New York Times: The open access movement has been pushing for scientific publishers to move away from subscription-based systems for access to academic papers. One side effect of the movement is the rise of journals that give the appearance of being legitimate but lack peer review and use shady business practices. This can range from hiding fees from submitting authors to using names of researchers as supporters without permission. And many of the publications have titles that are very similar to well-known journals. The lack of peer review and the willingness to publish anything if the author pays the fee results in the mixing of legitimate research with pseudoscience. This gives pseudoscience the patina of legitimacy, which is damaging when nonexperts are attempting to research a topic. When researchers apply to submit a paper, they are often uninformed of the cost of publication, and then are held liable for exorbitant costs when their papers are accepted. Employers who are looking at resumes can not necessarily distinguish legitimate publications from the mimics. Some people in academia are attempting to catalog the pseudo-journals and their pseudo-conference brethren, but the growth in such entities may be too much to track or limit.

Nature: Hundreds of researchers who thought they were submitting articles to two European science journals have been cheated out of their author fees by criminals who have created counterfeit websites. Neither of the authentic journals—the Archives des Sciences, published by the Society of Physics and Natural History of Geneva, and Wulfenia, published by the Regional Museum of Carinthia in Klagenfurt, Austria—has its own website. The counterfeiters are expert at deception: They have on their websites the journals’ impact factors, postal addresses, international standard serial numbers, and even editorial board listings that include real scientists. Daniel Gamelin, a chemist and materials scientist at the University of Washington in Seattle, and Gerald Cleaver, a high-energy physicist at Baylor University in Waco, Texas, were surprised to learn that they were listed on one of the bogus websites as being on the editorial board of Archives des Sciences. Although the journals are trying to fight the scammers, efforts to shut them down have so far proved ineffective.

Nature: To facilitate publication of scientific research, a new platform called the Episciences Project is scheduled to be launched this April. The brainchild of Jean-Pierre Demailly, a mathematician at the University of Grenoble in France, the project will consist of a series of free, open-access journals, whose articles will be culled from the arXiv preprint server. Each journal will have its own editor and editorial board, which will select the content and organize peer review of the articles. The Episciences platform will be maintained by the Center for Direct Scientific Communication, based in France. The project has the seal of approval of Tim Gowers, a Fields Medal winner and mathematician at the University of Cambridge who last year initiated a boycott of the world’s largest scientific journal publisher, Elsevier, in an effort to reform research publishing.

New York Times: Responding to evidence that fraud, plagiarism, and other misconduct explain most biomedical publication retractions, a recent New York Times editorial calls the news “a revealing glimpse of the pressures driving many scientists to improper conduct.” The editors observe that many theories explain “why retractions and fraud have increased.” They report that “a benign view suggests that because journals are now published online and more accessible to a wider audience, it’s easier for experts to spot erroneous or fraudulent papers,” but “a darker view suggests that publish-or-perish pressures in the race to be first with a finding and to place it in a prestigious journal has [sic] driven scientists to make sloppy mistakes or even falsify data.” They conclude, “The solutions are not obvious, but clearly greater vigilance by reviewers and editors is needed.”