Ever since the Women’s Dermatologic Society (WDS) Board of Directors voted in March
of 2014 to establish a peer-reviewed journal, our leadership has realized how the
advent of predatory publishing has affected the establishment of a legitimate medical
publication. For example, in 2014, there were already approximately 40 different dermatologic
journals but none with a specific focus on women’s skin problems and career issues
of female dermatology trainees. In fact, there are no specific journal publications
dealing with careers for women in medicine. The WDS is the third largest dermatologic
society in the United States with approximately 10% male membership holders and a
growing proportion of international members. Leaders in academic dermatology, both
female and male, make a significant difference in terms of the main goals of the WDS:
mentorship and leadership development. The two WDS co-editors in 2014 approached a
number of respected publishers to explore options to publish the journal. Not one
of the medical publishers offered the WDS the possibility of a subscription-based
publication, stating that with the proliferation of predatory open-access publications,
most libraries were not willing to add on additional charges for new journals. Hence,
the only way forward was an open access, peer-reviewed model. For many of us within
the WDS, this has been hard to accept because we have matured in our careers with
journals that have no publication charges and are generally accessible free-of-charge
through the university or hospital we are affiliated with, or by society subscription.
In addition, many dermatologists and even trainees have become accustomed to receiving
invitations almost on a daily basis from non-medical journal editors representing
various “predatory journals” and asking us to write articles for them. Some of these
journals have titles that are very similar to those of legitimate dermatology journals
associated with prestigious dermatologic societies, such as the British Association
of Dermatology’s two journals. In fact, these predatory journals have invited dermatologists
to join their editorial boards as an honorary activity, so the journals appear to
be legitimate on the basis of who is associated with them. I had the personal experience
of being invited to submit a case report to one such journal, and after seeing the
names of several respected colleagues serving on their editorial board, I believed
it to be a legitimate publication. Therefore, I decided to submit an interesting case
report for publication. Yet, within a couple of hours of submitting the case report,
I received an email from the non-medical editor, stating it had been reviewed and
was accepted for publication with no revisions. This is very unusual for any journal
submission. Subsequently, what I thought was a $50 submission fee for the article
turned into a $3,000 charge to my credit card! I tried to contact the journal for
an explanation, and discovered that their ‘head office’ in New York was a P.O. box
with an answering machine containing an outgoing message in broken English. I contacted
my colleagues on the editorial board to see if they were aware that this journal was
using their good names in this way and, of course, they were not. Several of them
immediately resigned from the editorial board of that journal and insisted that I
be refunded this fee, which was hidden in small print at the time the article was
submitted.
Yet, there are some excellent journals, which are now open-access and charge publication
fees, such as the Public Library of Science (PLOS) One journals. I recall in the old
days, pre-internet, that we had to pay a lot to get multiple copies of high quality
printed images posted in black and white. Some people would even pay typists and extra
fees for the images to be printed in color in the journals. These days, we take for
granted that we can electronically upload submissions for free and have forgotten
that there were always associated fees, which we or our departments absorbed. To be
able to give copies of our articles to people who sent reprint requests, we also had
to pay for reprints and postage. The charges for reprints were even higher for prints
in color. Compared to these charges, the open-access fees are actually not that much
higher in many cases, and particularly for IJWD, which is $800 for a research paper
or review, $500 for a case report (the same as for JAAD Case Reports), and the fees
are waived if the submission comes from a World Bank poor country. Compared to a $3,000
charge from the average predatory publisher, this is very reasonable.
However, it is not just predatory journals that we need to be aware of. Now, many
bogus textbook publishers and conference organizations email doctors with invitations
to speak at their meetings. There are no covered expenses but there are charges for
online access to book chapters with no royalty fees to the authors. For some doctors
who rarely or never are invited to speak at society meetings, these invitations are
a temptation and can appear to boost their CVs. I do not know who is paying to attend
these conferences, but some doctors and scientists must be; these businesses must
be making profits from the conference registrations and exhibitors, or they would
not keep organizing these meetings.
All of these activities dilute the reputations of decent publishers and conference
organizations because it becomes more difficult to gain educational support for the
main specialist society congresses. Members of the public do not realize how the vast
majority of medical speakers at meetings do not receive honoraria and in fact, speaker
honoraria from pharmaceutical companies and travel expense reimbursement are prohibited
for speakers at some meetings, such as the American Academy of Dermatology and American
Dermatologic Association. In Australia, unlike Europe, it is rare to receive pharmaceutical
support to attend meetings, in part because travel is so expensive but also because
of new regulations. This is good idea because only those experts who actually work
in and teach other specialists in the field can be sponsored to attend meetings rather
than those who just want to attend.
Jeffrey Beall’s excellent opinion piece in this issue (Beall, 2016) about these predatory
medical journals should be mandatory reading for medical students and junior doctors
so they are educated about these publishers and can avoid being sucked in. Likewise,
those of us who are relatively new to open-access publishing need to take a more educated
and broad-minded view about the benefits to society of the peer-reviewed open-access
model. Not only can medical subscribers and university academics access these papers
for free, but now patients and other interested parties can read articles that previously
would have cost them a significant amount of money to read. Research grants and departments
need to become more used to the concept of open-access publication fees for non-predatory,
legitimate peer-reviewed journals, such as the IJWD. IJWD became aware of at least
one American department of dermatology whose policy does not allow its faculty to
publish in open-access journals because of the open-access fees. One of our WDS members,
who is a faculty member with this department, submitted a paper to IJWD, which was
accepted after peer-review and revision. The paper had to be withdrawn and, having
been improved thanks to our reviewers’ voluntary efforts, is now published elsewhere.
Those departments forget that behind all of these legitimate journals are editors
who volunteer a considerable amount of their after-hours time, and expert reviewers
who volunteer their time and savings for their departments from the old days on librarians
who request papers, medical illustrations, printing fees for photographs, color images,
and reprint fees. A more tolerant view of open-access publications with increased
awareness and vigilance about predatory journals will help us all to maintain the
standards of medical publications.