“Wayne Dawson says:
April 20, 2013 at 7:55 AM
You have a point. This is one of the directions that this can go. However, I think “academic integrity and academic rigour” can be judged by content. One can find twaddle in every journal under the sun. Some even believe it for a long time. Then there are Nobel-prize winning works in obscure journals (though none of them, at least so far, in predatory ones). It is, of course, reasonable to anticipate that questionable work will have a better chance of being published in a “lesser journal” (predatory or not), and maybe the pay-to-dump predatory journals makes it easier for these kinds of people to get away with it.
Benjamin Franklin wrote to an editor on one of his papers: “If my hypothesis is not the truth, it is at least naked; for I have not with some of our learned moderns disguis’d my nonsense in Greek, cloth’d it in algebra or adorned it with fluxions.”
What we see now has happened many times before in the past. There is nothing new under the sun. At the end of the day, it is important to judge a work by what it is, not by the journal it appears in or the institution or country it comes from or whatever other trivializing criteria we prefer.”
Dear Wayne Dawson,
I found myself spending several hours on this website and among all ideas I came across, this stamtent of yours “At the end of the day, it is important to judge a work by what it is, not by the journal it appears in or the institution or country it comes from or whatever other trivializing criteria we prefer” did make me feel a sense of balanced judgement. I am really glad for the comment as it really made my day. I have read huge amount of the papers listed as predatory publishers and I did find cool sciences being done and also not properly done stuff. We need not to forget the history behind the invention Mac computers and Microsoft.
Many thanks