“Integrity under Attack – The State of Scholarly Publishing” – unter dieser Überschrift setzt sich Douglas Arnold, Präsident der Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics, mit einigen aktuellen Problemen der Wissenschaftspublikation auseinander.
Der Artikel erscheint in SIAM News und kann hier als pdf gelesen werden.
Auslöser für den Artikel ist ein Plagiatsfall, von dem eine der SIAM-Zeitschriften betroffen war. Es ging um die Arbeit M. Sreenivas and T. Srinivas. Probabilistic Transportation Problem (PTP). International Journal of Statistics and Systems, v. 3, n. 1, pp. 83-89, 2008., die wörtlich mit (einer Teilmenge von) James Luedtke and Shabbir Ahmed. A Sample Approximation Approach for Optimization with Probabilistic Constraints. Preprint posted to Optimization Online and submitted to SIAM Journal on Optimization, 15 September 2007. Revised version published in SIAM Journal on Optimization, v. 19, n. 2, pp. 674-699, 2008. übereinstimmt. SIAM hat eine ausführliche Untersuchung zu diesem Fall durchgeführt, den Abschlußbericht kann man hier lesen. Der zentrale Absatz:
On 7 April 2009 SIAM was informed of the existence of the above plagiarism of one of its articles. After verifying that plagiarism had taken place, on 8 April 2009 SIAM wrote to the publisher of the journal, Research India Publications, notifying them of the plagiarism and consequent copyright infringement and asking for a response. SIAM has never received a response from the publisher.
(Es werden dann noch vier weitere Arbeiten derselben Autoren angegeben, die ebenfalls Plagiate sind.)
Weiter geht Arnold dann noch auf “Chaos, Solitons &Fractals” and “International Journal of Nonlinear Science and Numerical Simulation” ein, über die wir hier auf scienceblogs schon mehrmals berichtet hatten.
Let me describe another element that contributes to IJNSNS’s high impact factor. The Institute of Physics (IOP) publishes Journal of Physics: Conference Series (JPCS). Conference organizers pay to have proceedings of their conferences published in JPCS, and, in the words of IOP, “JPCS asks Conference Organisers to handle the peer review of all papers.” Neither the brochure nor the website for JPCS lists an editorial board, nor does either describe any process for judging the quality of the conferences. Nonetheless, Thomson Reuters counts citations from JPCS in calculating impact factors.
One of the 49 volumes of JPCS in 2008 was the proceedings of a conference organized by IJNSNS editor-in-chief He at his home campus, Shanghai Donghua University. This one volume contained 221papers, with 366 references to papers in IJNSNS and 353 references to He. To give you an idea of the effect of this, had IJNSNS not received a single citation in 2008 beyond the ones in this conference proceedings, it would still have been assigned a larger impact factor than any SIAM journal except for SIAM Review.
Und wirklich lustig ist dann sein letztes Beispiel:
Cornell graduate student Philip Davis and a friend used a computer
program, SCIgen, to generate a random document; the grammar and vocabulary were those of a computer science research paper, but the document was completely free of meaningful content. (The paper opens, “Compact symmetries and compilers have garnered tremendous interest from both futurists and biologists in the last several years. The flaw of this type of solution, however, is that DHTs can be made empathic, large-scale, and extensible.” Four pages later, it concludes, “We expect to see many futurists move to studying TriflingThamyn in the very near future.” Indeed!)
The paper was submitted to The Open Information Science Journal (TOISCIJ), published by Bentham Science, a publisher of more than 200 open-access scientific journals (many of which, according to the publisher’s website, have high impact factors).
Although the paper was submitted under pseudonyms and with the give-away affiliation Center for Research in Applied Phrenology, or CRAP, Davis was notified four months later that the “submitted article has been accepted for publication after peer-reviewing process in TOISCIJ.” Following the open-access model, the publisher told the authors that the paper would be published as soon as they sent a check for $800. (They declined to do so.)
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