The Government-University-Industry Research Roundtable (GUIRR) will host a webinar to discuss the growing menace of predatory academic journals and conferences. These practices are pervading the research enterprise: they are driven entirely by profit and involve some form of deception, such as the false promise of rigorous peer review – a hallmark of academic research. What is more, their tactics are becoming increasingly sophisticated. This means that poor science can find its way into the knowledge base and good science can be overlooked when it appears in low credibility journals: if left unchallenged, the implications are profound. The webinar will follow a study being conducted by the InterAcademy Partnership (IAP), the global network of over 140 national academies of science, engineering and medicine, which is co-hosted by NASEM. The study has been informed by a unique survey of the global research community in which over 1,800 researchers participated. The survey gives a concerning insight into the extent and impact of these predatory practices across the world, what drives them and motivates researchers to use them, and how they can be combatted.
Speakers
- Professor Ana Maria Cetto is Research Professor and lecturer at Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM) and founding president of LATINDEX, an online information system for Ibero-American and Caribbean scholarly journals.
- Professor Diane Negra is Professor of Film Studies and Screen Culture at University College Dublin, Ireland.
Professors Ana Maria Cetto and Diane Negra – members of the international working group leading this work – will provide an overview of the study’s findings before it officially reports at the end of the year. The final report will provide targeted recommendations to key stakeholder communities who play their part in the knowledge ecosystem, including researchers, research funders, publishers, academic leaders, libraries and indexing services.
Photo by Susan Q Yin on Unsplash