Quasi-Predatory Journals

Frontiers and MDPI are the Walden and Capella of journal publishers. On Reddit, academics have been warning for a long time that most Frontiers and MDPI journals ignore reviewer recommendations and publish low-quality articles. All of their journals are exclusively open access, which means that you always have to pay to publish. Finland has just downgraded hundreds of their journals in their quality ranking system.

https://retractionwatch.com/2024/12/24/finland-publication-forum-will-downgrade-hundreds-of-frontiers-and-mdpi-journals/

 

At the Human Capital Lab, we've launched the Research Fellows Program. Peers in our professions (human capital management and talent development) and interested in other, related topics like distance education and leadership development can now submit papers for review--and be referees on submitted papers. These papers are expected to be brief and relevant to practitioners. We'll publish the accepted articles on our website. When participants meet the writing and refereeing criteria and earn an award level--Associate Research Fellow, Research Fellow, and Senior Research Fellow, we'll award the title and an electronic badge to accompany it. The emphasis is on inclusion, not exclusion. Authors retain full copyrights so they can re-publish or re-purpose their material. And best of all: it's free. Completely. You can check it out at our website, The Human Capital Lab.

 

That's another problem in academic publishing - exclusion. While you don't want to publish almost everything to make money, like MDPI and Frontiers, some journals are on the other extreme end. They're not rejecting the vast majority of articles because they're low-quality; they're rejecting them to improve their metrics. Similarly, Ivy Plus schools love receiving a lot of applications because this lowers their acceptance rates.

I noticed there was a problem in academic publishing when a professor told the class that it's hard to publish a study when it fails to reject the null hypothesis.

 

What an absurd (yet all-to-common) take, for two reasons.

First, accepting the null tells us that the particular question(s) are probably not worth pursuing further. Closing off these trails provides a service to future researchers. Significance isn't just about finding something new. It can also be about dropping that same new thing, when the research indicates.

Second, as it is applies to doctoral theses, the point is conducting the research and showing one's capabilities. Even the "original" and "significant" contribution criteria are overblown. Doctoral dissertations seldom rise to that level. But they do show that the researcher is ready to conduct effective projects. This can be achieved even if the null is not rejected.

I guess a third would be: if you're definition of success is rejecting the null, wouldn't that tempt the researcher to either identify research with obvious and predictable outcomes (bad) or even "doctor" (pun intended) the results? (Worse. Much worse.)

Research needs to be--as much as possible--unbiased, and the researcher needs to be able to go where the data say.