Doctors may accept spurious claims about medical treatments, and invalid studies wrongly influence public policy
In the past year there's been a lot of talk about the lack of trust in science and the need to distinguish legitimate research from misinformation, disinformation, and other forms of fallaciousness. But how? Many commentators have pointed to the importance of peer review—the process through which scientific claims are scrutinized for validity by other researchers with expertise in relevant fields, before the papers are published.
This is a big problem for society, not just for science. One study concluded that 8,000 predatory journals collectively publish 420,000 papers every year, nearly a fifth of the scientific community's annual output of 2.5 million papers. A medical news story on Medscape noted that dubious research funded by commercial interests can bypass proper vetting via publication in a predatory journal.
Why do scientists publish in these journals? One answer is money . Prestigious scientific journals charge their authors for publishing, stating the costs cover careful editing and review. These “page” fees can amount to thousands of dollars. Well-funded academics charge these fees to outside grants, or wealthy institutions may cover a researcher's costs.
To warn scholars away from predatory journals, librarian Jeffrey Beall developed a list of them in 2008. But his approach was criticized as subjective and even defamatory. Other lists have also been subject to dispute, in part because there was no agreement on precisely how to define predation.
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