4. Scientific Hoaxes and the Predatory Paradox: Past, Present, and Future

In Chapter 4, ‘Scientific Hoaxes and the Predatory Paradox: Past, Present, and Future,’ Amy Koerber examines scientific hoax articles with a focus on the weaknesses and flaws that such hoaxes can expose in the larger information ecosystem of scholarly publishing. The chapter thus reveals that scientific hoaxes further complicate any neat distinction between journals that are predatory and those that are not. Hoaxes have, in some cases, exposed specific journals as predatory. But in other cases, they have had effects beyond those that the author anticipated, exposing major weaknesses or fraudulent practices not only at journals or publishers suspected to be predatory but also at the most prestigious and well-respected journals. More importantly, publishing hoaxes have unintentionally exposed weaknesses in the mechanisms that we have long relied on to ensure research quality. For example, hoaxes have exposed flaws in even the best journals’ peer review systems, and when hoax articles continue to get cited in subsequent literature—sometimes even after retraction—they lead us to question our habit of relying on citation counts as a measure of research quality. Partly in response to hoaxes, industries have emerged around the desire to pin down the legitimacy of a particular author or publication in an environment that makes it increasingly easy for fakes to be mistaken as the real thing. For example, we now have ORCID identifiers to help us establish the identity of authors and Digital Object Identifiers (DOI) to help us pinpoint the location and verify the identity of published texts. These identifiers are becoming commonplace in academic lingo, but it is easy to overlook the fact that each of these markers emerged as a commercial development with its own complexities, nuances, and shortcomings. As we argue, these innovations reflect our desire to pin down something that is certain and real in a landscape where it is increasingly easy for fakes to circulate as the real thing.