So #ResearchGate just made an agreement with... the predatory publisher #MDPI
I know not everyone liked it but I was actually finding ResearchGate quite useful. Now this is completely trashing the little reputation they had left in the toilet. MDPI might have a few good journals but it is overall famously known for its predatory practices like not listening to the reviewers and not having enough time for proper review between submission and publication.
This is a really disappointing move from ResearchGate that's really not in their interest. I guess they got a big check for it? Makes you wonder what other unscientific content are they getting paid to promote.
I'm going to write to them (e.g. press@researchgate.net) to ask that they cut all ties with MDPI and any other predatory publishers. I hope that many users will complain too. If it has no effect, I'll just have to close my account and never go there again...
"MDPI’s commitment to delivering a high-quality service for our authors" :rofl:
I guess you could say that not having proper peer-review is a service to the authors in a way?? 🤔
@elduvelle Has anyone received any kind of reply from #researchgate, or indeed any statement at all from them? I got no response, so am moving to delete my account asap #mdpi
After seeing this done by someone else (who then closed their account) I posted a document to draw attention to the problem. It worked quite well (lots of views and recommendations) but no answer from ResearchGate there either:
@snailman Have you found anything to replace it? I’ve found research scholar (https://www.semanticscholar.org/) to be quite useful once you feed it some of the papers you like.
@elduvelle Thanks for the info. Have messaged them - unless there is a rapid change of mind on their part then I will be deleting my account (I have found it quite useful over the years, but only quite). Presumably the financial manager. overruled the science managers.
Apparently #MDPI doesn't hesitate to pressurize your employer if you criticize them:
"Beall's list was shut down in 2017. Beall later wrote that he had been pressured to shut down the list by his employer University of Colorado Denver and various publishers, specifically mentioning MDPI as a publisher that had "tried to be as annoying as possible to the university so that the officials would get so tired of the emails that they would silence me just to make them stop.""
@elduvelle I once posted about a predatory journal on Mastodon and they threatened our instance with a law suit 🥴 Real healthy publishing model we got here in academia
@janeadams what? I guess that would explain how these journals are still around... Surely they wouldn't have the basis for a lawsuit though? We should be the ones suing them...
@elduvelle
Yeah rg is an odd one, not a virtuous org by any means and continually on the precipice of cashing out/getting bought out by the many interested players in the space. Not a great platform to invest energy in imo.
@elduvelle
Back in the day I loved the question/answer system. Like stack overflow for scientists. Wish we could have nice things, but yno capitalism. We'll make our own RG one day.
Hmm, interesting. To my knowledge, they have had similar agreements with e.g., Springer Nature, Cambridge University Press or Thieme. These corporate publishers have done way more damage to society and science than all so-called 'predatory' publishers combined.
But these earlier agreements did not make you reconsider RG? Why not?
@brembs Do they? It’s the first time I’ve heard of such agreements. And I totally agree with you that these publishers are bad too. I’d rather complain in priority about the one I know about and that seems the worst in terms of predatory practices but I’m happy to complain about all of them :)
More generally, I've long wondered what the actual problem with 'predatory' journals really is? I mean they publish papers nobody reads, so who is actually harmed? Compared to, e.g., the Lancet article by Wakefield et al., the Nature/Science articles by Diderik Stapel which had real-life policy outcomes, or the 88% of cancer research that isn't reproducible? Compared to that, what is the harm of people paying to publish articles that nobody reads?
@brembs basically what is bad is the predatory aspect: preying on people who don’t really know the system to get them to contribute their time with no benefits to science (eg by being a reviewer); preying on people who need papers for their CV and are ready to give money to publish without going through proper reviewing; more generally contaminating the existing literature with poorly reviewed papers; and also having dishonest practices like adding known researchers on their editorial board without approval.
Again I’m not saying all other publishers are blame-free but this specific publisher is pretty bad on many levels and I wish researchGate did not encourage them or showcase their papers or associate with them in anyway.
IMHO, we have way, WAAY, bigger fish to fry than companies whose biggest fault is to publish articles without peer-review (as long as these articles themselves do not seem to do any other damage!).
“Shouldn't we go after the worst problems first and worry about the fringe later?”
In general, I’m not sure that’s true. Otherwise we’d just have to stop fighting all the problematic things in the world until we’ve fixed the biggest problem. What if you never fix that one? Also, that’s basically a fallacious argument (fallacy of relative starvation, yes, I had to google it).
In this case, personally, I had not been so annoyed or harmed by MDPI or at least I wasn’t really paying attention to it. Now it’s “invading” what used to be one of my favourite network. Don’t I have the right to fight back? I know it’s probably useless but I’ll still give it a go.
@brembs@elduvelle Your findings might be important to others (esp. new medical/applicable findings) but hidden, and its paid for with (wasted) tax money. So it harms the same people that can't access and pay for publication in glossies?
@brembs you were saying that nobody reads MDPI content anyway so what’s the harm in publishing there - right?
@thartbm is saying that if you (or anybody) are actually publishing useful content then publishing it there harms everyone who will miss on it because they’re not reading it because they don’t trust it.
@elduvelle Sorry for not being clear... but yes, that's the harm. Second point is that to some degree that's the same harm that is done when publishing in pay walled journals... notwithstanding some differences between the two.
If I judged articles by where they are published, I wouldn't have anything to read 🤣
But seriously: who still does that these days? It's 2023, after all, and not 1995, no matter how much academic institutions like to pretend otherwise 😁
@brembs@thartbm@elduvelle Bjorn, as much as I'd like to agree with you in theory, in practice, we are all judged by the company we keep. When we often read articles we find worthwhile in a given journal, it has more trust capital than one where we may have read one or a couple of similar caliber but glimpsed many others that don't convince through sloppy writing, reviewing or editing. Time being a limited resource, we do use heuristics. My worthwhile work in less trusted venues is less cited.
@Etche_homo@brembs@elduvelle I wonder if there is work comparing the quality / replicability of papers in shady, semi-predatory journals with middle-of-the-road journals? Are they as bad as glossies or worse?
Sorry, that's not backed up by any data, so anybody who does that is really shooting themselves in the foot, either because they miss important literature for their work or because they promote unreliable research in their institution. Either way, the consequences for those who do that will come home to roost, eventually.
Beyond predatory, why would a journal ask these questions by email:
"To serve you better, Nature Portfolio editors would like to better understand your research and writing cycle. Your answer will help get you the right support tailored to every phase of the publishing process."
As in, if a for-profit entity wants my feedback on their operations, they can hire me as a consultant. But the above is really about me being their client and them wanting to find ways to "better serve me", which in today's doublespeak, means, in essence, finding ways to improve their revenue – a consulting job.
@brembs@elduvelle
Just to say that I increasingly think quite serious harm can be done by predatory journals, having seen some individuals rise to positions of influence on the back of such publications (and also citations from cartels). They leapfrog over honest colleagues and can end up running organisations, attaining positions of editorial and other influence, and essentially embedding a corrupt system in a country.
@deevybee Agreed! They help spread completely unscientific values. I was complaining about MDPI on researchgate and some people (not the majority) came claiming that scientific publishing was governed by the law of the market and that’s what should decide what is a good journal to publish in… of course that is how most for-profit publishers think, but that should really not be how scientists think!
I agree that for projects like systematic review and similar large-scale endeavors masses of fraudulent papers can be a problem. It's probably really tricky to get a handle on the size of the problem, however.
Take the recent cancer reproducibility project, for example:
Surely, all senior authors on these ~200 papers have taught their students how to do these kinds of experiment, ow to write these papers and how to get a job? Likely this has been going on for nearly 30 years now - and one doesn't need to be an evolutionary biologist to see how this works.
My intuition (which may of course be wrong!) tells me that the 'regular' literature still remains the much larger problem: 88% non-reproducible, vs. 3-4% paper-mill papers?
Analogously, the authors of these ~200 cancer papers of which 88% are not reproducible also got their positions in part due to these papers. I'd say even in psychology, where the reproducibility rate is much higher, most of the problem of authors getting jobs on irreproducible work must be massively higher than those who got their jobs on paper-mill papers?
@brembs@deevybee Irreproducible results are not necessarily a sign of poor science ethics though... it can happen because of many uncontrolled reasons, one of them being that it is impossible to know which are all the relevant parameters to control for.
But of course, people who fake results are as bad if not worse than those who make up results for a paper mill. And they’ll keep growing if we don’t do something about it. Let’s get rid of all of these!
To make my qualms even more explicit: I'm somewhat worried that the corporate publishers amplify (they are already doing this to some extent) any issues, no matter their relevance, with their 'competition' to distract from the real solutions that imply a threat to their parasitic business mdoel.
It'd be ironic if the noble cause of ridding scholarship of frauds would have the unintended consequence of helping the corporations to maintain their grip on the status quo.
@brembs A fully justified worry! But maybe in the quest for removing the incentives of predatory publishing, we’ll manage to remove all incentives for for-profit / glamour publishing. Maybe it will open our eyes to see that the two categories are not that different. Who knows 🤷
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