GRADUATE

ACADEMY

2:50 p.m. | Online via ZOOM

Talks and Panel Diskussion with

• Dr. Jasmin Schmitz, ZB MED - Informationszentrum Lebenswissenschaft

• Anja Matthes, University library of the OVGU

• Prof. Christian Apfelbacher, Senate representative for dealing with scientific misconduct

• Prof. Kurt Friese, Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research-UFZ

(Simultaneous Translation: German and English)

In February 2021, a NATURE news article headline read "Hundreds of ‘predatory’ journals indexed on leading scholarly database". Acording to the article the academic database called Scopus contained papers from more than 300 journals tagged as potentially ‘predatory’, which means that they have questionable publishing practices. All in all, these journals have published within a three year period more than 160,000 articles!

Why is this a real problem?
Predatory journals accept articles for publication, of course, along with authors’ fees, without(!) performing the usual scientific quality checks.

Who are the victims?
Naive readers and even scientists may get flawed or even totally wrong information. It may even lead the scientific discourse in a totally wrong direction. In addition, good research submitted to such predatory journals may be overlooked.

And it doesn't stop there. Predatory conferences are a global problem, too. Those conference organizors want your money! In the best case you'll spend some nice days in a beach resort without scientific talks and discussions. In the worst case your money will be gone.

Recommended Reading: The fight against fake-paper factories that churn out sham science (nature.com)

Schedule