FTC Sues OMICS: Claims Open Access Academic Publisher Scams Academics

Abstract

Almost every emergency physician has gotten at least one of those very peculiar e-mail solicitations. More like hundreds of them. They come from a journal that may have a familiar, authoritative-sounding title, but which you have not quite heard of. The authors of the e-mail, however, sure seem to be eager to publish your research. Such e-mails represent the front door of the predatory publishing industry, and finally the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), after monitoring the increasing number of publishers soliciting research and hiding fees from academics, has taken action by filing a precedent-setting case against what it sees as one of the biggest predators. In late August, the FTC filed a complaint against the OMICS Group, Inc, along with 2 affiliated companies, iMedPub LLC and Conference Series LLC, and their president and director, Srinubabu Gedela, charging them with deceiving academics and researchers about the nature of its publications and hiding publication fees ranging from hundreds to thousands of dollars. OMICS, the publisher of hundreds of “purported online academic journals,” claims to follow rigorous peer-review practices and have distinguished editorial boards. But the FTC argued that in reality many articles were published without peer review and that academics represented as editors had not agreed to serve in those positions. It is the FTC’s first case against an academic journal publisher. “The defendants in this case used false promises to convince researchers to submit articles presenting work that may have taken months or years to complete, and then held that work hostage over undisclosed publication fees ranging into the thousands of dollars,” said Jessica Rich, JD, Director of the FTC’s Bureau of Consumer Protection, in a statement. “It is vital that we stop scammers who seek to take advantage of the changing landscape of academic publishing.” The complaint, filed in the US District Court for the District of Nevada, alleges that OMICS calculated its own impact scores for its journals and also told researchers that they were indexed by the National Institutes of Health’s PubMed and MEDLINE services when they are not. The FTC complaint also said the defendants deceive customers by promoting academic conferences, charging registration fees of more than $1,000, and advertising prominent researchers as participants when those academics had not agreed to participate. If the FTC is successful with its lawsuit, the court could order OMICS to return money to some of the researchers and conference participants. Shortly after the lawsuit was filed, the Hyderabad, India-based OMICS group filed a somewhat rambling, poorly edited, 6-page legal response, flatly disputing the claims as “baseless.”1OMICS International. OMICS response to FTC allegations. 2016. Available at: http://www.omicsonline.org/pdfs/OMICS-Group-Lawyer-Response-to-FTC-Allegations.pdf. Accessed October 18, 2016.Google Scholar The reply stated that “the entire scientific community knows our client to be one of the reputed publishing company in the world which holds 700+ Journals and has organized more than 3000+ conferences all over the world.” The letter continues in this aggrieved manner for a while, and its response to the FTC charge of hidden publication fees serves to illustrate the tenor of the entire reply: “We submit that this allegation is completely wrong, baseless and invalid,” the OMICS reply stated. “Our client has never demanded payment of fee from the authors for the services which they have not performed. Our client has waived off fee in most cases even after incurring certain expenditure on peer review followed by formatting services and other works processed by our client. Further our client states that it has liberally waived off fee for several authors/students/scientist on request and claiming inability to pay such amounts. It is our client endeavor that they should encourage poor and economically backward authors and have waived off fee to the tune of 60 percent to complete wavier [sic]. The Intentions of our client cannot be doubted in any way since, the efforts of our client are always been genuine and had been centered around the holistic theme of sharing the knowledge as well as dissemination of knowledge from the scientific community for the benefit of society at large.” The reply would almost be comical but for the very serious nature of predatory publishing and its effects on modern science research. The extent of the OMICS group activities has become fairly well publicized in the western scientific research community, thanks to the writings of Jeffrey Beall, MA, MSc, a librarian at Auraria Library, University of Colorado–Denver, and publisher of an annual list of “potential, possible, or probable predatory scholarly open access publishers.” A frequent critic of OMICS, Beall wrote as recently as July about the group on his Scholarly Open Access site: “Greetings for the day! I am writing this blog post as yet another reminder that the open access publisher OMICS International completely sucks. The stark language here is justified, I believe, by the abusive, exploitative, and unethical actions that OMICS International has engaged in against honest researchers.” Beall’s list and long-running criticism earned him a threat from OMICS back in 2013 to sue for $1 billion and possibly be imprisoned for up to 3 years under India's Information Technology Act. His Web site was characterized as “mindless rattle” in the letter from OMICS. (The letter proved to be just that, a threat, and no actual suit was ever filed. It also clearly did not have the effect of muzzling Beall as a critic.) Beyond the practices of OMICS, Beall’s writings have chronicled the significant increase of the predatory publishing industry. It is thriving, he said, because with open access journals the market lacks a function for eliminating the low-quality and predatory operations. “For traditional journals, libraries cancel their subscriptions when the quality decreases, when the subscription cost becomes too high, or when a journal's reputation declines,” he said. “With open access journals, no such ‘checks’ exist. And open access mandates—from universities, from funders, and from governments—worsen the problem, giving researchers no choice but to submit their work to open access journals.” The librarian welcomed the FTC action, citing increasing abuse of the system. The practice of researchers themselves financing scholarly publishing through the author fees open access journals collect, Beall said, has escalated the abuses of the predatory publishers. A study published in 2015 in BMC Medicine sought to quantify the increase of predatory publishing.2Shen C, Björk B. ‘Predatory’ open access: a longitudinal study of article volumes and market characteristics. 2015. Available at: http://bmcmedicine.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12916-015-0469-2. Accessed October 18, 2016.Google Scholar The authors, Cenyu Shen and Bo-Christer Bjork, started with Beall’s list of thousands of questionable journals, which had earned that designation through a number of criteria, such as soliciting submissions through spam e-mails or fabricating an editorial board. For their analysis, the authors selected 613 journals by using a stratified sampling method and concluded with a rough estimate that predatory journals increased their publication volumes from 53,000 articles in 2010 to an estimated 420,000 in 2014. Of the published articles, authors from Asia and Africa accounted for approximately three quarters of them and had paid an average processing charge of $178 per article. Publication usually came within 2 to 3 months of submission. Beall noted that biomedical researchers, including emergency physicians, represent especially ripe targets for predatory publishing. “They tend to have grant money that can be used to pay for article processing fees, and the predatory publishers know this,” Beall said. Researchers, he added, “should also be aware of larger, borderline publishers that skirt the line between predatory and barely acceptable.” These publishers specialize in accepting manuscripts rejected from top journals, a new market niche. Predatory publishing raises several major problems for academic researchers and science in general. First of all, there are the academics themselves, who face pressure to publish to advance their careers. This creates a situation in which researchers can be victimized by these publishers, not realizing until after their submission the nature of the publisher, and the hidden fees. Alternatively, on realizing the possibility of a predatory publisher, if a researcher chooses to immediately withdraw his or her article from the publisher, the article might be published anyway, ethically preventing the researcher from submitting it to a reputable journal. Second, the proliferation of shoddy journals and questionable research pollutes an environment of medical research in which there is already information overload for many physicians. And finally, the increase of predatory publishing in the digital age sows confusion about the value of open access publishing. In its complaint, the FTC was careful not to smear the entire field of open access journals, which have arisen with the Internet and pressured traditional journal publishers.3Federal Trade Commission. Complaint for permanent injunction and other equitable relief. 2016. Available at: https://www.ftc.gov/system/files/documents/cases/160826omicscmpt.pdf. Accessed October 18, 2016.Google Scholar In an interview with Inside Higher Ed, a staff attorney for the FTC said, “We take no sides between the traditional subscription model and the open access model. We believe both of them can be done in a fair, open, clear, and lawful way. What we have a problem with here is people who are trying to benefit from the open access model to scam people.” That it is the victim of an open access smear campaign appears to form the core of the OMICS defense against the FTC charges. “We understand that FTC working towards favoring some subscription based journals publishers who are earing Billions of dollars rom scientists literature [sic],” the reply from OMICS asserts. This colorful language aside, Beall said he believes the increase of predatory publishing has unfortunately muddied the waters of open access publishing. Part of the problem is that the scholarly publishing industry does not regulate itself well, Beall said, and it has taken little to no action to help decrease the abuses of the predatory publishers. There are even firms in the industry that do business with publishers such as OMICS, he asserted, such as Aries, which licenses EditorialManager, a type of journal management software. OMICS International is among its clients. “Increasingly, people are employed by open access publishers, both legitimate and predatory. These people have a strong voice in support of open access, so they quash criticism of open access,” Beall said. “They make it politically incorrect to question the ‘noble aims' of open access, and this suppression is exploited by the predatory and low-quality open access publishers.” Ultimately, Beall fears this and further FTC lawsuits will only chip away at the problem of predatory publishing, given its broad scope. Although the FTC has indicated it will not file thousands of complaints against potentially questionable journal publishers, it also seems unlikely to stop at a single suit. The initial action appears to be a statement that the FTC is now looking carefully at predatory publishing. Beall called on medical researchers and journal editors to play their own roles in a campaign to curb the abuses of predatory publishing, suggesting they develop a “scholarly publishing literacy” skill set. Researchers should aim for the best journals in their field, read widely, and not hesitate to publish in a subscription journal if it's the best choice, he argued. Beall also encouraged researchers to avoid citing research published in predatory journals because editors are increasingly aware of this problem and may immediately reject articles that cite predatory or low-quality journals. “If you receive a request to do an ad hoc peer review in a questionable journal, it's probably better to decline,” Beall said. “If you review the manuscript and recommend rejection, the journal will probably publish it anyway so the publisher can earn the money from the author. So the time you invested in reviewing the paper is wasted, a fool's errand. In some cases, researchers who agree to do such reviews are then quietly added to the journal's editorial board, without ever granting explicit permission.” Ultimately, if the FTC action is successful, it should lead to increased confidence in open access publishing because researchers will eventually have more faith that publishers aren’t acting under pretenses. But for now, the line demarking valid and questionable open access publishing remains an uncertain, shifting one, lining a playing field that now stretches around the world, from Hyderabad to the FTC’s main offices at 600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW, just a few blocks from the White House.