You Know These Studies are Good Since They’ve Been Reviewed…by a Dog

Author: Robby Berman / Source: Big Think

The Global Journal of Addiction and Rehabilitation Medicine sounds like a solid, peer-reviewed academic publication. It’s not. It’s one of many “predatory” journals, alongside the Journal of Finance and Economics — as opposed to the legitimate and almost identically named Journal of Economics and Finance — and the GSTF Journal of Engineering Technology, a nefarious knockoff of the respected Journal of Engineering Technology published by the American Society for Engineering Education.

What distinguishes the Global Journal of Addiction and Rehabilitation Medicine, however, is one of its editors, Dr. Olivia Doll. She’s a dog. A Staffordshire terrier from Perth, Australia. Her owner, Mike Daube submitted her “credentials” to the journal, about which Daube had doubts, and they, well, bit, appointing her to their editorial board. Six other journals did the same.

Daub was conducting an experiment to see if the journals were the fraudulent operations he suspect they were, ones that scarcely even looked at — much less peer-reviewed — research they were happy to publish for a fee. You’d think the “Dr.” Doll’s CV might’ve tipped them off, had they even bothered to look it over. Her research interests included ”the benefits of abdominal massage for medium-sized canines.“ She was described as a senior lecturer at Subiaco College of Veterinary Science — which doesn’t exist — having formerly been an “associate” of the Shenton Park Institute for Canine Refuge Studies, a dog shelter that does.

Predatory journals are a skeevy industry of entities posing as legitimate publishers of academic research, and a very good reason to verify the source of any new breakthrough you’ve read about.

They’ve been around just about as long as there’s been an open-access movement in scholarly journals.

Prior to open-access, articles accepted for publication by journals were available only to the journals’ subscribers, typically libraries at universities. In these days of education cuts, that includes fewer and fewer institutions, and results in a wealth of research other scholars can’t access. To remedy this, legit journals now offer an open-access option by which a scholar whose work is selected for publication and passes through peer review can pay a fee to make it freely available online for other scholars. The fees run upward of about $1,000, and many academics therefore can’t…

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