When we last visited the lively, ever-evolving world of shady scientific publishing, we saw publication brokers offering journal editors kickbacks to push their papers into print, and here’s plenty more about it in a new article here at Science. I particularly enjoy the parts where some of these sleazeballs wake up to the fact that they are not talking to customers, but rather to a reporter, and suddenly their entire demeanour changes.
Those customers are both on the author side and the editorial side. You too can be a co-author if you just pony up, and if you’re an editor, well, you can earn extra cash by slotting these papers into the journal. An especially good route to that has been the “Special Issue” racket, where a group of themed papers are rounded up by a guest editor. People have caught on over the years that being one of these guest editors, especially in an open-access journal where money has to change hands, is a quick way to make spending money. And the paper mills have meshed right into the process – it’s like Philip Larkin’s poem where he imagines his money admonishing him: “I am all you never had of goods and sex. You could get them still by writing a few cheques” These folks are willing to write them, and everyone walks away satisfied, right?