Stings, scams and science

The global landscape for scientific research is fast changing. Going by criteria such as national spending on research and development (R&D) and scientific publishing, the axis appears to be shifting from America and Europe to Asia and elsewhere. India, China, Brazil and Korea have significantly stepped up their efforts in the scientific arena in the past decade or so.

China and India are among the top 10 countries in terms of the number of research papers published annually. China has surpassed the UK and other European countries to emerge as the second most prolific publisher of research papers, next only to the US. India ranks seventh in this list.

It’s a racket The overall quality of research papers published by academics in India and China, however, leaves much to be desired. Two separate sting or undercover operations have recently revealed that scientific publications are virtually on sale in India and China.

One can get published any fake research paper with astounding findings such as new cures for cancer in several Indian journals by making a cash payment, while in China scientific authorship or data can be bought with money without any need to do research, sting operations carried out by the journal Science have revealed.

The first sting exposed fraud in scientific publishing globally, and it seems India leads in this business. Thousands of scientific journals are published from India covering practically every field of science. Most of them fall in the category of ‘open access’, meaning they can be accessed online by anyone without paying any fee. Open access journals are sustained by the processing or publication fee paid by the authors or institutions they belong to, while subscription-based journals are not available for free online.

The system of open access journals came into vogue a decade ago with the legitimate objective of making scientific research accessible to academics in poor countries. It was felt that subscription-based journals such as Nature or The Lancet were unaffordable to academics and researchers in poor countries.

Both open access and subscription-based journals are supposed to rigorously examine a research paper through a system of peer-review before they publish it. But, as the expose shows, some publishers have reduced open access publishing to a racket.

In an operation that lasted 10 months, science journalist John Bohannan concocted a research paper describing the anti-cancer properties of a chemical extracted from a lichen. He sent 304 versions of this paper with fake and utterly flawed data to open access journals.

Names of scientists and institutions were all fake (such as Dr Onoohaw D. Induah from Iyeparroo Doctor's College, Malawi or Dr Ocorrafoo Cobange from Wassee Institute of Medicine). The spoof paper sounded credible but contained grave errors. Surprisingly, more than half of the journals accepted the paper and a bulk of them were based in India (at locations such as Bijapur, Jaipur, Chidambaram, Udaipur, Srinagar, Chennai, Mumbai, etc). As email trails show, journal editors were quick to accept papers and send invoices along with bank account details.

About a third of the journals were based in India — visibly or as revealed by the location of editors and bank accounts — making it the world’s largest base for open access publishing, says Bohannan in the expose published in Science .

As many as 64 India-based journals accepted the flawed paper and just 15 rejected it. The US emerged as the next largest base with 29 acceptances and 26 rejections. Even journals hosted by top publishers — Elsevier, Wolters Kluwer, Sage — reportedly accepted the bogus paper.

Thriving black market The second investigation – also carried out by Science – shows that even mainline journals are not impregnable for unscrupulous scientists in China. The investigation has found a “flourishing black market” in academic publishing involving shady agencies, corrupt scientists, and compromised editors.

They are trading authorship in research papers in top journals with globally accepted benchmarks such as Science Citation Index (SCI) of Thomson Reuters and Engineering Index of Elsevier. Middlemen are selling authorship in research papers to be published in high impact journals. Co-authorship of research papers can be bought for fees ranging from $1,600 to $26,300.

Undercover reporters of Science discovered various ways of getting papers published in top journals. The website of an operator called Sciedit openly advertises — “Publish SCI papers without doing any experiments”.

Another has a ready stock of abstracts for clients who need to get published fast, while some list titles of papers that only lack authors. One such company representative revealed that his firm buys data from a national laboratory in Hunan province.

Another common brokerage method is bringing on authors after a paper has gone through peer review with a journal. Some journals allow authors to be added at a late stage in the review process. Chinese researchers are ready to buy authorships in journals with a high impact factor because they are critical for getting promotions.

The two stings clearly show that scientific publishing, particularly open access, has been reduced to a scam in many countries. It is child’s play to get fake or flawed research papers published in journals without any peer review and scrutiny.

Scientists are using these journals to increase the number of research papers published by them since it is directly linked to promotions, incentives and other rewards in the academic system.

Common man conned Unethical practices in scientific publishing are not new. Plagiarism, ghost writing, conflict of interest have plagued mainline research publications as well for a long time.

There have been several instances of drug and chemical companies surreptitiously getting favourable mention for their products or procedures in research papers. Leading publishers have hosted sponsored journals without disclosing the source of income to readers.

The two scandals indicate that the scale of fraud has been institutionalised and has become an industry in which culpable scientists are becoming partners. Even peer-reviewed journals are not above board, as indicated in the Chinese scam.

Fraudulent research publishing has severe implications for the common man, as most medical and science stories in media are based on what appears in scientific journals. Clinical practices of doctors are influenced by research findings that appear in technical journals.

If research published in journals itself is compromised so will be the news reported in media. It is time researchers and science academies woke up and took corrective measures to put an end to fraud in scientific publishing.

(The writer is a science journalist and author based in New Delhi)

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