Fake journal publications: Silent fraud in university systems costing billions to taxpayers

Majority of the State universities in Sri Lanka haven’t taken effective steps to stop this fraud

In 2013 former leader of Pakistan, Imran Khan, fought against the corruption in the country with a clear understating of the nature and mechanisms of corruption as evidenced by his statement given in a youth conference in Oxford University, before becoming the Prime Minister of Pakistan. He described two types of corruption in countries like ours. Firstly, a small group of powerful people in the higher strata of the society make systems corrupt to make money. Secondly, the people get corrupted through a corrupted system. 

If any government wants to fight and stop corruption, the foremost thing is to stop powerful people corrupting the system. Then the second will slowly disappear. The powerful people include not only the politicians, but bureaucrats, henchmen, family members and friends. Most certainly, political leaders alone cannot corrupt the system without the help of bureaucratic leaders. These bureaucrats are produced by the free education policy introduced in Sri Lanka in 1947 by universities. Hence, university academics have a great responsibility in structuring and shaping the key elements of good governance by being ‘role models’ to achieve the objectives of ‘clean Sri Lanka’.

In total contrast, a recent study indicates that around one third of university academics in Sri Lanka are cheating annually more than Rs. 1.5 billion of money allocated by the Government to pay salaries of university academics, since at least last decade. This specific fraud cannot be uncovered even by auditors in same universities as it needs special academic skills to uncover the fraud. It could be one reason that still this fraud is continuing silently. Unfortunately, most of the academics who are not involved in this fraud keep silent probably to avoid conflicts. This silent fraud has now become a massive, organised crime and getting institutionalised. 

Why is research so important to the country and world? 

Without research, we cannot find a cure for deadly diseases, or eco-friendly ways to light up our homes and offices; we wouldn’t know that our lives depend on the existence of bees. Simply, research is what propels humanity forward.

What is research? 

Research is an inquiry or investigation subjected to a series of disciplines. No research is valid or accepted, until it is published. It is essential to follow the ‘refereed’ or ‘peer review process’ before publishing research. It means that an article written by the researcher is reviewed by several experts in the same field before the article is published in a journal, to ensure that the research has been carried out following acceptable ethical and scientific procedures to reach reasonable conclusions. This process is named as ‘peer review process’ considering that the reviewers who review the articles as well as the writer of the article are experts or ‘peers’ in the same field. In this review process, a special attention is paid to check whether there is novelty in the findings of the research, as it is the ‘gate keeping’ process for new knowledge. The journals which publish manuscripts only after screening through the peer review process, are called peer reviewed journals.

Although anybody could conduct research, it is assigned as a job to academics in universities and officers in research institutes by statutes. Hence, a university lecturer cannot get confirmation in the job without proving that he or she has been properly trained for research, and afterward, they cannot get any promotion in the job without doing research. Now it should be clear why a university teacher is paid more than three times compared to that of a school- teacher sometimes with same or similar qualifications in SL. Throughout the world, proper research is encouraged through financial incentives and other rewards. Due to the same reason, procedures and guidelines to ensure that any research is done in an acceptable way, are established and followed throughout the world. The popular aphorism ‘publish or perish’ originated from this pressure for academics and researchers to author research publications.

There is a special category of ‘publications’ to publish research works and they are named as ‘journals’ or ‘research journals’ in contrast to magazines or newspapers. Until the end of the 20th century, research journals were available in hard copies only the readers have to pay and read. However, with the development of the ‘World Wide Web’, some journals shifted to online mode. Initially, online journals also maintained the same business model charging money to give access to the reader, but eventually some of the online journals shifted to another business model named as ‘Open access journals’ charging money from the author while giving free access to the reader. These predatory or fake journals pretend as peer reviewed without following the proper process.

The funny ‘manuscript’ submitted to the International Journal of Advanced Computer Technology, by Dr. Peter Vamplew in 2014, is the best example to represent the worst extreme of the above range of ‘review processes’ in predatory or fake journals. The manuscript including a scatter plot and a flow chart was originally created by David Mazières and Eddie Kohler in 2005, using a single sentence of seven words, “Get Me Off Your Fucking Mailing List” over and over again, submitted to a conference as an annoyed response to frequent emails from the organisers of the conference inviting to submit papers. Later, Dr. Peter submitted a copy of the same ‘manuscript’ to the above fake journal, and it was accepted rating as ‘excellent’ by the ‘journal’s peer review process’ and asked to pay the article processing charge (APC) of $ 150 to publish the paper. This indicates that some fake journals accept any nonsense even without opening the file or reading at least the title.

However, nowadays in many of the fake journals, the owner of the journal or member of his staff, pretending as peer reviewers, go through or glance the research manuscripts submitted and give some superficial comments which fall under one of the following categories. The paper is tabulated review carry out using the words ‘excellent’, ‘very good’, ‘satisfactory’, ‘need revision’, etc. Non-specific review report is sent. It is generally a pre-prepared one to suit any manuscript and it is sent with minor adjustments to fit with the manuscript submitted. Some predatory publishers, particularly those who publish large number of fake journals, assign a member of their journal staff having a basic knowledge in related discipline e.g. statistics, economics etc. to give a superficial and one-sided review. Meanwhile, some predatory publishers run fake versions of reputed legitimate journals using the same journal name and same ISSN number and they are called ‘hijacked journals’. Unlike the original reputed journal, the hijacked journals also do not maintain a thorough review process. 

In all the above cases in fake journals, the objectives of the deviations from the proper peer review process and the lack of good editorial service is to minimise the time gap between the first submission to the acceptance of the article, reduce the rejection rate of manuscripts targeting easy and quick money. These journals attract inexperienced authors for having a very short time gap from few days to few weeks, negotiable publication fee from 50 to 500 USD and zero rejection rate. This now is a billion-dollar industry with millions of fake journals and new journals are created every day by somebody with a basic IT knowledge with a computer and an internet connection inside a room. These fake journals are a new threat to the honesty of research publications and it has become a global epidemic with a rising trend. 

Fake publications affect negatively to authors, institutions and the country. Authors get degraded their credibility. They lose their valuable findings as well as the money spent for the relevant research and its publications. The author’s institute also get the same negative consequences. Furthermore, the funds of the institute can get cheated through fake publications particularly when financial incentives are given for research publications. The genuine researchers will get discouraged. Fake publications can affect the country also negatively, particularly when policy makers take the findings of such publications as genuine and consider those findings in policy planning. 

Consequently, such a policy could result a great loss to the country particularly when development projects are planned based on inaccurate information given in fake research papers. The impact for the health sector is unimaginable. Therefore, fake publications should be eliminated to find solutions for above local and global problems. For that, academics, researchers, and other intellectuals should learn how to distinguish fake publications.

The first person who identified and reported fake or predatory journals in the world is Jeffrey Beall, an American librarian and library scientist who drew attention to “predatory open access publishing”, coining the term by himself. He listed more than 50 features of predatory journals, highlighting some key features. Any scholarly person can use those features to identify fake or predatory journals. Using those features, Jeffrey Beall, identified and created a list of potentially predatory open-access journals and publishers. He categorised the predatory open access journals into two bundles based on the scale of the business; in cases where a single publisher manages many predatory journals without any of the credible journal, he included only the publisher’s name in his list as predatory publisher. 

On the other hand, in cases where any publisher runs only one or few predatory journals, with or without other types of publications (i.e. books, magazines, non-predatory journals) he included such predatory journal name(s) in his list under ‘Standalone journals’. If somebody is not competent enough to identify predatory publications by using their features, this Beall’s list can be used as an alternative to find whether the relevant journal is predatory or not. Jeffrey Beall had to stop updating and maintaining the list in 2017, but it is continuing by some other organisation. 

Global distribution and Indian scenario

These predatory or fake research publications have not become a serious problem for developed countries where the researchers compete each other to publish their works in high standard journals and secure their jobs. 

More than 90% of fake publications are restricted to developing countries, particularly to Asia and Africa. It has been noticed that even the small percentages of fake publications coming with addresses of developed countries are authored by Asian, African or Mediterranean names implying that probably they are temporary residents of those countries. One study (Erfanmanesh & Pourhossein, 2017) conducted on the global distribution of fake publications indicated that more than 75% of fake publications are coming from India. 

Therefore, Indian authorities paid a grave concern on this epidemic. As almost all the fake publications are coming from universities, the University Grant Commission (UGC) of India, as an apex regulatory body, responsible for maintenance of standards in institutions of higher education, took the initiative to curb the menace of fake publications and to promote research integrity and publication ethics among the Indian academia. For this purpose, in 2018, the UGC has established “Consortium for Academic and Research Ethics” (CARE) for creation and maintenance of “Reference List of Quality Journals”. CARE members include Statutory Councils, senior academies, Government bodies and the Association of Indian Universities. 

The acceptable or standard journals in the UGC-CARE list, were listed under two major categories as Group-I and Group-II. The selected Indian journals included in Group-I and it was continuously updated based on requests. The journals indexed in globally recognised four databases, (i.e. Arts & Humanities Citation Index, Science Citation Index Expanded, Social Sciences Citation Index and Scopus Source List) were included in Group.

Up to the end of 2024, all the Indian universities and research institutes used that list as a reference in checking the quality of research publications in recruiting academics and research officers as well as in their promotions, and career advancements. However, the UGC-CARE list had to face some criticism for its centralised process, delays in processing requests, and particularly for the handling of requests related to journal in Indian languages (India is a home to a total of 121 languages of which 22 are official languages). Due to those criticism, at the end of last year, the expert committee of UGC-CARE has decided to discontinue UGC-CARE listing of journals and to give the freedom to universities for choosing peer-reviewed journals by on their own, based on the criteria recommended by the UGC.

In that measure, the Indian UGC, has selected about 36 parameters (which were used by Jeffrey Beall to distinguish peer reviewed journals from predatory journals) under eight criteria and given as “Suggestive Parameters to identify Peer-Reviewed Journals”. Now, the universities in India will have their own process to select the journals for publication. It is expected that this step will not deteriorate the quality and standard of Indian universities as the university education is not free in India. In other words, now this step will restore the academic freedom and autonomy of Indian universities allowing them to maintain their standards increasing their demand. 

Sri Lankan scenario

In Sri Lanka, university academics must produce their standard research publications and earn marks for them, not only to get their promotions in the job, but also to get the research allowance (35% of the basic salary) added to the salary. However, many academics who have published in predatory journals, submit those fake publications to get promotions as well as research allowance. In most of such events, the university authorities accept such fake papers without following the necessary checking and give them the promotion and/or research allowance. It is simply negligence of their duty, because relevant circulars clearly mention that the marks can be given for research publications which have been ‘peer reviewed’ or ‘refereed’ (the two terms are synonyms); the predatory publications are not peer reviewed/refereed. 

In 2018, a small team of experts in University of Ruhuna carried out a systematic survey on the extent of papers published in fake/predatory journals by academics of State universities in Sri Lanka. The study covered each faculty of all the State universities of Sri Lanka. A summary of the results are given in Table 1. This indicates that nearly 30% of research publications by academics of the whole system of State universities in Sri Lanka, are fake. They use these fake publications to get appointments, promotions and research allowances. Approximate amount cheated by university academics with the help of fake research publications can be estimated based on ‘Sri Lanka University Statistics 2022’ as follows.

According to UGC, 7,000 academics are employed in State universities at present. Hence it is reasonable to assume at least 2,100 academics in State universities of Sri Lanka getting their salary increments with the help of fake or predatory journals. The amount cheated in such a way is calculated based on the number of academics in the university system in 2022 and given in Table 2. It revealed that the total monthly amount potentially cheated by university academics in Sri Lanka, with the help of fake journal publications is more than Rs. 157 million. Accordingly, the total annual amount cheated exceeds Rs. 1.88 billion (Table 2). This is an approximate calculation and even if it is half of the estimate it is huge. 

Therefore, the vice chancellors of all the above universities were informed in January 2019, about the outcome of the above survey giving detailed methodology of the survey and results related to all the faculties of their own university, allowing them to take necessary actions. Furthermore, the UGC was also informed the overall situation. Some universities responded positively by conducting awareness workshops for academics and discussing the matter at their senates, etc. Only 2-3 universities have taken some effective steps to stop or minimise these undue appointments, promotions and payments, irrespective of resistance from some academics. Among them, the University of Ruhuna was at the top. During the five-year period from 2019 to 2024, no academic member in Ruhuna University was able to get an appointment or promotion by producing fake research papers. Since 2019, Ruhuna University screened the research publications produced by academics, using the same guidelines now Indian UGC has recommended for their universities to follow in screening research publications before sending to evaluators.

However, majority of the State universities in Sri Lanka haven’t taken effective steps to stop this fraud. Some pass the ball to UGC, saying it is the duty of UGC to send them necessary guidelines to combat fake research publications. It is not totally correct; because the circulars issued by UGC clearly mentioned that only the ‘peer reviewed publications’ can be considered to give relevant marks in evaluations. The universities should check whether the evaluators of their promotion applications are capable of distinguishing peer reviewed publications from fake research publications in additions to evaluate the subject matter of research publications of the applicants. 

This is also affected when the appointed evaluators are friends with conflicts of interest of the applicant. 

On the other hand, the UGC is having the responsibility to give necessary guidelines to identify fake or predatory publications. In the fee education system of SL, UGC must take initiatives as a duty to maintain standards. Unfortunately, the UGC in Sri Lanka has not been able to stop the above silent fraud, irrespective to the discussion taken place for years in some second level bodies such as ‘Postgraduate standing committee’ of the UGC. Hence the CVCD (Committee of Vice Chancellors and Directors in Sri Lanka) took the matter into their hand and played a leading role in formulating a new circular preventing the use of fake journals in getting promotions by university academics. UGC was never able to release the said circular for two years. According to reliable sources, the CVCD has submitted those guidelines two years back. 

Will the new NPP Government with a former academic as Minister of Education and Prime Minister be able to stop this trend of cheating more than Rs. 1.88 billion of Treasury funds annually with the help of fake publications, and the corrupt academic community? 

(The writer is a professor 

at University of Ruhuna.)