{"id":2320,"date":"2013-11-14T14:52:46","date_gmt":"2013-11-14T02:52:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/sites.massey.ac.nz\/library\/?p=2320"},"modified":"2017-01-06T12:42:43","modified_gmt":"2017-01-06T00:42:43","slug":"editorial-boards-editors-in-chief-and-identity-theft-a-cautionary-tale","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sites.massey.ac.nz\/library\/2013\/11\/14\/editorial-boards-editors-in-chief-and-identity-theft-a-cautionary-tale\/","title":{"rendered":"Editorial Boards, Editors-in-Chief and Identity Theft – A Cautionary Tale"},"content":{"rendered":"

I was asked last week to help a member of the Massey academic staff who had found that she appeared on the website of a journal that she had never heard of, listed as its Editor-in-Chief. Closer examination revealed that another Massey academic was listed as the Editor-in-Chief of another title from the same stable of publishers, and in both cases their photos and short biographies had been taken from the Massey website. Yesterday I wrote to the publishers protesting strongly and identifying their behaviour for what it was – identity theft, a serious act of malice towards the people concerned and an attempt to parasitise their good names and that of Massey University. I also promised them their very own blog post – they may have thought that they had selected some sleepy hollow far off in the South Pacific to play their games with, but if that was so then Massey turns out to have been an exceptionally poor choice – so here it is.<\/p>\n

Fortunately they saw fit to reply almost immediately and not only have the names and images of our staff disappeared from their website but the journals themselves have been removed as well. They don\u2019t seem to have grasped, however, the sheer outrageousness of their actions so there\u2019s still a good case to be made for walking them through it slowly and carefully. Their exact words were \u201cwe regret for any inconvenience caused to you\u201d but there was no suggestion of an apology to the individuals involved and no acknowledgement that they had played very fast and loose with reputations. They went on to point out that one of the Massey staff had in fact responded in some way to an email from them as if this were a justification for the misappropriation of their identity and image, but there was no suggestion of any further communication with this person and it is simply ludicrous to suggest that someone could be Editor-in-Chief of a journal without actually knowing that they were. If that makes any sense then I\u2019m President of Iceland. (I\u2019m not, I just checked.) Anyway, it seems that there is just a fig leaf of honour among these thieves and that they are more likely to steal your name if you respond to them in some way.<\/p>\n

Now there\u2019s a warning here for our academic community. Years ago we learnt to be careful with certain types of email, in particular anything that might suggest any sort of monetary transaction. Then we learnt not to click on links in emails. (Every week it seems I still get emails from someone called Webmaster warning me that my mailbox is full and inviting me to click on the link, although why my Webmaster would have crook@dumbster.com as their email address I can\u2019t think.) So now there\u2019s a new one, don\u2019t reply to emails about editorial boards from anyone who is not known to you<\/em>, preferably in person but at least by reputation, and make sure that the person you are emailing is who they say they are<\/em>. If the request comes from an organisation, is it one that you already know of, does it have an existing reputation and does it do something other than just publish journals and run conferences? (The subject of junk conferences is for another time.) If it\u2019s a new journal what other existing journals does the publisher already put out? Are they already known to you and others in your field? The two staff who just had their names deleted were lucky, and if they get hold of yours simply emailing them and asking them to remove it probably won\u2019t work.<\/p>\n

Part of me thinks that because these guys reacted so promptly to my request then I shouldn\u2019t name and shame them, but I\u2019m still pretty annoyed about their audacity and I don\u2019t think they should get away with simply running a take-down policy with a touch of \u201cwe regret the inconvenience\u201d so here goes. The journals involved are the International Journal of Advancements in Civil, Structural and Environmental Engineering<\/em> and the International Journal of Advancements in Mechanical and Aeronautical Engineering<\/em>. Their websites are not currently active but you can see their content here<\/a> and here<\/a>. They seem to be short projects from engineering students of a fairly predictable kind, such as a proposal for jet-powered automobiles<\/a> and a wikipedia-powered piece on robotics<\/a>. In themselves they are both unexceptionable bits of vanity publishing that wouldn\u2019t merit a moment\u2019s notice, but they are also not something that a respected academic would want to be associated with, and fall well short of the claim that they \u201cpublish high quality, referred papers\u201d and offer \u201csurvey and review articles from experts in the field, promoting insight and understanding of the state of art, and latest trends in the field.\u201d Five other journals from the same stable are still active and despite being on different subjects they have identical editorial boards which were also the editorial boards of the International Journal of Advancements in Civil, Structural and Environmental Engineering<\/em> and the International Journal of Advancements in Mechanical and Aeronautical Engineering<\/em> –<\/p>\n

International Journal of Advances in Computer Science and its Applications<\/a>
\n
\nInternational Journal of Advances in Computer Networks and its Security<\/a><\/p>\n

International Journal of Advances in Artificial Intelligence and Neural Networks<\/a><\/p>\n

International Journal of Advances in Electronics Engineering<\/a><\/p>\n

International Journal of Advancements in Electronics and Electrical Engineering<\/a><\/p>\n

So what\u2019s the big deal and does any of this really matter? A few students had their work published in pseudo-journals with fancy-sounding titles and some names, photos and bios borrowed from the Internet to make them look like the real thing, so what? No real harm was done, surely. Well, there\u2019s just this. I\u2019m guessing that for most of these students this was their first experience of being \u201cpublished\u201d and that is always a bit of a thrill. It also looks good on their CVs, at least to the untutored eye. But I\u2019m guessing that these students also know that this isn\u2019t the real deal, that these journals don\u2019t have real academics as editors-in-chief and that their work wasn\u2019t really peer-reviewed. And if they don\u2019t know this then someone should have told them. Instead their lecturers and supervisors have been complicit in this charade and have failed in their primary duty to these students which is to instill in them a powerful sense of ethical responsibility that will stay with them throughout their professional careers. I don\u2019t know about you, but I really want the rising generation of civil, structural, environmental, mechanical and aeronautical engineers to follow the highest ethical standards, and I certainly wouldn\u2019t want the guys designing the jet-powered automobiles to cut any corners. Even worse, I don\u2019t even want to think about the implications of teaching students of network security that it\u2019s okay to fake someone\u2019s identity<\/em>. The mind boggles.<\/p>\n

If the world of fake academic publishing existed in some quite separate space from the real academic world (no sniggering!) then this wouldn\u2019t be a problem – nobody expects a paperback romance to win the Man Booker Prize, for example, at least not unless it\u2019s 800 pages long and really well-written – but in actual fact there is a crossover between these two worlds. Academics are often very eager to publish and may not even be aware of the fact that the journal they have submitted their work to has no actual peer-review process. They may allow a co-author to choose the journal and later find that their name appears in a title they would never have looked at alongside work that is badly-written, naive or even plagiarised. They may think that they are helping out a legitimate new journal. They may agree to join an editorial board without realising that their name will then be used for other journals in subjects quite outside their own area of expertise. All of these techniques are used to create an impression of legitimacy that in turns allows the perpetrators to tear down the walls of good scholarly practice and ethical research practice from within. This is not to say that everything is perfect in the scholarly publishing garden but simply that they could be made a whole lot worse if we are not careful, and that a cordon sanitaire needs to be placed around bad practice of this kind.<\/p>\n

So here\u2019s what we can do. We can take this stuff seriously for a start. I recently had a tweet from the Scopus Content Selection Advisory Board to say that they had my earlier blog post<\/a> on on the table while they discussed this issue and I commend them for that. If you are a researcher looking for a place to publish then make sure that your journal is above board and that the publisher acts ethically. If the peer review process is suspiciously easy then that may not be the case. Check out a few of the articles in the journal and decide whether your work would feel comfortable there. But here\u2019s the important thing. If the post penetrates as far into the academic blogosphere as some of the others have, then I\u2019m confident that some of you who have read this far will know someone who just needs a little reminder about the ethical responsibilities of scholars and scholarly publishers – if that\u2019s the case tweet it at them, email it to them or print it out and quietly drop it onto their desk while they\u2019re at lunch. I\u2019d be much obliged. For the rest of you just tweet and retweet until your fingers hurt. Thanks.<\/p>\n

Bruce White
\neResearch Librarian<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I was asked last week to help a member of the Massey academic staff who had found that she appeared on the website of a journal that she had never heard of, listed as its Editor-in-Chief. Closer examination revealed that another Massey academic was listed as the Editor-in-Chief of another title from the same stable […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":32,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[102],"class_list":["post-2320","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-scholarly-journals"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.massey.ac.nz\/library\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2320","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.massey.ac.nz\/library\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.massey.ac.nz\/library\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.massey.ac.nz\/library\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/32"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.massey.ac.nz\/library\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2320"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/sites.massey.ac.nz\/library\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2320\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4560,"href":"https:\/\/sites.massey.ac.nz\/library\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2320\/revisions\/4560"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.massey.ac.nz\/library\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2320"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.massey.ac.nz\/library\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2320"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.massey.ac.nz\/library\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2320"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}