Predatory Publishers Expand to Video

Thanks to diligent reporting by Tom Spears of the Ottawa Citizen — who is interviewed in a separate subscriber-only post that will be published later today — we now know about another gambit being employed by predatory publishers.

It confirms they are a shadow following the market, working like a doppelgänger, an evil twin.

Pursuit of video articles, video abstracts, and other forms of multimedia has been an innovation among established publishers. It turns out the predators weren’t far behind.

Spears conducted a sting using a video submission that consists of nonsense talk and obviously silly elements as well as clear signals that a reporter was involved:

One journal (the American Journal of Biomedical Science & Research) had already accepted and posted the video from Spears when his report appeared late last week. Two other journals accepted the video — the Journal of Clinical and Molecular Medicine and the International Journal of Cell Science & Molecular Biology.

To give you an idea of how obvious the problems were with the submission aside from the contents of the video (which one expert called “complete garbage” when Spears checked to make sure it couldn’t be mistaken for science), Spears posed as Dr. Yosemite Sam when submitting the video.

To refresh your memory, this is Yosemite Sam:

Two journals accepted Dr. Sam onto their editorial boards, with a screenshot of one of these editorial boards below:

Spears writes that these journals sought to charge more than the few hundred dollars they would normally get for an article, with “fees [for video publication] ranging from $1,500 to $4,200.”

Spears has been working in the midst of his other reporting duties to document the emergence of predatory publishing in the Canadian publishing market. His experiences are eye-opening, and the subscriber-only interview with him is a delight to read. I hope you avail yourself.

Sorry, no video, though.

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