The Problem is the Business Model

Houston, we have a problem

The National Library of Medicine has stopped indexing articles from Scientific Reports after excessive fraud in its articles.

Call me a pinko, but the problem here is as a result of the aggressively for=-profit academic publishing industry. 

If you are being paid thousands of dollars for each article published, there is no incentive to aggressively pursue fraud, because that is lost sales.

The National Library of Medicine has stopped indexing articles from Scientific Reports in MEDLINE because the journal’s inclusion in the world’s largest biomedical library is under review, Retraction Watch has learned. 

“Following its significant growth in recent years, Scientific Reports is currently being reviewed by the US National Library of Medicine (NLM),” the journal’s chief editor Rafal Marszalek wrote in an Oct. 20 email we have seen. “We have been informed that during this period, indexing of newly published content in MEDLINE and archiving in PubMed Central (PMC) are paused, and will not appear in PubMed.”

Marszalek did not say why NLM is reviewing Scientific Reports, which is the largest journal in PubMed in terms of articles indexed. But according to MEDLINE’s policies page, NLM re-evaluates journals if “there are significant changes to a journal,” noting the library monitors journals “for changes in publication practices, such as annual publication volume or primary article content types.”

………

The anomaly was discovered by Tom Lahey, a self-described “independent, self-funded researcher with an interest in public health and research.” Lahey maintains a set of tools based on PubMed data, including a page showing journals ranked by total articles in PubMed. Scientific Reports has had the most articles indexed in PubMed each year since 2019, by Lahey’s count. He is familiar with the typical delays in data processing, but when he noticed lower-than-usual numbers for Scientific Reports for two months in a row, he opened a support ticket with NLM to inquire why. The PubMed team suggested he contact the publisher, which he did. Marszalek replied to him on October 20 revealing NLM was reviewing the journal.  

The insertion of the for-profit operators into academic publishing has been an unmitigated disaster.  (more details in the video)