The academic world and its detractors are all a-tizzy about this recent news reported here:
Springer, a major science and medical publisher, recently announced the retraction of 64 articles from 10 of its journals. The articles were retracted after editors found the authors had faked the peer-review process using phony e-mail addresses.
The article goes on to say that science has been truly sullied by this event, and anti-science voices are claiming that this is the end of the peer reviewed system, proving it is corrupt. The original Springer statement is here.
Personally, I think that anyone who circumvents the process like this should be tossed out of academia. Academics toss each other out of their respective fields for much much less, and often seem to enjoy doing it. Cheating like this (faking peer review as well as making up data) is the sort of thing that needs to end a career, and a publishing company that allows this to happen has to examine its procedures.n This is probably worse than Pal Review, but Pal Review is probably more widespread and harder to detect because it does not use blatantly obvious fake people. (See this for more on Pal Review.)
But, there is an utter, anti-scientific and rather embarrassing lack of perspective and context here. Let us fix it.
Ten of Springer’s journals are sullied by this process. Is that most of Springer’s journals? All of then? Half of them? Well, Springer produces 2,900 journals, so it is less than a percent of the journals. I’m not sure how many papers Springer produces in a year, but about 1,400,000 peer reviewed papers are produced per year. So the total number of papers known to be affected by this nefarious behavior is a percentage that is too small to be meaningful. More papers were eaten by dogs before publication.
So there are two obvious facts here. One is that authors who faked their research or its qualities, including faking the peer reviewed process, need to be run out of town on a rail, drawn and quartered, and otherwise gone medieval on. The other is that the conversation we are going to have about this on social media and elsewhere is likely to be a useless pile of steaming bull dung if we can’t start the conversation with two feet planted firmly in reality, rather than context free scary looking numbers willfully (I assume, but maybe out of ignorance) presented scale free.
Springer’s full statement, which actually indicates that the process works rather than it does not work, is here:
Retraction of articles from Springer journals
London | Heidelberg, 18 August 2015
Springer confirms that 64 articles are being retracted from 10 Springer subscription journals, after editorial checks spotted fake email addresses, and subsequent internal investigations uncovered fabricated peer review reports. After a thorough investigation we have strong reason to believe that the peer review process on these 64 articles was compromised. We reported this to the Committee on Publishing Ethics (COPE) immediately. Attempts to manipulate peer review have affected journals across a number of publishers as detailed by COPE in their December 2014 statement. Springer has made COPE aware of the findings of its own internal investigations and has followed COPE’s recommendations, as outlined in their statement, for dealing with this issue. Springer will continue to participate and do whatever we can to support COPE’s efforts in this matter.
The peer-review process is one of the cornerstones of quality, integrity and reproducibility in research, and we take our responsibilities as its guardians seriously. We are now reviewing our editorial processes across Springer to guard against this kind of manipulation of the peer review process in future.
In all of this, our primary concern is for the research community. A research paper is the result of funding investment, institutional commitment and months of work by the authors, and publishing outputs affect careers, funding applications and institutional reputations.
We have been in contact with the corresponding authors and institutions concerned, and will continue to work with them.