Why bogus science journals are thriving in the era of COVID-19

The world now has roughly 10,000 sources of misinformation dressed up to look respectable. Though they superficially appear to have scientific authority, for years they’ve made money publishing false and even absurd findings – misleading to the uninformed, but not necessarily dangerous.

Then COVID-19 came along.

Fake cures, untrue claims about alleged risks of vaccination, and more have been helped to proliferate, and been given a thin veneer of plausibility, by the rise of the “predatory journal.”

Take, for instance, one website that published claims that hydroxychloroquine is effective against COVID-19. It was exposed when it also published a satirical study submitted by the “Institute of Quick and Dirty Science,” claiming hydroxychloroquine could prevent scooter accidents in Marseille. Yet the original paper remains online.

Such publications are called predators because they exploit junior academics who need to publish their work to boost their careers, but have not done any. Instead, they pay publishers hundreds or thousands of dollars to publish fictitious or low-quality studies so that they can say, “Look, dean, a journal published my work!”

Proper COVID-19 research circulates through science journals, sober and expensive publications where scientists announce their findings, using lots of big words; they’re not likely to attract the casual reader. However, upstarts have learned they can make faster, easier money by publishing fraudulent science instead of the real thing.

Roger Pierson, who teaches medicine at the University of Saskatchewan, has been warning his colleagues about predatory publishers for years.

Because they copy the format of real journals, “It looks like it’s real stuff. But the real scientific process is based on peer review ”- having experts in a field review new findings before publication – and this does not happen with the predators, he said.

For these publishers, their income is all profit. The “journal” is just a website that posts whatever people submit, with no overhead because there’s no editing, reviewing or printing. There’s no law to stop them.

“It’s a wild west. I could open Roger’s Really Great Science Journal ”and publish junk,“ and (it looks like) it’s credible. Hence we have (papers about) ancient aliens and other sorts of things. ”

Into this murky world came the novel coronavirus.

A study in the Canadian Journal of Public Health (a real journal) found that known predatory journals published 367 articles on COVID-19 in five months of 2020. And that’s only from 114 such journals the study examined; there are thousands around the world.

That study is called “Money down the drain: predatory publishing in the COVID-19 era.” It warns of the “spread of misinformation with potentially harmful or negligent consequences (eg, some articles claimed efficacy of homeopathy).” It also calls the practice “deeply perverse.”

“Ethics has been a sidebar for professions for far too long. It’s sad but that’s the way of the world. You’ve got to be critical, ”Pierson said.

Kent Anderson, the former publisher of Science magazine, sees a parallel threat in “preprint” servers, where researchers can post findings in their early stages. He describes a recent case where a group posted about an apparent COVID-19 vaccination problem that turned out not to be real after more data came in. But “due to haste and a platform that enables sloppy publishing practices in a volatile information environment, the damage has been done,” he writes: Social media spread the misleading early report everywhere.

“The immediate, global amplification of these preprints into misinformation echo chambers will reverberate for years – that can not be undone.” The latest case “will remain accessible… for anti-vaxxers and misinformation purveyors to promote again and again, because bad preprints never die.”