Faking credibility

The growth of predatory journals is worrying

Over the past two years, the government has focused on the deep-rooted weaknesses in the regulatory regime for higher education. Its creative attempts to develop an environment of greater autonomy for universities, technical and management education institutes, outside the purview of the stultified and discredited regulatory authorities, are all part of the search for academic excellence, principally in terms of achieving higher placement on influential global rankings of academia.

A pursuit of metrics does not address, however, the fundamental weaknesses embedded in India’s higher academics ecosystem, as exemplified in the predatory journal scandal that hit the headlines recently. In May, the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) filed a case in the District Court of Nevada against a Hyderabad-based outfit called OMICS for making false claims for journals it publishes. OMICS is neither a new offender nor the only one. An American academic had raised this charge as far back as 2013 and the FTC had charged OMICS in September last year.

An investigative report in The Indian Express has established that India — specifically Hyderabad — has become the hotspot of the predatory journal industry with over 300 such bucket-shop outfits. This is an easy money-spinner by all accounts: They charge between $30 and $1,800 to “publish” a “research paper” in a so-called international journal complete with editors, peer reviews and so on.

The snag, as the FTC discovered, was that these journals are owned by these fraudulent self-publishing outfits and the papers — mostly written by Indian academics, it turns out — had not gone through even the minimum of checks. The absence of the basic editorial standards means three things: First, the veracity of these papers is unconfirmed, second, the quality and rigour of the research are unverified and dubious, and, third and most serious of all, the level of plagiarism is shockingly high. Academics have frequently discovered their researches reproduced verbatim in someone else’s paper without any attribution, though some writers have had the chutzpah to tag on the name of the original writer (without permission, of course) in a joint by-line.

What’s driving this booming business in academic chicanery? The principal factor appears to be a performance indicator — the number of papers an academic published — instituted by the University Grants Commission for promotion. This metric and the UGC’s failure to create the kind of environment that fosters high-quality research have driven Indian academics to cut corners for advancement. The knock-on effects on the quality of higher academics do not require a peer-reviewed paper to understand.

The truth is that higher education in India is caught between poorly designed regulation, inadequate funding and governments whose approach ranges from benign neglect to disturbing attempts to shape arts and science curricula to ideological agendas.

The lesson from the countries with the most reputed institutes of higher learning — the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany and, increasingly, Singapore — is the criticality of political forbearance in academia and the light touch regulation that enables private funding to drive and sustain quality research and development. Indeed, institutions of higher education remain the bedrock of the US’ superpower status even today. In both arts and sciences, such a regime may not necessarily lead to outcomes compatible with the outlook of a ruling dispensation, but politicians in a democracy must surely create the space for a broad tent of opinion.