The U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) won a suit against India-based scientific publisher, Omics International, alleging that the publisher operated hundreds of fake scientific journals with deceptive business practices.
The U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) won a suit against India-based scientific publisher, Omics International, alleging that the publisher operated hundreds of fake scientific journals with deceptive business practices. A federal judge ordered the publisher to change its business practices and pay a $50.1 million settlement.
However, since this is a U.S. judgment and OMICS is headquartered in Hyderabad, India, it’s not clear if the settlement will ever be paid or whether the money will be shared with researchers who alleged OMICS defrauded them.
Judge Gloria Navarro of the U.S. District Court in Las Vegas, Nevada, ruled that the FTC had proved that OMICS, which published approximately 700 journals, used deceptive advertising indicating authors were given rigorous peer review, which was not the case. A Science investigation published in 2013 found that of the 69,000 manuscripts published by OMICS from 2011 to 2017, only about half were even sent out for peer review.
In addition, the OMICS communications to authors weren’t clear that they would be charged to publish articles in its open-access journals, that it advertised 50,000 reviewers, but many never agreed to act as reviewers, and that OMICS statements about its own “impact factor” were actually internal citations based on not much evidence.
Navarro based the $50.1 million judgment on OMICS’ total revenues from 2011 to 2017. “Defendants did not participate in an isolated, discrete incident of deceptive publishing, but rather sustained and continuous conduct over the course of years,” Navarro wrote.
OMICS is hardly the only scientific publisher to have questionable and often predatory practices. A 2015 study in BMC Medicine estimated that “questionable publishers issued nearly half a million articles in 2014 and took in about $75 million,” according to Science.
Nor is this particularly new. The New York Times reported on it in 2013, although it appears to be gaining ground in the Internet era and as scientific publishing moved from a traditional business model for professional organizations and societies toward an open-access, typically online, product that requires authors or their institutions to pay for publication—often hundreds or thousands of dollars.
As the NYT wrote, “Open access got its start about a decade ago and quickly won widespread acclaim with the advent of well-regarded, peer-reviewed journals like those published by the Public Library of Science, known as PLoS. Such articles were listed in databases like PubMed, which is maintained by the National Library of Medicine, and selected for their quality.”
But what appears to be happening, and OMICS may well just be the most recent example, is scientific publishers publishing anything for a fee with little or no review or editing. The traditional form of peer-review is that when a researcher submits an article to a journal, it is then sent to multiple experts in the field, who vet the article for appropriateness to the readership and for scientific merit and accuracy. Significant edits may be required prior to publication. This is an important aspect of scientific publication, assuring that what’s published is as accurate and scientifically solid as it can be while setting the stage for other researchers to either duplicate the findings or build upon them.
Jeffrey Beall, an American librarian, compiles and updates a list of “potential predatory scholarly open-access publishers” that is astonishingly long.
One reason these publishers exist—and even thrive—is that many academic careers depend on publishing a certain amount of research in legitimate, and often what is dubbed “high impact,” journals. Tenure and advancement often depends on it. Beall’s website notes, “We hope that tenure and promotion committees can also decide for themselves how importantly or not to rate articles published in these journals in the context of their own institutional standards and/or geocultural locus.”
The FTC’s action against OMICS was brought in 2016 under Section 5 of the FTC Act, which involves unfair or deceptive practices. The FTC targeted OMICS Group and iMedPub LLC, which organized scientific conferences, and one person, Srinubabu Gedela, who operates both companies. The case showed that the two companies were basically a single entity with business addresses in India and the U.S.
ARS Technica writes, “Many of the companies that engage in predatory practices are small and based overseas, so it’s not clear how well the FTC will be able to pursue them. And, as long as these journals are willing to provide crackpot ideas with a veneer of scientific legitimacy, it’ll be tough to shut them down entirely. Still, it’s nice to know that there’s legal recourse should predatory publishers become a large-enough problem.”
