
Penetrating the Omerta of Predatory Publishing: The Romanian Connection - rfreytag
http://link.springer.com.sci-hub.io/article/10.1007/s11948-0...
======
dalke
This link is invalid because the DOI is incorrect. Also, this is pointing to a
proxy service and not the primary publisher URL.

This article ("First online: 01 February 2014") is at
[http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11948-014-9521-4](http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11948-014-9521-4)
. The abstract is:

> Not so long ago, a well institutionalized predatory journal exposed itself
> by publishing a hoax article that blew the whistle for its devastating
> influence on the academic affairs of a small country. This paper puts that
> experiment in context, gives all the important details and analyzes the
> results. The experiment was inspired by well-known cases of scientific
> activism and is in line with recent efforts against predatory publishers.
> The paper presents the evidence in detail and uses it to analyze the
> publishing practices of the offending journal, using established criteria
> for assessing predatory publications. That journal somehow acquired an
> impact factor and charged money to publish thousands of “scientific” papers
> without any peer review. Since the impact factor is the major official
> evaluation criteria for scientists in Serbia, these papers disturbed the
> whole academic evaluation process. Credentials acquired by those
> publications form a strong obstacle to institutionalized reasoned efforts
> against such practices. This case warns the whole community of the long
> lasting damage when journals with low publishing ethics are taken seriously.

Edit: Ahh, I see. It was posted because the article's author, dragandj,
commented at
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11185577](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11185577)
and pointed to sci-hub.io. For the submission URL, rfreytag then copy/pasted
the visible <a> text, which HN truncates, rather than the link URL.

~~~
rfreytag
Ah, good catch: [http://link.springer.com.sci-
hub.io/article/10.1007/s11948-0...](http://link.springer.com.sci-
hub.io/article/10.1007/s11948-014-9521-4) is indeed working - for now.

The whole point of pointing to Sci-Hub is to illustrate the way research is
made inaccessible from original sources by paywalls.

