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Publishers withdraw more than 120 gibberish papers

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Re: Publishers withdraw more than 120 gibberish papers

#31

Post by mzl »

p4bl0 wrote: post #30
mzl wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In many CS fields, workshops are the equivalent of conferences in other fields such as physics. It is important to judge each field on how the primary peer-review publication is done, not by some abstract rule that is supposed to be the only valid standard. As a side note, I've heard people from the humanities scoff at physicists and their belief that journal papers are worth mentioning. The only real publications ar…

Actually, there are workshops in many CS fields which are selective (not as much as big conferences, that's for sure) and as serious as conferences or journal on peer-reviewing. The name "workshop" mainly means that the focus of the event is very specific and that the attendance is intended to be small so that real discussion with everyone can happen (contrary to big conferences where there are hundreds of people). F…

Sorry, I was too general. I am very much aware that there are selective workshops in CS (I've been to some). I think I mostly wanted to point out some differences. My main wish was to convey that publishing venues are different, and the name of the venue is not always an indication of the type of publishing.

Thanks for pointing out that I made the mistake I was trying to correct.

Re: Publishers withdraw more than 120 gibberish papers

#32

Post by p4bl0 »

vesinisa wrote: post #20

Previously, I have understood this was a concern mostly with the so-called "open-access" journals. In 2013, the Science Magazine went to some extreme lengths to discredit these journals, that more often than not seem to lack any form of scientific peer review. A fake paper, published by a made-up person working for a non-existent university, purporting to describe a cancer drug extracted from lichen, had experimental…

The paper you cite is a load of crap. And its author John Bohannon is a sell-out. Or at least I hope so for him, because if he compromised his intellectual faculties and his scientific reasoning for less than a very good place in hell, he is mad.

This paper makes and obviously false hypothesis: that the quality of a journal depends on it being open access or not, while clearly it depends on it being seriously peer-reviewed. The real question is: among peer-reviewed journals, are those which have an open access policy worse, better, or the same as the others? (My bet is that they are the same, since scientists/researchers doing the peer reviews have no more incentive to do it better in a case or another).

Bohannon shows his results in a way which can't say anything about that, mainly because he is comparing two things (open access and closed access journals) but only studied one of them and makes assumption about the other. With this level of scientific hypocrisy anyone can make numbers tell anything they want.

What I take from this article is that Science is scared of what is coming. Nothing else. If they were honest they would have titled it "Who's afraid of open access?" and the content would mainly be "us".

Re: Publishers withdraw more than 120 gibberish papers

#33

Post by p4bl0 »

mzl wrote: post #31
p4bl0 wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually, there are workshops in many CS fields which are selective (not as much as big conferences, that's for sure) and as serious as conferences or journal on peer-reviewing. The name "workshop" mainly means that the focus of the event is very specific and that the attendance is intended to be small so that real discussion with everyone can happen (contrary to big conferences where there are hundreds of people). F…

Sorry, I was too general. I am very much aware that there are selective workshops in CS (I've been to some). I think I mostly wanted to point out some differences. My main wish was to convey that publishing venues are different, and the name of the venue is not always an indication of the type of publishing. Thanks for pointing out that I made the mistake I was trying to correct.

Actually this is what I understood from your previous post. I was trying to strengthen your point with concrete examples and thought the best way to do it was in a reply. Sorry if that was unclear!

Re: Publishers withdraw more than 120 gibberish papers

#34

Post by beloch »

discardorama wrote: post #28
hueving wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Since conference proceedings are typically ignored researchers generally won't put their best effort into these papers. It's interesting, because this is completely the opposite in many CS fields (e.g. security). The top conferences carry much more weight than any journal. It's probably related to how fast the field changes.

That's because it takes a long time to publish in a journal (like 1.5 years or longer), and by that time the topic is old. Publishing in a conference allows you to bring fresh-from-the-oven results to your colleagues, along with the freshly-baked bread smell ;)

Journals are highly variable, at least in physics. I've experienced everything from acceptance after a week and publication within the month to pure hell that dragged on for over 2 years. The average is a few months and certainly not over a year! You'd better believe physics moves fast too. Preprints frequently gather dozens of citations before a journal editor even bestirs him or herself to send the submitted article out to referees! ArXiv is what everyone reads daily for the latest stuff, but always with caution. There's crazy crank stuff and crap in there too unfortunately.

Preprints are a great way to distribute results quickly without waiting for the gears of the peer-review process to complete their grinding or for the right conference to come up. However, when you get good referees the peer-review process can really put your work through the acid-test. We frequently get comments back that prompt us to do great work (along with many that just piss us off with busy work...). When it functions properly, the peer-review process bursts your institution's local bubble of thought-patterns and reminds you of how other experts in the field might think about the same problem. Occasionally it catches big mistakes or spots huge redundancies.

China is starting to publish a lot, but the standards aren't there yet. Some of their institutions do fantastic work while others really need peer-review to keep them honest. There are, of course, dishonest individuals pretty much everywhere who will take advantage of any flaws in the system. How do disciplines that eschew peer-review deal with this? When viewing preprints, I unfortunately place far too much importance on authors I know and trust. Sources matter when you can't really trust every article you read. Without peer-reviewed journals, how do you avoid potentially ignoring brilliant research by people unknown to you?

Re: Publishers withdraw more than 120 gibberish papers

#35

Post by a3_nm »

p4bl0 wrote: post #32
vesinisa wrote: post #20

Previously, I have understood this was a concern mostly with the so-called "open-access" journals. In 2013, the Science Magazine went to some extreme lengths to discredit these journals, that more often than not seem to lack any form of scientific peer review. A fake paper, published by a made-up person working for a non-existent university, purporting to describe a cancer drug extracted from lichen, had experimental…

The paper you cite is a load of crap. And its author John Bohannon is a sell-out. Or at least I hope so for him, because if he compromised his intellectual faculties and his scientific reasoning for less than a very good place in hell, he is mad. This paper makes and obviously false hypothesis: that the quality of a journal depends on it being open access or not, while clearly it depends on it being seriously peer-re…

To summarize the concerns I have with this study:

1. To prove that open access is worse than close access, you need to do experiments comparing both, not just do experiments on open access and say the results are bad. Try imagining a study using the same methodology to show that American journals are bad.

2. Even assuming that open-access journals on average are worse than closed-access journals, it does not follow that all open-access journals are crap. I think it is safe to say that 80% of all publications venues are crap regardless of their access policy. Fortunately, scientists usually do not choose a venue at random among open-access or closed-access ones, they pick those that have a good reputation. So to establish that open access is bad you should do so by evaluating the right venues.

To give another analogy, this is like looking at random emails in transit, observing that they are spam, and concluding that email is worse than Twitter, without observing anything on Twitter, or taking into account the fact that people are not reading random emails.

I think this study does exemplify the fact (well-known among scientists) that there is a huge mass of low-quality publication venues with little or no review of the submissions, but branding it as "open access is bad!" can only be explained by further political motives.

Re: Publishers withdraw more than 120 gibberish papers

#36

Post by p4bl0 »

mjn wrote: post #2

If I'm dreaming, the ideal outcome of this would be that Springer and IEEE decide to actually apply some kind of scrutiny to the conferences whose proceedings they publish under their names. It's a pretty poorly kept secret that, while they publish some stuff that's top work in several fields, they also publish some total crap that is so bad it's inconceivable someone actually competent has spent even 20 minutes vett…

> If I'm dreaming, the ideal outcome of this would be that Springer and IEEE decide to actually apply some kind of scrutiny to the conferences whose proceedings they publish under their names.

I'm sorry to break it to you but that won't happen. It would totally destroy the awfully good business model they have, which is one of the best engineered fraud ever.

Right now the situation is:

- Researchers, oh which almost 100% are paid by public money, do research and write their results in papers which they submit to journals / conferences / workshops.

- If the targeted journal / conference / workshop want to do peer review, their editors / committee is in charge of distributing the load, those people also are researchers (also close to 100% paid by public money).

- They offload the reviewing work to other researchers who hopefully are competent on the subject of the papers. Again, public money since the reviews are seen (and I think it's normal) as a normal part of the researchers' job.

- The selected papers are given to the publishers and often their copyright too.

- The publishers now put the papers online, put a paywall it front of them, and make private profits $$$$.

- On top of that, not many people do buy individual papers, most papers are rented by academic institutions for colossal amount of money (again, public money!). I'm really not kidding when I say "colossal".

Re: Publishers withdraw more than 120 gibberish papers

#37

Post by einhverfr »

ScottBurson wrote: post #25
ChuckMcM wrote: post #15

I tried to read the papers but they cost $35.95 each to download.

There are a couple of examples here: http://pdos.csail.mit.edu/scigen/#examples I found them side-splittingly funny, at least for a page or so.

"Cryptographers must usually enable the partition table."

These are actually really really funny.

Re: Publishers withdraw more than 120 gibberish papers

#38

Post by mzl »

p4bl0 wrote: post #33
mzl wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry, I was too general. I am very much aware that there are selective workshops in CS (I've been to some). I think I mostly wanted to point out some differences. My main wish was to convey that publishing venues are different, and the name of the venue is not always an indication of the type of publishing. Thanks for pointing out that I made the mistake I was trying to correct.

Actually this is what I understood from your previous post. I was trying to strengthen your point with concrete examples and thought the best way to do it was in a reply. Sorry if that was unclear!

No problem. It was one of my pet peeves when others (typically physicists) devalued the work of the computer scientists at the university I was at just because they believed that journals were the only acceptable form of publishing.

Re: Publishers withdraw more than 120 gibberish papers

#39

Post by mjn »

p4bl0 wrote: post #36
mjn wrote: post #2

If I'm dreaming, the ideal outcome of this would be that Springer and IEEE decide to actually apply some kind of scrutiny to the conferences whose proceedings they publish under their names. It's a pretty poorly kept secret that, while they publish some stuff that's top work in several fields, they also publish some total crap that is so bad it's inconceivable someone actually competent has spent even 20 minutes vett…

> If I'm dreaming, the ideal outcome of this would be that Springer and IEEE decide to actually apply some kind of scrutiny to the conferences whose proceedings they publish under their names. I'm sorry to break it to you but that won't happen. It would totally destroy the awfully good business model they have, which is one of the best engineered fraud ever. Right now the situation is: - Researchers, oh which almost…

I can see that narrative with Springer, but the IEEE is a nonprofit, the main professional society for large areas of computer & electrical engineering. It's not necessarily the best-run nonprofit, but they aren't trying to pump up a stock price or give an ROI to investors or anything. They do need some revenue to pay for their ongoing operations, but in theory they should also be very interested in ensuring that revenue-generating operations don't compromise their main mission and reputation (which is the reason to raise revenue in the first place).

I think part of it is that historically the IEEE has wanted to be relatively open to new fields of research, so if you have a few professors willing to vouch for a new conference, the IEEE is willing to sponsor it and publish the proceedings. It's quite decentralized and any of the various "societies" and "interest groups" within the IEEE can sponsor a conference without central approval... and it's also fairly easy to start a new interest group. That system depends on most active IEEE members being legitimate researchers, though, who are in good faith trying to put on real conferences. If that's true, it makes sense for the approval policy to be relatively permissive. But some people have been taking advantage of this and producing vanity conferences, so this system probably needs to be tightened. Either the IEEE needs to exercise more control over conference approval, or they need to be more diligent in kicking out people who abuse the trust of the permissive system. The ACM (the main professional society for computer scientists) is somewhat more conservative about sponsoring new conferences, though that does occasionally produce the opposite problem where it takes a lot of legwork (and sometimes politicking) to get a new one accepted.

Re: Publishers withdraw more than 120 gibberish papers

#40

Post by p4bl0 »

mjn wrote: post #39
p4bl0 wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If I'm dreaming, the ideal outcome of this would be that Springer and IEEE decide to actually apply some kind of scrutiny to the conferences whose proceedings they publish under their names. I'm sorry to break it to you but that won't happen. It would totally destroy the awfully good business model they have, which is one of the best engineered fraud ever. Right now the situation is: - Researchers, oh which almost…

I can see that narrative with Springer, but the IEEE is a nonprofit, the main professional society for large areas of computer & electrical engineering. It's not necessarily the best-run nonprofit, but they aren't trying to pump up a stock price or give an ROI to investors or anything. They do need some revenue to pay for their ongoing operations, but in theory they should also be very interested in ensuring that rev…

I sincerely hope you are right.

However, as pointed out in other comments, most researchers know what are the good and bad venues in their particular fields. This means that in reality, who is the publisher of a journal or of the proceedings of a conference matters less than the reputation of the conference or journal itself (sadly, that may be less true when it comes to recruitment in academia) which is given by the quality of the papers published in there. If I had to chose fights I guess it would be for the generalization gold open access and for the end of bibliometrics before trying to get these publishers more involved in what they publish (since we don't really need them anymore).

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