librarypunk - 116 - Hijacked and Zombie Journals

Episode Date: December 20, 2023

We’re talking about more issues in scholcomm. Join the Discord: https://discord.gg/QTr6Tn6YMk  Media mentioned Hijacked journals: https://www.science.org/content/article/leading-scholarly-database-listed-hundreds-papers-hijacked-journals Hbomberguy video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yDp3cB5fHXQ Weird MIT report on OA: https://access-to-science.pubpub.org/  Zombie journals: what’s left after editorial board leaves like Glossia/ Lingua https://www.openlibhums.org/news/656/ - Glossia/Lingua https://www.science.org/content/article/zombie-papers-wont-die-retracted-papers-notorious-fraudster-still-cited-years-later

Tonight we're putting all our citations in the notes because we don't want H-Bomb doing a video on us. I'm Justin, I'm a Skalkanlcom librarian. My pronouns are he and they. I'm Sadie. I work IT at a public library and my pronouns are they them. And I'm Jay. I'm a music library director and my pronouns are he-him. U-woo. Hey. Did you make a drop out of me? Yeah, I think I told you, but you must have forgotten. U-W.

Imminently dropable. That's also true. I wonder if my accent, that is also true, Ms. Robinette Biden, I wonder if my accent's going to come out during recording. I've been watching Righteous Jimstones, and so my Southern accent's been coming out. Oh, fun. So that'll be fun. My eyes are really flat.

Let's fucking go. Oh, I was hoping I could find the misbehaving drop really fast. Alas. But no. We used that drop for like a year, and I only have now watched the righteous gemstones. So now I understand what running through the, house with the pickle in the mouth is all about. It's about misbehaving.

Really, it doesn't work out of context, and I don't know why we used it. Because it's funny. Okay. First, we have Reddit. So, there is, let's see, a new content warning field. System preference can be set to any mark record.

And I don't know what this is in. It's just something someone on Reddit's talking about. It's co-ha. They clarify later that. Oh, fuck. Koha. Sorry. Yeah. I think, hold on, let me say. Latest version of Koha will have the ability to label items with a harmful content warning.

Yeah. Yeah. They say it's Koha. But they also say that the harmful content warning is actually like the harmful part is a bug. And it actually only shows as content warning like in the system preference and in like search results. So at least it's not putting that ugly label on things. There's so many problems with things. Medidate is bad, actually.

Medidate is bad, actually. So I remember in my cataloging class, shouts out to Bobby Bothman, we had a whole section on the ethics of putting this. It wasn't a content or anything at the time, but he used the example of this memoir or something that was then later revealed to be falsified or something. And so it's like, do you put a note on that? Do you put it in a different section or like creationism stuff?

Do you put a note on that? Like, where do you put it like this sort of like thing? Like catalogers putting caveats or like notes on works instead of instead of the work describing itself, which is like I know it can kind of sound like pretentious bullshit, but is one of the things I like about RDA is that you let the work sort of describe it itself, which doesn't mean that you don't use catalogers judgment when like. applying subjects or anything like that, like obviously. But I have a lot of issue with the framing of like the harmful content statements and stuff like that. I'm not against the concept of like trigger warnings or content warnings or anything like that.

But like most librarians are white people. And if white people are the ones deciding what is harmful or not to people of color, for example, which is often how these get used in a special collections in archival context, is white people saying what will be harmful to black people. It is most of the time what harmful content statements are, and they're really patronizing a lot of the time. And so, like, how are you going to know if, and with this, it's like, how are you going to know if a book contains rape in it?

Like, are you going to put a content warning on the book, Speak, which is about a young girl dealing with and living through the aftermath of being sexually assaulted, and that's what that whole fucking book's about, and is a really good book and important book to read. And I read it in high school and it's really important to me. Are you just going to be like a... The thing that got me about this and somebody else puts it in there, somebody in the comments says, you know,

there's plenty of open mark fields that you could use for this. And also isn't that what subject headings are? Like speak. Yes. Like, oh, that would be a perfectly reasonable subject heading to have for the book speak because that's the topic that it deals with. It's about sexual assault, yeah. So like what? And somebody else is just like, does Koha search like discovery layer just sucks so much that people.

Koha sucks so fucking bad. I swear to God, it doesn't do Boolean. I try to teach people how to use it and it doesn't work. And the only way you can do Boolean on Koha is doing an advanced search. It's garbage on the back end and the front end. I'm sorry if you're a person who works on Koha, but the search sucks. Good to know. I literally just grabbed the microphone and like listeners who could not see. I literally just. grabbed the microphone and was like, no. Yeah, apparently the sponsor of the change is a UK library that is a specialist library for mental health. And they were the ones that requested the change. And like, Koha's open source, so like people can make all sorts of versions of it, but it's basically commercialized now. But, and then somebody says, and then somebody says, yeah, there's plenty of open mark fields that could have been used to add this information. Is Koha's discovery layer a bit clunky when filtering search results? I'm just trying to see the motivation.

here, a specialist library or not? And I'm like, if you can't use an already existing field or an open field and your subject headings are so obscured in your search that things like speak need a content warning instead, like there's so many layers of like, how did we even get here? Also, Koha does I have a discovery layer? It's just an OPEC. There are other things that you put on top of it to make it a discovery layer. Or there's like a plug-in if you have EDS, EBSCO Discovery Service to get those results filtered in through Koha, but Koha in and of itself doesn't do discovery. You have to like get Aspen or like that's the one that Buywater advertises along with it is

Aspen Discovery. Yeah. Yeah. No, like Koha search is so clunky. I knew this one was going to just irritate the shit. I'm sorry, but it was the most interesting. thing one I found. Yeah, it's like our, to bring up querying the catalog, again, like I do, and everything I ever talked about, the onus to make a non-harmful, like frictionless, will not

upset anybody catalog. And as the onus of catalogers removes any responsibility of reference librarians to actually fucking talk to their patrons about things, or, to, I don't know, make a fucking lib guide or do programming or something, this does not need to always be the onus of catalogers and the infrastructure. This should mostly be the work of the public service people. I agree. You said earlier, like the biography that turned out to be falsified, like, I probably know which one you're talking about because I was working in public service when it happened. It was, I think it's James Frey at like a million leases. Yeah, Oprah called him out on it on her show,

but it was still a really popular book that checked out a whole lot, whether or not it was because Oprah before or after Oprah called him out, like on it. But yeah, like, as a public service person, if I saw somebody like check, like somebody who's checking that out, like, yeah, and that's, yeah, that's reference work. But the thing with public libraries is, they're offloading reference work onto non-degraded workers like I was in the name of reducing staff and streamlining public service interactions.

So I can see how that gets foisted onto catalogers. I don't necessarily think it's a good thing or agreeable, but I see the chain of thought. Yeah. And I mean, like, there's like a very rich radical history of cataloging. My boy, Sandy Berman, still growing strong, still fucking alive. Since like the 60s and earlier, like, that has been a really consistently radical part of librarianship is in cataloguing. So it makes sense that this is the kind of evolution that that would take. I'm sure there's a similar thing in reference. I just didn't. I was a little metadata

nerd in grad school and I took classes about metadata. So like, would it ever be appropriate to maybe put a warning on a book for whatever reason? Yes. I'm not going to say that issue that would never, ever be a thing ever. But like having a content warning field makes them the assumption that for every single fucking book that goes across a cataloger's desk, they have to look up, does this have rape in it? Does this have like eating disorders in it? Does this have like self-harm in it? Which things do we- Becomes a professional reference website? Yeah. Which things do we content warn about? Are you going to put a content warning on like fucking beloved or something, which would be racist of shit to do?

Like, okay. And I think somebody in here, too, and it was one of the ones that cracked me up was like, somebody who as a cataloger was like, I don't have time to even like read the covers of half the shit that comes across to my desk. I don't even look at the record fully. Yeah. I don't even look at the full record that I'm copy cataloging. I go, yep, that looks right. Boop. Like, I don't have time for that shit.

Yeah. It's like, yeah, no. This is not a sustainable change. Well, meaning not sustainable. If you feel like this is appropriate for your community and your collection and your library, put it in a local notes field. That's what they're fucking for. Yeah, that was the thing is it was a 05x field they were recommending. Or a 590 field, sorry.

Yeah. Which is not a local field. 59, whatever would be a local, yes. Would it? Yeah. Anything that's a 90 is local. Okay. Any, yeah, 090, 190, you know, anything that's a 9, anything that's a 90 is local, I'm pretty sure.

Like, a 690 is where you put like local subject headings. Pretty sure. Or like a C mark in line or something. Yeah. But yeah, 90s are usually where the local stuff is. And the 500s are notes field. So like the 590 is like a local news. Anyway, that was Reddit.

I'm sorry, I get so mad. Well, let's talk about a completely unrelated topic, which is decided. what's good for people to read. That's right. I'm talking about journals again. It's in the title episode. By the way, we are not a professional podcast. Stop, like, just stop treating us like one.

We're just here to complain about our jobs, man. I like talk up. Go ahead. We're here so the librarians can say fuck is really what it is. Let the library say fuck. I am like too much of a weird pervert on air for y'all to be like citing us and professional things, okay? Yeah, cut it out.

Yeah. Or else, do you want me to stop being a weird pervert on air? No, then stop citing us in things. Thank you. Yeah. Just stop listening. We just want the weirdos to end up in our Discord. Yeah.

They can keep listening. Beloved weirdos. Hello, my beloved weirdos. Movies and poppers. Our gay children. Shit posting. That's so good. Speaking of it, forgot.

I got to do poppers on an episode. Hell yeah, do it. Rip it. Take a deep sniff. I wish I had poppers. God damn it. You're outgaying me, Justin. Damn.

That was a deep sniff. Hell yeah. Yeah, this is where we change from a podcast into a popper baiter. Podcast. Sniff in, hold it. Oh, God. Release. Yeah.

It's just like an EDM in the background. Just that one Troy Chauvin song, I feel the rush. No, you know, we're just playing Raspi T and Loop. It's been like two weeks since, three weeks since we've recorded. We've got like too much backlogged, like life information has happened. Yeah. I've watched like 15 movies. I've read like two books.

I just know shit I didn't know before. You got to see the ye old Chipotle here in Boston. I didn't get to see the year in Boston. I think it to see the Yeo Chipotle in Boston. That's pretty good. It wasn't that exciting, but it was cool. Is that like the ye old Starbucks in Seattle, or is it like the first Chipotle? No, it's just in an old-timey, like, revolutionary war.

It's like an old brick building, like, in the like old, like, Paul Revere part of Boston. And the building, there used to be a bindery and bookstore there back in the ye old days that bound some books from made a bound in human skin. Oh. And that's where the ye old chipotle. It's the yield human skin book Chipotle. I forced Justin to go on the spooky ghost and gravestones bus tour and you drive past it on it. I was like, it's the ye old Chipotle with the skin book.

Yeah. It was very cold though, so you couldn't see out the windows very well. Yeah. The only downside. Yeah. So this comes to us from the. Skullcom shit talk discord where they have been talking about hijack journals which are very funny but then I thought let's also talk about zombie journals because I don't know if that's enough for

a full episode just to talk about hijacked journals but it turns out there's actually a lot about hijack journals because there's a lot of vectors of attack that I didn't think were possible and that'll be fun to talk about but first I have to talk about journals what are they and what do they do. So as a Skalkan person, I get asked a lot to talk about predatory publishing, which is when duplicitous brown people set up websites to trick good white scholars into paying an article processing charge to publish their shitty papers, open access, and deceive all of their colleagues, because they're all out to get you, and they're going to get tenure before you by pumping a bunch of

add articles into journals that barely anybody reads, which is true of most journals in that barely anybody reads them. But anyway, journals have been around for about 400 years. They're a traditional means of scholarly communication. Most, or a lot of that history had only editorial review and then eventually had peer review. And people have been kind of, unfortunately, that people forgot that peer review is like a human process, which means it is corruptible and that people are lazy and also petty. And very lazy and pet. Yeah.

So, and you only get like two peer reviewers per article, and no one has ever really seen anyone's peer review of anything because peer review is generally not open. And people are very, very slow to adapt to open peer review. So basically, the authority of journals came from the authority of the institution and organization that backed them, rather than the fiction that it came from the authority of peer reviewers, because editorial review is actually more important than peer review, because editors decide what goes to peer review.

And people just accept that an article is good because it's in a journal that's good, because it's from a publisher that's good or an institution that's good. And you can see how this is circular logic, because it's just a bunch of assumptions about authority. At no point does anyone actually have to read the article and decide if it's good. That's not important in science. We don't read things. We measure them by proxies of the thing. Like how much it gets cited and how high the citation score of the journal is and how much money they got in grants to do the research. And we're not going to read the fucking article and think for ourselves because that's not science.

Are we not paying attention to the framework, TM? Yeah. Where authority is constructed and contextual. journals exist so that academics don't have to think for themselves. So now that we know what the function of a journal is, we can see how journals break. So I wanted to talk about like, let's see, actually did I miss something in my introduction? Diversification of outlets has been cited as a reason for misinformation clouding the scholarly information system. But really, it's just a change in how we evaluate information, which is that we don't let institutions do it for us on our authority.

So people making their own journals or making open access journals. or making journals and countries that we don't respect, which is mainly the big one, or in languages that we don't care to learn or read. There was actually, I don't know why I put this note here, because now I don't remember what this note is about. But if you haven't seen the H. Bomber guy video, that's about the YouTuber James Somerton, who is like a giant plagiarist and plagiarized like every word he ever said, which was very impressive, honestly, to not have like a single unique thought.

someone was writing a book that cited James Somerton in it, and then obviously the book was about to come out, and then this video was coming out, and the person had to rush to their editor and redo the citations and check things to make sure one, the right person is cited, but also that the information is correct because, you know, plagiarists tend to plagiarize badly. And I don't know why I brought that up, but if you can make the link in your head about why that has to do with diversification of outlets. Well, well, because, like, citing YouTube videos is, like, seen as more acceptable now, but there's not the quote, rigor of peer review in things like YouTube videos and blogs and tweets and stuff. But people are citing things like podcasts and YouTube videos and whatnot. And so that's, like, clouding everything because those aren't, quote, peer reviewed. I'm doing a bunch of air quotes around that because peer review, as we know, is a lot. Yeah, I think, I mean, that's related. but I think the reason I brought it up maybe is that I was going to make a point about how you have to also double,

like you have to be suspicious of who you're citing anyway, no matter if someone is like an authority, like people were treating James Somerton. And they said, oh, well, he does this research. And, oh, this is a good journal. But no, you still have to check because there still could be plagiarism. And as we're going to talk about, there could also be hijacked journals. So then zombie journals and all kinds of things that clouds. information to the point where you still have to just evaluate it on your own, which is not the

function of a journal. A journalist, so you don't have to actually read anything. You just believe what it tells you. So there's a piece in science about a paper. The paper's actually a lot more interesting, I think, than usually the write-up is a little more sexy, but I think the paper's actually more fun. About the hijacked journals that are indexed in Scopus, and Scopus is an Elsevier product. It's a competitor for Clarabate's Web of Science, and it's one of the ways that people evaluate journals. So if you're indexed in Web of Science or Scopus, that's generally seen as a legitimate journal

because there's a vetting process. But for hijacked journals, it has the possibility that a journal can be subjected to some kind of hijacking attack. And there were a lot more than I thought there were. So in a science article, it says, as of September, the database listed 87 hijacked journals, the database being a database of hijack journals,

Legitimate publications taken over by a scrupulous operator to make an illicit profit by charging authors fees of up $2,000 per paper. That's actually kind of low for a lot of article processing charges by quote-unquote legitimate publishers. For some of these journals, Scopus had listed hundreds of papers. So not only was the journal being listed in Scopus, but the articles were also getting into indexing by Scopus. So it's based on a study by have it open. Anna Al-Balkina, which, as of first,

September 2023, so that's not that long ago. 41 hijacked journals are still compromising the data of legitimate journals in Scopus. And then data from Scopus goes other places downstream. So that includes people's orchid profiles, the World Health Organization COVID-19

research database. And also the author, this is poorly, there's a typo in the abstract because they added a comma that makes it confusing. But it also is a problem for a lot of countries where, particularly like non-imperial core countries, really, where journals that are indexed in scopus or wopus science are, like, required as part of, you know, your promotion and tenure or getting a stipend. Like, I think Mexico does stipends if you publish in certain journals, which comes from, like, the central government, like the National Science Center or whatever. And so if these are compromised and that compromise is, like, major science directives and reward programs in many countries,

around the world, depending on how dependent they are on these proprietary products. Scopus is often the most compromised Web of Science and Medline are as well. There are one form of attack is cloning a journal and making it into the index of the first documented hijacking of a journal through any method was in 2011. So typically, I think the most typical form of attack is to make a cloned version of a journal that has certain characteristics. So if it's a print-only journal, easy. You just make a website and say that you're the website version of that print-only journal. Or it's a niche journal that doesn't maybe have good SEO. So it might not be a well-made website, but it still got, you know,

it still did all the hard work that you need to do to get indexed because there is a vetting process. Because a certain type of journal is a target, this leads to multiple hijackings of similar types of journals that fit the profiles. So the journal Sabled report has at least five different clones from like five different actors, which is pretty cool. That's one, that's the most common vector of attack. There is another one, which actually I mentioned and Johnny wanted to know information about this. And I said, well, listen to the podcast. So here it is, Johnny. This is the part you're asking about.

We were talking about DOIs. And I said, never put semantic information in DOIs. They tell you not to do it. So, for example, the hijacked version of the Journal of Southwest Joultong Univ. I'm not reading that because my Mandarin is bad. Registered the DOI 10.35741 dash. Okay, now after the dash, this is where you just make up whatever numbers and letters you want. So that first prefix.

Oh, yeah, slash. So that first bit is the prefix that's assigned to you by the organization that registers it. Everything after the slash you just put in. So slash, ISSN. 0258-2742. Whereas the authentic journals DOI is 10.3969 slash j. .isn. 0258 slash 2742 because you can put whatever you want after the slash as long as it is unique.

So that part is not controlled and that's why you don't put semantic information in there. Also, like your journal name changes or whatever, that's bad. So they use the same ISSN, which was in all of these DOIs, which you don't need to do. in order to trick people and create a clone journal website. There's also some good old-fashioned web tricks, web tricks, like registering the expired domain of a journal. So you just wait for the domain to expire, then you take it over. Hacking, so get some hackers shit.

Or compromising the data of the original journal on indexing databases. This one, I don't know how they do it, and Elsevier won't say how it's done. But people have basically, instead of like taking over a website or making, a clone and getting like that in there. The thing they attacked was like Scopus itself. And they changed the links in Scopus to point you to the cloned website. So say you'd make another website that's a cloned version of the journal. You attack Scopus and then you change just the website.

That is like the official website for them. And that will now change Scopus's data. And they will insist that that's the right website. So you can contact Scopus and be like, is this the right website? And they'll be like, yes, because they have no other way of verifying it. So, or at least their customer support people won't. So that was probably the most shocking thing that I learned was that was an actual attack vector. But there's also like really low rent ways of doing this.

You can create a clone website and be like, we're in Scopus. You can look us up. And then just hoping they won't notice that it's like a different URL for the website. But this is an attack on Scopus and you actually do change the URL for the journal. So that's a pretty cool attack. And I have no idea how you would do it. Because normally I could imagine a way of doing this for a lot of these like Skalkan attacks.

I have no idea how you do this. So there must be a vulnerability. I assume it's just social engineering attacks. Like you contact them and be like, hey, we changed the website. I'm Dr. So-and-so. Please do this. And then someone just did it. That's the easiest way I can think to do it because I don't know what else would be the easier.

We should try. Let's call on air. Yeah, there you go. That would make sense for why Elsevier won't say is because they don't want to be like, yeah, our people don't do their due diligence and you can just call. So if it was a technical problem, they would probably fix it and then say something about it. Yeah. Okay. So social engineering attack makes good sense. Okay.

Yeah. That's the only thing I can figure is that it's very easy to sound like an annoyed faculty member who's like, why do you, why do I have to, why do I have to do a. Form. Can you just change it for me? Just fucking change it for me. I'm so important. My grandfather was John D. Fuxmith. Okay. Look them up. I don't have to deal with this shit. There's more in the article, but I didn't want to just like end up reading the article because an H-bomb would slide through my window and fucking start karate chopping me. Just shank you out of nowhere. But those are the main like attack vectors and most of them I thought were pretty cool. And related, every librarian should go watch the H-Bomb video if you, like, teach plagiarism or citation or anything at all. It's good. Yeah.

At least watch, like, the, I don't know if you can just like break it down into first half or last half. But I don't know. Yeah, I watch the whole thing. It's long, though. Okay. This is why I always, whenever I'm asked to talk about predatory publishing, I say, I'll talk about it. But there are other problems with publishing that have nothing to do with the original term predatory publishing, which, was mostly, that low-quality journals that don't do peer review are being created because there's

still fraud options. So I'd rather talk about, like, scam journals and fraudulent journals because that's really, like, what we're talking about. Whereas a lot of the things that were picked up as predatory journals were like, you know, these scholars in Pakistan aren't doing a good job of peer review, and we don't trust them. And that causes its own problems. So it's just racist and xenophobic. A lot of it is, yeah.

Yeah. Now, like, do scams concentrate in certain geographic areas? Yeah, like, certain types of scams are localized to, like, certain cities in certain countries. Like, yeah, that'll happen. But that happens exactly as well with, like, hijacked journals. Something like, I want to say it was Kazakhstan. Oh, man, this is in the article. Uzbekistan. Okay. As of May 2021, the proportion of non-authentic content by scholars from Uzbekistan reached 41.5% of total papers indexed in Scopus in, in 2020. So almost half of all the papers in Scopus by scholars from Uzbekistan are faked or are have been submitted to hijacked journals that have been identified as hijacked and the scholars don't know. It's 8.4% in Iraq and 1.5% in India. And I don't know what I don't. I wish I would have compared that to like United States. That would have been nice to give me like a baseline, but whatever, especially if it's in the U.S. journal, like use the United States as a baseline. So I can compare. Okay. Is is 1.5% bad? I don't know. Maybe it's better than the U.S. I have no fucking clue. Yeah, because I feel like a lot of those like scam stuff, they like target grad students or like recently graduated people who might not have the savvy yet to know to not like those emails.

It's like like the like fishing attempts where it's like obvious if you know what it is, but you're not the target. Right. And also like I feel like a lot of these things like target international students or international scholars in the United States, again, who, like, might not know, like, for whatever reason, but I feel like these types of groups, like, graduate students or recent grads, no matter the nationality in the United States. And then, like, people praying on international students in general, I think. So, like, if you did the study in the United States, there'd probably be a lot,

and that would make us look bad. And we can't have that. We have to make Uzbekistan look bad. Maybe. I didn't really go into the underlying database that. that this research is based on, so I didn't like look at like, I just looked at the analysis, because I was just interested in the attack vectors for this. I didn't really want to like do a huge deep dive. Yeah, because I've got those emails before. They were like, Dr. G. And I'm like, I do not have a PhD.

So. Yeah, but I also get that just because people want to just assume. But I want to bring up more predatory publishing just in case anyone is unaware. People got worried about like the whole concern about predatory publishing kind of picked up during the rise of open access. Because it does create perverse incentives if you have a pay for publishing model. If you have an article processing charging model, then it does create a perverse incentive to publish more, which equals more money and more revenue. The problem is every major legacy partner also understands that and has pushed to have an OA option on everything.

So it is true, which means every journal is now a predatory, or at least every publisher is now a predatory publisher, because they all have based their business models on, let's crank out a shit ton of open access. because we monetized it in that way. Most open access journals do not charge a fee. Most open access articles that are published are published with a fee. So there are lots of small independent journals out there that don't charge anything, but they are overwhelmed by the big commercial players that are trying to capitalize on, well, we have to pay for it somehow, so we're going to pay for it through article processing charges. The issue was never the business model because that business model has been accepted everywhere.

MIT recently released this really long thing about journal publishing. I didn't read it because it was weird. I didn't read the whole thing. But they said some really weird shit about open access models in SciElo, which is the Latin American database for basically a collaborative publishing in South and Central America. And I'll just, I'll just read this. Diamond OA, that's open access without a charge, has worked on a larger scale in some regions, including South and Central America, where national funders have built cooperative models such as Sailo. These large-scale multi-million dollar models have promised, but may be easier to build in areas

that do not have established publishing infrastructure and expectations already in place. They're scrappy. One question about this model, you know how hard those Mexicans work. One question about this model concerns innovation. In a cooperative model with no competing journal publishers, there may be less incentive to invest in improvements. You know all that investment that happens in Scholarly Communication where you start a company and then Elsevier buys you? All those new tools that are created every day and bought. Many of the new tools valued by research funders and researchers, example, persistent identifiers.

Okay, one, those are, you know, I'm going to keep interjecting, but those are like worldwide. They're made by like two mentors. Okay, you don't need more. And there are other ways to do persistent identifiers. You could recreate DOIs if you need to. And paper mill and image manipulation detection tools, which data harvesting. Do they work? Have been instigated by large publishers.

If competition is removed or reduced, how will that impact the drive towards ongoing improvements in publishing infrastructure and service to the research ecosystem and how will those technological advances be funded? So as we know, this is all very capitalist. As we know, journals don't rely on people doing labor and validating things. You need little tools that do it for you because we just discuss the whole history of journals. And at every single point, I pointed out how it was really important to have technological tools to look for image manipulation. That's like central. They had that in the 1600s, you know.

It's really important. How will we grift funders into building stupid tools that, like, no one will use? Who will make the next Mendley, I hear you ask. Where would we be without a Mendley knockoff? Go use and learn how to use Zotero. It's pretty cool. Ask me. I'm pretty good at it. Yeah.

So now we're going to go into Skalkan necromancy. We should have asked Horror Vanguard on for this part. For zombie journals. Zombie journals. So zombie journals are an interesting phenomenon that I actually was what I thought I was going to do this whole episode about. But then I saw that article about the hijack journals. I'm like, oh, that's way more cool. But zombie journals are cool, too.

So a zombie journal is a journal that has been delegitimized, but because it's owned by a legitimate publisher, it's just left to be there and be legitimized. So if you have a journal, let's say a lingua. So there's an Elsevier journal called Lingua. It's not a joke. I'm not going to say Lingua my balls. It's called, yeah, don't fucking make that face at me. So Lingua is an Elsevier own journal.

and they got into a fight with their editorial board and the editorial board all left and created a new journal called Glossa and encouraged all of the scholars who submitted to Lingua to move with them. And because journals are ultimately a community of people, not a product, you would think this means that legitimacy of the journal also goes. But no, Lingua is still, you know, index and scopus or whatever. It's still owned by a legitimate publisher. So they just hire new people who don't know any better or who do and just wanted to say that they're on lingua and hope no one else knows any better.

So they went and kept the journal going and what's left behind is called zombie lingua. This has also happened. I brought this up in the Scalcom Discord and someone was like, oh, this also happened to the journal of academic librarianship, which is also an Elsevier journal. So I've got a little quote. Some may have forgotten and some newer to the profession may not know that Elsevier bought, Pergamam Press in 1999, you know, doing that innovation. They innovated Pergamon Press in 1999, something that people in Latin America could not do, causing the Journal of Academic Librarianship to become an Elsevier journal. I know the feeling. You work with something,

it gets bought by Elsevier, and now you have to work with Elsevier, and that sucks. A lot of people left Beep Press for this reason. Many editorial board members resigned and formed a new journal, the first issue of Portal, Libraries, and the Academy. It appeared in 2001 as a direct result of a Boycott Against Journal of Academic Librarianship. This is coming from a article, which would be in the... Portal is great, by the way. I have never used it. Yeah, I've cited it a lot.

I've read a lot of things out of portal. I must have. I assume. But I had no memory of, like, the name Portal as a journal. It's not particularly memorable. I think a Portal, I think of a video game. Yeah. No, I've used Portal a lot.

They published some really good shit. So this is an article by an editorial. by Elizabeth Blakely in the Journal of Academic Librarianship in 2016, long after it's a zombie journal. Her position was the boycott against the Journal of Academic Librarianship wasn't complete, and it didn't discredit Journal of Academic Librarianship because there was still lots of room for more journals for academic librarianship to be created. So the creation of portal did not crowd out the market for the Journal of Academic Librarianship, and that's why it has continued to go for all of these years.

And also, they mentioned the College and Research Libraries Journal, which was created after a journal of academic librarianship, and also didn't seem to impact the ongoing success of the journal of academic librarianship. So basically, these journals can be successful in their afterlives, even though the community moves away, a new community may move in. But they're sort of moving in into a husk in a way like a fungus does, or like one of those little funguses that eats an ant and then drives the ant around. So you're the fungus now, which is good.

Join the rot. Join the decay. So there's actually a whole much more to say about zombie journals. Other than I want you to keep in mind that journals are communities, much like podcasts. But unfortunately, there are also commodities. Citi has given me an X-C-CD. Standards proliferate. Suggestin their situation, there are 14 competing standards, 14 ridiculous,

This would be one universal standard that covers everyone's use cases. Solution, a situation, there are 15 competing standards. I love that one. There's an XKCD for everything. So, yeah, until there's too many journals to be the top dogs, I guess is the argument. Then there will just be other communities of people making journals, which I kind of agree with. I think you should just blip journals and make new ones. And if the old one continues, like, fine, whatever.

But now you've got, like, one that's hopefully run better as a competitor. and even if it's not a commercial competitor. And since I was on this track anyway of, like, zombie journals, I also wanted to bring up zombie papers, which is an interesting phenomenon about journal reliability. Because a lot of the problems when people talk about predatory publishers is they talk about like the downstream effects. People will cite things they didn't know were written by brown people.

And then they won't know that they're good and shit. And it'll poison the well. And this is zombie papers is a phenomenon where an article gets retracted, but people continue to cite it. Like the fucking autism and vaccines paper. Or the paper about sudden rapid onset gender dysphoria,

which has also been retracted, but people still... Yeah. They still use it. They still cite it. There's nothing in the rulebook that says you can't cite a retracted paper because you can cite things negatively, obviously. But this is... There's a great Zotero plugin that will scan

all of the things in your Zotero library and let you know if something has been retracted. Yeah, I think it uses the Retraction Watch database. I think so, yeah. You should also read Retraction Watch just to get an idea of how fucked things are on a regular basis so that you don't understand that this stuff is not outliers. Like, you know, it's a human system. It's got problems, you know.

Anyway, there's nothing that says you can't cite a plagiarized work, but the concern is, well, what about articles that cited the retracted paper before it was retracted? And now you've got the specter of, like, poisoned information. stream, which is not really, I feel like it's not a huge problem because, again, this problem could be solved in the same sort of like James Somerton way of like diving into what the references were and see if the information was correct. And I guess that was why I included this and also wanted to bring up the James Somerton thing. But yeah, I mean, you could have tools that would automatically say like this has a downstream citation. This paper is downstream of a citation that was retracted,

but there's so many retractions that would flag like every paper, and then everyone would get really mad. Because, like, why does my paper have a flag on it? Or, like, would an author changing their name on an article cause it to be retracted and reissued, like, within a trans person, like, changing their dead name one article, cause an article to be retracted, for example? I don't think so.

Okay. Because these citation links are tracked by, like, scopus and web of science. So those are all, like, persistent identifiers, and they also have like database identifiers. So you can you can always like on the side of Web of Science, you can always be like articles that cited this paper or cited in this paper. And you can go in either direction. I know that, but I mean like if I wanted to change my dead name on the two articles that I published,

like would that be read as like a retraction because it's something that then gets like edited in the thing? And like all of the citations of the people who cite me, those would now all be incorrect citations, right? Right, but the kind of flagging they're talking about is like a specific, this has been retracted field, not a this has been edited field. Okay. It would be a marker that specifically says this was retracted by the journal it was published in and is like illegitimate. Whereas if you were to change your name and like the journal, then the journal might contact or might automatically update its information through like cross-ref and cross-ref data. would go to Web of Science and Web of Science would just change your name. But I think the idea is you would put a flag somewhere in Web of Science or in somewhere.

And then that data would proliferate throughout the system, upwards and downwards. So no, I don't think just editing something would be in the shoe. Okay. Yeah, there's also AI attempts to deduce positive and negative citations, which I find very funny, because they're like, well, we don't want to count a negative citation. Like, everyone's talking shit about you, so everyone cites your paper. And then you're like, look, I have a great H index, which you do. It's how it's calculated.

That's why H indexes are fucking stupid and unreliable. All these things are unreliable. They're all like human systems. And so I think eventually what will happen is Elsevier will create a little tool that'll be like, here is your adjusted index because you have bad citations. People don't count it. And that way you're a super good boy because no one shit talked to you when they cited your paper. And you get a good boy award from Elsevier. And then you put that in your promotion and says,

is very good boy. Isn't half the fun of academics just shit-talking other academics? So like, yes. Okay. That's what this whole bag is. I just making sure I understand. That's all we do. Yeah.

Scholarly communication is just a bunch of bitchy gossipy queens, shit-talking each other. And that's what academia is, back and forth. I'm going to put that on a plaque in my office. Yeah. bitchy queen librarian no just that quote it'll just like say jake 2023 why did i say i know how you i know how your name is pronounced why did i do that yeah have i said my last name on the podcast before no do i have to bleep it maybe i mean people know who the fuck i am because i'm you said doctor

oh it's right i fucking did shit you know what i'll just it's the same episode so i could just beep it twice yeah i mean people know who the fuck i am because i'm bad at opsec but But, you know, whatever. All right. Any closing thoughts? Say, do you go first? Oh, I was just going to, yeah. God, what is it?

Tell me the name of God, you fungal piece of shit. Bring it back. You cannot kill me in any way that matters. Zombie journals. Yeah. My closing thoughts is that commodification and capitalism ruins everything good. And I'm really glad that I'm not a faculty member anymore because I haven't had to fucking worry about publishing anything in a year and a half and I have never felt freer. Save yourselves

while you can. You have nothing to lose but your chains. Thank you for coming to my TED talk about how being a faculty member sucks. I'm never fucking going back. Good night.