Problems in Science Publishing....If not Corrected It Will Undermine the Credibiity of Science

I opened this thread here and not in Soapbox in the hope that a rational rather than a polemical discussion could ensue.

This article is one of several in a similar vein about the darker side of science publishing.

http://www.science20.com/news_articles/journals_and_publication_pollution_denialism-154566

With the never-ending pressure at universities on professors to publish and the willingness of publishing houses to create journals without rigorous peer review, the scientific community does itself a disservice and creates the platform for the far right wing to attack science (global warming, vaccines, evolution, use of tobacco and cancer, and many other issues) and create a dilemma for non-scientists who have to make some decisions like whether to vaccinate a child, to support high cigarette taxes, to go solar power, to support carbon taxes and so on.

At the end of the article there are links to similar articles.

Following up on the above, there is a web site (I don;t think it gets updated anymore) that was created at MIT to spoof scientific publishing. It is called SciGen and here is the link:

http://pdos.csail.mit.edu/scigen/

All you do is put in your name or your dog's name or Senator Inhofe's name as author (or all three at once) and voila a gibberish computer science paper is produced. Here's the sad part from their own web site:

"About

"SCIgen is a program that generates random Computer Science research papers, including graphs, figures, and citations. It uses a hand-written context-free grammar to form all elements of the papers. Our aim here is to maximize amusement, rather than coherence.

"One useful purpose for such a program is to auto-generate submissions to conferences that you suspect might have very low submission standards. A prime example, which you may recognize from spam in your inbox, is SCI/IIIS and its dozens of co-located conferences (check out the very broad conference description on the WMSCI 2005 website). There's also a list of known bogus conferences. Using SCIgen to generate submissions for conferences like this gives us pleasure to no end. In fact, one of our papers was accepted to SCI 2005! See Examples for more details.

"We went to WMSCI 2005. Check out the talks and video. You can find more details in our blog."

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That was in 2005! The blog, again not updated beyond 2008-9 or so, shows a number of stories of how the random nonsense generated by their web site got accepted in conferences and journals.

This article from Nature in 2014 -- one of the most prestigious of science journals in the world -- takes the issue further:

http://www.nature.com/news/publishers-withdraw-more-than-120-gibberish-papers-1.14763

A few articles were generated by the SciGen web site. The publishers cited were IEEE and Springer-Verlag, both prestigious.

Scary.

I think the scientists in the respective disciplines know which journals are reputable and which are not.

Generally yes, but IEEE is one of the prestige ones and they fell for the junk. And the pressure to publish does have a downside...a decent amount of junk.

Springer Verlag in my field is not prestigious. That's where people publish who can't get into the decent journals.

pol100gk said:

I think the scientists in the respective disciplines know which journals are reputable and which are not.

That may be, but it doesn't really address the dilemma for us nonscientists who, as Jude noted, "have to make some decisions like whether to vaccinate a child, to support high cigarette taxes, to go solar power, to support carbon taxes and so on." For instance, there are people who pride themselves on coming to their own conclusions on complicated topics, even while failing to distinguish between, say, a "Yale study" and a partisan think tank's position paper that a Yale website simply linked to. Publication pollution makes false pretenses like that, whether intentional or unintentional, only harder to avoid.