(30 August 2016) The rising number of predatory journals has become a major blight on academic publishing, deceiving authors, their institutions, and the wider scientific community.
And now the federal government is fighting back, writes Paul Basken in The Chronicle of Higher Education.
The U.S. Federal Trade Commission, in its first such foray into academic publishing, filed a civil complaint this month in federal court in Nevada against one of the largest publishers of online science journals, OMICS Group Inc.
The federal law-enforcement agency charged OMICS, two affiliated companies, and their president, Srinubabu Gedela, with running an operation that routinely tricked researchers into paying fees ranging from hundreds to thousands of dollars for publication in its journals.
The FTC made other complaints against OMICS, including publicly listing as editors of its journals numerous academic researchers who either never had agreed to an affiliation or had asked to have their names removed.
Read the story in full here.
