Predatory publishing in India: has the system failed us?
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LETTER TO THE EDITOR - NEUROSURGERY TRAINING
Predatory publishing in India: has the system failed us? Ajay Hegde 1
&
Neehar Patil 2
Received: 6 October 2020 / Accepted: 6 November 2020 # Springer-Verlag GmbH Austria, part of Springer Nature 2020
Dear Editor, We would firstly like to congratulate Dr. Deora and his team for their article on about predatory publishing in Neurosurgery [1]. Being an early career neurosurgeon from a developing country, this has been a problem often encountered by myself and my colleagues. The article picks out a list of predatory neurosurgical journals from various blacklists making it easy for a researcher to avoid them. More importantly, it summarizes well the different open-access platforms available and steps to identify predatory publishers. Dare we say these issues are equally important for developed nations as has been demonstrated in the article. Predatory publishing was born out of a vicious cycle fueled by systemic failure. The Medical Council of India, to promote research and publications in the health sciences domain, forced faculty of all medical colleges to publish or perish. Remuneration and promotions were tied to research output by universities and medical schools. Clinicians who had never published before took shortcuts to publish. They were unaware of ethical publishing or research methodologies during formative training. This led to a generation of clinicians not versed with ‘how’ to publish ethically but ‘need’ to do so desperately. In 2015, the Medical Council of India published guidelines for academic promotions which was received with widespread criticism [2, 3]. It recognized Index Copernicus, a sham index, which allowed predatory journals to flourish. They did not include e-journals/online-only journals which were the new upcoming way of publishing [2]. While the main objective was to prevent predatory publishing, researchers lost the opportunity to publish in several reputed online journals and This article is part of the Topical Collection on Neurosurgery Training * Ajay Hegde [email protected] 1
Institute of Neurological Sciences, NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde, Glasgow, United Kingdom
2
M S Ramaiah Medical College, Bangalore, India
predatory journals very quickly released print versions with an International Standard Serial Number (ISSN). These guidelines were revised in early 2020, which accepted journals indexed in Medline, PubMed Central, Citation index, Sciences Citation index, Expanded Embase, Scopus and Directory of Open Access Journals (DoAJ) [4]. While this list is inclusive, it leaves a degree of uncertainty, where publication in any journal with a citation index is accepted. Unfortunately, this includes Google Scholar, which indexes most of these predatory journals, as it is simply a search engine for scientific literature that indexes the full text or metadata [5]. This has been used by some predatory publishers, who claim to be recognized by the MCI under the 2020 guidelines using misleading impact factors [6]. A useful list of fake
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