Will the real Wulfenia journal please stand up?

In mid-August, the AuthorAID mailing list came up with an intriguing case. An author asked "Can you help me? Is this journal is true or fake: "WULFENIA" http://www.wulfeniajournal.at/editorial.html".

The response on the list was clear: "I searched an article from their archive entitled 'Decision making-- Eastern and western style: A way to synthesize the best of each' by Felix Kaufmann. This is a real article but it was published in 1970 in Business Horizons, vol. 13, issue 6, pages 81-86. It looks like they pinch stuff from elsewhere to seem legitimate." The journal purported to be run by "Editor in Chief: Prof. Dr. Vienna S. Franz" at Landesmuseum Kärnten, Austria, but - though the institution was genuine - nobody by that name could be found. PLOS ONE Academic Editor Jack Gilbert also gave reason to be certain that this journal was fake: "Wulfenia - a fake journal using myself and others as 'editorial board members' that makes you pay for all 'articles'".

The author who queried the validity of wulfeniajournal.at let wulfeniajournal.com know, and this site posted a warning:

 "To all scientists about www.wulfeniajournal.at : 

Wulfenia journal has not a website, and it is published as hard copy. Wulfenia journal does not publish online and www.wulfeniajournal.at is a fake site. All http://sciencesarchive.com , www.sciencerecord.com and www.wulfeniajournal.at are for one person that he/she is a hustler. If you check 2009-2011 issues of this journals, You know that all published papers are for another journals which he/she used them for your trust and fraud. Wulfenia just publish as hard copy and just publish Biology science articles NOT ALL SCIENCE AND ENGINEERING. www.wulfeniajournal.com is made just for informing you about this fraud and does not accept any papers for reviewing."

I emailed the Landesmuseum Kärnten to let them know that "Your museum's name is being used by a fake journal", tweeted about it, and thought that would be the last of it. Yet one commenter on the AuthorAID list noted that: "Even the more legitimate journal is a bit suspicious".

He was right.

Roland K. Eberwein, Editor-in-Chief of Wulfenia Journal emailed me last week to say that "The site www.wulfeniajournal.com is a criminal site too!". Wulfenia, as it turns out, is an annual print journal in botany. As the real Wulfenia notes on its website:

"The websites http://www.wulfeniajournal.at and http://www.wulfeniajournal.com ARE NOT the official websites of the journal "Wulfenia: Mitteilungen des Kärntner Botanikzentrums" published by the Regional Museum of Carinthia. Both websites criminally usurp the identity of the official journal. They fraudulently use false informations, a false editorial board and false publication requirements to encourage authors to submit articles and to transfer page fees to a bank account in Yerevan (Armenia). The Regional Museum of Carinthia is not liable for any offence undergone by potential authors who would have submitted articles via the websites mentioned above. Download of articles from these websites which were published in the official journal Wulfenia is illegal."

He let me know that "You can find 'Wulfenia' at http://www.landesmuseum.ktn.gv.at/210226w_DE.htm?seite=15".

I asked about issues with indexing of the journal, and he replied that "I got an e-mail from Thomson Reuters. They told me that they are only indexing the printed journal."

The journal is treating this as a criminal case: "We have a meeting at the police to involve the Austrian Agency against Cyber Criminality. We want to close the website www.wulfeniajournal.at. It seems that this is possible. The site www.wulfeniajournal.com is not hosted in Austria - in this case, we have no chance".

http://www.wulfeniajournal.com is currently down, while the fake http://www.wulfeniajournal.at/index.html is still accessible.

Jeffrey Beall has also written about this and he notes that print journal Archives des Sciences has also been hijacked.

My advice - before sending money to any journal, be sure who you are dealing with. Watch for poor spelling, editors with no academic record, claims to be based in one country but requesting money to be sent to another. And other print journals without an online presence should get one before they get their identity stolen too.

Incentivising academic fraud

This is a guest post by Joe Dunckley
Catching up with the newsfeeds after a week working in Beijing (where citizens are saved from reading such subversive content as Journalology -- as they are all Blogspot blogs), I notice the Economist discussing academic fraud in China.

Being the Economist, it attempts to explain China's fraud epidemic focus on incentives:

China may be susceptible, suggests Dr Cong Cao, a specialist on the sociology of science in China at the State University of New York, because academics expect to advance according to the number, not the quality, of their published works. Thus reward can come without academic rigour. Nor do senior scientists, who are rarely punished for fraud, set a decent example to their juniors.

The trouble with this explanation is that these same incentives apply in many -- most -- other countries also. Science everywhere is plagued by the publish-or-perish game and the incentives it generates. Academic careers stand and fall on the basis of publication counts. Some countries at least try to judge quality of output in addition to quantity, but most methods are no more sophisticated than that used by China -- and every method has its incentives for fraud.

Nor does a lack of disincentives in China explain why they stand out. Fraud is rarely satisfactorily punished anywhere. If it is even discovered at all, the photoshopped figures and made-up numbers become an accident; the original data was lost sometime after that project was completed; the grad student who handled that particular experiment has moved on, and can no longer be contacted. A researcher getting fired for fraud is big news, not because fraud is rare, but because failing to weasel out of an allegation is rare.

It is my fear that China is perceived as having a higher rate of fraud compared to other countries not because it does, but because Chinese researchers aren't very good at it yet. Their fiddled figures are crude and easily spotted; their fictitious facts are amateur inventions that can not be believed. The worrying thing about these rough and unrefined fabrications is not that they themselves, easily found out and struck from the record, exist. The worrying fact is that they must be the tip of a great iceberg; 99% of the fakes are unseen, produced by forgers skilled enough to mask their work in convincing disguises and cover their tracks perfectly. As science in China matures, and the student to supervisor ratio falls and natural selection picks the cleverest conmen, the epidemic of clumsy and primitive fraud will end. That's when China joins the ranks of countries experiencing advanced and undetectable fraud epidemics.

Discussing fraud as a symptom of a Chinese problem -- of a failure of Chinese academic administration or a flaw in the Chinese culture and psyche -- is a nice distraction from the uncomfortable fact that fraud is a symptom of a global problem -- of failing academic administration everywhere. The Chinese copied the publish-or-perish game from the west. Soon they'll get good at it.

Fraud epidemic in China?

This is a guest post by Joe Dunckley
Last week's Nature included a news feature on scientific misconduct in China which contained the extraordinary (but not unbelievable) claim that a third of all researchers at "top institutions" in China admitted to plagiarism, falsification, or fabrication. The feature contains the extreme example of the systematic fabrication of crystal structures, but one would hope that the majority of the confessions of misconduct represent no more than the borrowing of a few paragraphs by those for whom English is not a first language (a crime, but not a hanging offence). But every publisher has its examples of photoshopped figures and impossible datasets, and it's hard to deny that certain countries pop up more often than others.
The fun part of the article, though, is the comments thread, which is full of readers' speculating about why China should have such a high-rate of misconduct. A drive for quick success and control of the sector by short-sighted bureaucrats with no actual understanding of science are suggested. A rapid expansion of science with a bottom-heavy hierarchy and insufficient supervision, or else the fierce competition and pressure in a publish-or-perish world. Perhaps it's just in the nature of communist societies? Even the impact factor is cited as a contributory cause, and the blame somehow shifted onto the publishers.
Nobody seems to consider the simple possibility that researchers from other countries might have access to better tools for disguising their fraud.

Publication ethics - COPE and WAME

In the battle to maintain ethical standards in science and medical publishing, two groups deserve a special mention - the Committee on Publication Ethics, and the World Association of Medical Editors.

The Committee on Publication Ethics is based in London and has member journals around in world, although mainly in Europe. COPE centres on meetings every three months, when editors present anonymised cases when they have concerns about the conduct of a study or publication ethics, and an annual seminar. Anyone reading in the BMJ about the apparent total fabrication of trials of high-dose mannitol for head injury will no doubt be interested to hear that COPE had been consulted for its advice during this investigation. Several BioMed Central journals have taken cases to COPE - we recently consulted them with a question about when an author's publication rate becomes too high to be feasible without gift authorship or fraud.

The World Association of Medical Editors (WAME, pronounced "whammy") is made up of individual editors of biomedical journals. WAME aims to encourage ethical practices among its members and to encourage communication among editors. The WAME listserve acts as the core of WAME's activities and archives of these discussions can be browsed through. A list of resources for editors is also available - I'll be helping to add to these, after being invited to join the Education Committee.

To easily search the websites of WAME and COPE you can install these search plugins.