodicals in completely unrelated fields such as earth sciences.

But it also turned out that if you wanted to be an editor or reviewer, you first had to submit a research paper. Well, I suppose it’s fair enough that an applicant should be able to demonstrate some degree of academic credibility, but that wasn’t at all the purpose. The cost of processing such an article (copyedit, proofreading, and publication on acceptance) turned out to be up to $500, though there was a substantial discount for early submission. Further research showed that some similar organizations charged several times that much, though they too offered significant discounts.

Open Access is not in itself fraudulent. In principle, it provides unrestricted access to scholarly, peer-reviewed journal articles. In this case, the reader doesn’t pay for access (for example, by paying a yearly subscription fee or for individual articles), the cost of publishing being mainly borne by the author. It’s a complex and varied model, but for many academics and academic departments, publications are essentially a performance metric. The number of publications they can claim is essential to maintain tenure and is a significant advantage in the job market. Research information is not only a core academic product but a marketing asset.

You won’t be surprised that there are journals whose review process is less rigorous than is appropriate, but you may be more surprised is how many Open Access journals have little or no content, or include articles from disciplines irrelevant to the field the journal appears to cover. Even worse, such publications may include names on editorial and review boards of people who never agreed to participate, and others whose credentials are blatantly misrepresented.

From the point of view of the academic hooked by these publications, perhaps it’s not a scam if you get what you want out of it, though it’s clear that sometimes the journal does not exist, or has such a tiny readership that it has no credibility at all. (Hence my comparison with vanity publishing.)

Buying a bibliography by the yard (the way some people buy books for their study or shelves in their pub) is one way to pad a résumé, and some hard-pressed academics may consider it worth the money. But to obtain and maintain tenure by buying credibility at the expense of those who earn theirs is to cheat the employing institution, and the academic community as a whole loses credibility.

Here is a fairly old (February 2024) article from the Guardian that describes how “Medical research is being compromised, drug development hindered and promising academic research jeopardised thanks to a global wave of sham science that is sweeping laboratories and universities.”

David Harley

*** This is a Security Bloggers Network syndicated blog from Check Chain Mail and Hoaxes authored by David Harley. Read the original post at: https://chainmailcheck.wordpress.com/2025/01/12/the-vanity-press-in-academia/