Debates inside Vietnam about low-quality academic papers about Vietnam studies

From: Liam Kelley via Vsg <vsg@u.washington.edu>
Sent: Thursday, June 20, 2024 8:25 PM
To: Hiep Duc <Hiep.Duc@environment.nsw.gov.au>
Cc: vsg@u.washington.edu; Judith A N Henchy <judithh@uw.edu>
Subject: Re: [Vsg] predatory journals

Dear List,

I don't mean to keep beating a dead horse. . . but one thing that I noticed long ago was how the publications in the VSG Bibliography (thank you for your help with this, Cari!!) have changed over the years, and I know that Judith and I have talked about this before too.

Since the topic of journals is on my mind, and since I have a lot of things that I need to do, and therefore, am in procrastination mode. . . I went through the most recent Bibliography and listed the names of journals and the dates when they started publishing. I did not look beyond that to try to determine anything about the quality of the journals. I only looked at titles and dates and I excluded journals published in Vietnam. So, this is just a list of "international" journals.

I think I counted around 49 journals and 32 of those started publishing in or after 2011. Further, there are multiple articles in the Bibliography that were published in some of the same post-2011 journals, so the distribution of articles is even more heavily weighted towards the more recent journals. That said, there are a lot of articles/reviews in JVS that are listed, but that is because the entire journal is dedicated to Vietnam. If we removed JVS from this list, then the predominance of articles published would be in the post-2011 journals.

I think this list can help people visualize the new world that we are in, both in terms of the fields that people are publishing in, as well as the journals that they are publishing in.

Liam Kelley

Universiti Brunei Darussalam

2023
Frontiers in Economics and Management
Decision Science Letters
Journal of Knowledge Learning and Science Technology

2022
World Development Sustainability

2021
International Journal of Advanced Multidisciplinary Research and Studies
Philosophy and Global Affairs

2020
International Journal of Religion
Revista de Gestão Social e Ambiental (Environmental and Social Management Journal)

2019
Asian Journal of Research in Education and Social Sciences
Discover Applied Sciences
International Journal of Law and Politics Studies
Environmental Research Communications
International Journal of English Language Studies
Journal of Sustainability Research

2018
Journal of Hospitality and Tourism Insights

2017
European Journal of Literature, Language and Linguistics Studies
Asia-Pacific Journal of Regional Science
Journal of Infrastructure, Policy and Development

2016
International Journal of Sociology of Education
Икономика и Управление  (Economics and Management)

2015
Heliyon
Humanities and Social Sciences Communications
European Journal of Alternative Education Studies

2014
ASR: Chiang Mai University Journal of Social Sciences and Humanities
Journal of Eastern European and Central Asian Research
Cogent Arts & Humanities
Educational Administration: Theory and Practice
British Journal of Healthcare and Medical Research

2013
Global Journal of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences
Climate

2012
Journal of the International Society for the Study of Vernacular Settlements

2011
Journal of Asian Scientific Research

2006
Journal of Vietnamese Studies
Polish Sociological Review
Journal of Asia Business Studies
International Journal of Criminal Justice Sciences

2005
New Voices in Translation Studies

1999
Environment, Development and Sustainability

1995
Asian Journal of Women’s Studies

1989
Gender & History

1987
Visual Anthropology
Practice

1986
Journal of Cross-Cultural Gerontology
自然资源学报 (Journal of Natural Resources)

1984
Journal of Population Research

1977
GeoJournal

1968
Asian Journal of Social Science

1936
Acta Psychologica

1906
Anthropos

From: via Vsg <vsg@u.washington.edu>
Sent: Tuesday, June 18, 2024 8:06 PM
To: 'Hiep Duc' <Hiep.Duc@environment.nsw.gov.au>; 'Liam Kelley' <liam@hawaii.edu>
Cc: vsg@u.washington.edu; 'Judith A N Henchy' <judithh@uw.edu>
Subject: Re: [Vsg] predatory journals

Dear colleagues,

Hiep Duc and Liam Kelley both provide the answer (as have others in earlier posts):

“abolish this ranking game all together” (Hiep)

“get away from administrators using metrics” (Liam)

Many universities have stopped participating in the bogus ratings/rankings charades at the inter-university level. Why not try now to reverse the pervasive metrification of everything before all hope is lost, rather than simply trying to fine tune (or game) a system that is inherently corrosive of everything many of us aspire to as scholars? If not, future generations of scholars will have little to argue about except what was the last tune that the band played as the Titanic sunk, ignoring the hubris that produced the disaster in the first place.

Curmudgeonly yours,

Frank Proschan

Retired do-well but fully employed ne’er-do-well

From: Hiep Duc via Vsg <vsg@u.washington.edu>
Sent: Tuesday, June 18, 2024 7:01 PM
To: Liam Kelley <liam@hawaii.edu>; frank.proschan@yahoo.com
Cc: vsg@u.washington.edu; Judith A N Henchy <judithh@uw.edu>
Subject: Re: [Vsg] predatory journals

Dear Liam and list,

Other thing to mention is that good researchers don’t publish in predatory journals which has near zero impact and zero citation. Publish your research in these journals is embarrassing and they never do that. Except the mathematician Perelman who deliberately chose an obscure preprint online site to publish his solution to the century-old Poincare conjecture. He won the Fields Medal (equivalent of Nobel Prize for mathematics) but refused to receive the medal and 1 million dollars prize. He snubbed the whole publication system. This made the top journals such as Nature felt very badly in missing the discovery of the century.

The ranking of the journals are based on the quality of the publication and its impact hence on the average citation of the articles (impact). Note that a lot of Q1 journals also have option for open access articles. Of course, the number of citations also depend on the discipline. Medical science journals have a larger number of citations than other disciplines such as mathematics or say history. These metrics used in ranking have to take this into account. People who publish in a good journal usually have reasonable number of citations. For the administrators of KPIs, they rate these publication highly. One of such publication worth more than a number of Q2 or Q3 publication. So there are incentives for good researchers to publish in high quality journals and not on predatory journals.

But when you have the ranking metrics to assess your publication, you always have people who game it such as the  problem of ‘citation cartel’ like Liam and others have mentioned. I often see some referees reviewing the manuscripts insist the authors to include their publications as references, a serious violation of COPE ethics. We often see journals (including Q1) sometimes retract published papers due to serious misconduct or data/method falsified. It is increasing recently especially with lower rank or open access journals. This is normal and it also show that the safeguarding system and COPE guideline is working. Editors are swamped with submission and work but they also conscientiously remove the misconduct papers.

The reality is that the current status is the one that all institutions and people agree to participate. We have to face it and try to improve it unless we want to abolish this ranking game all together. Or decide to do like Perelman did.

Hiep Duc

Principal scientist

NSW, Asutralia

From: David Marr via Vsg <vsg@u.washington.edu>
Sent: Tuesday, June 18, 2024 6:40 PM
To: Liam Kelley <liam@hawaii.edu>
Cc: vsg@u.washington.edu; Judith A N Henchy <judithh@uw.edu>
Subject: Re: [Vsg] predatory journals

It seems to me that every effort should be applied to sustain journals that abide by traditional standards, leaving it to individuals to decide where they want to send their manuscript for consideration.  Mercantilism may get the majority, but promotion committees will not necessarily be fooled.

David Marr

ANU

From: via Vsg <vsg@u.washington.edu>
Sent: Sunday, June 16, 2024 7:14 PM
To: 'Liam Kelley' <liam@hawaii.edu>; 'Judith A N Henchy' <judithh@uw.edu>
Cc: vsg@u.washington.edu
Subject: Re: [Vsg] predatory journals

Liam writes:

“That is because these journals are not based on the idea that scholarship can be area-specific. They are based more on the idea that scholarship is global and theory/methodology-generic enough for people who are not experts on a specific place to still be able to assess the quality of a manuscript.”

Rather, the problem is that the manuscripts (eventually, published articles) satisfy NEITHER the area-studies NOR the general theory/methodology considerations, and that there is NO adequate qualitative assessment from either standpoint. These mega-journals are purely mercenary responses to the global metrification of everything, market-driven and crass in identifying money-making opportunities. Confounding them with reasonable and serious critiques of occidental-centrism or paywalls or with appeals to decolonization and diversification of voices, etc. is a fundamental mistake. They are not the answer to those very real problems.

Best,

Frank Proschan

Curmudgeon-in-chief

From: Liam Kelley via Vsg <vsg@u.washington.edu>
Sent: Sunday, June 16, 2024 6:27 PM
To: Judith A N Henchy <judithh@uw.edu>
Cc: vsg@u.washington.edu
Subject: Re: [Vsg] predatory journals

last last note (can you tell that this topic gets me excited???):

Just to be clear, there are definitely examples of journals that are unquestionably predatory. I don't want to point any out because I don't want to shame the authors who have already published there, but I have seen people paying to publish in journals that have absolutely nothing to do with the topic of their papers. That is 100% predatory publishing, and the editors and authors are all complicit.

However, these mega-journals occupy what is now a grey area, but I think they are going to become normalized, and in some cases they already have. This also happened with the Area Studies journals that were set up in Asia earlier in this century. When some of them were first established, some people were skeptical and thought that these universities were merely purchasing the prestige of ABC University Press or editor-in-chief XYZ. To some degree that was true (it was also linked to the rankings), but that doesn't mean that the people involved in the journals were not conscientious, and that submissions were not sent to capable reviewers, etc. Over time, such journals have become normalized, and they deserved to be.

I think the same thing will happen with the mega-journals. That said, there is no way that journals of that scale will be able to maintain consistent quality across all of the articles, and they will never be an appropriate place to publish area-specific scholarship (unless one of the many editors is a specialist in that field). But again, much of what is produced around the world today is not deeply area-specific and that is what these journals target, and for some of those editors and authors, certain mega-journals are probably fine.

So, to go back to the point of that article, if we are to create a database of predatory journals, do we put mega-journals on it? If so, who decides? The person who engages in area-specific scholarship who sees poor quality publications in the journal, or the more general social science theorist who sees works in the journal that are fine? If the journal is placed on a black list, what happens if the journal gets normalized in some fields? Is the black list going to be field specific?

I don't have answers to these questions. What I've tried to point out though is that we are in a new world, and while there are black-and-white cases of predatory publishing, there are a lot of grey areas too.

Liam Kelley
Universiti Brunei Darussalam

From: Liam Kelley via Vsg <vsg@u.washington.edu>
Sent: Sunday, June 16, 2024 4:42 PM
To: Judith A N Henchy <judithh@uw.edu>
Cc: vsg@u.washington.edu
Subject: Re: [Vsg] predatory journals

Dear list,

One more note:

Another way to look at the problem of these big mega-journals is to see them as the logical outcome of the decades-long critique of Area Studies. Since at least the late 1980s, people have been criticizing area studies for being complicit with imperialism and too focused on nations, etc. Now, instead of Area Studies/Asian Studies programs you have Global Studies programs, and instead of new journals on specific parts of the globe, you have these mega-journals.

There was a brief moment in the 2000s when certain universities in Asia created Area Studies journals (often with "Western" presses), and at the time, that was touted as an advancement that would move the center of knowledge production about Asia from Euro-America to Asia ("de-centering" Area Studies). And my experience from reviewing for, and publishing in, those journals has been generally positive. In the Tia Sang article, Tran Trong Duong mentions the Sungkyun Journal of East Asian Studies. That's an example of this type of journal.

However, I think that era is now over and we have entered the era of these mega-journals.

So, when someone submits an area-specific article to one of these mega-journals we should not be surprised if it is not sent to appropriate reviewers, and ends up getting published with area-specific typos, and area-specific problems with its content. That is because these journals are not based on the idea that scholarship can be area-specific. They are based more on the idea that scholarship is global and theory/methodology-generic enough for people who are not experts on a specific place to still be able to assess the quality of a manuscript. And there is probably plenty of scholarship today that fits into that category because it is getting produced in the post-Area Studies world of. . . whatever we call knowledge production today.

This, I would argue, is where you logically end up when you abandon Area Studies. And now that abandonment is coupled with the desire of university administrations for global rankings. So, if a university in Asia decided to set up a journal now, I think it is much more likely that it would opt for something like one of these new mega-journals rather than an Area Studies journal (more citations, more visibility, higher rankings). In fact, I'd be willing to bet that this is exactly what we will soon see if it hasn't happened already.

Liam Kelley
Universiti Brunei Darussalam

From: Judith A N Henchy via Vsg <vsg@u.washington.edu>
Sent: Sunday, June 16, 2024 9:31 AM
To: Liam Kelley <liam@hawaii.edu>; Hue-Tam Tai <huetamtai@gmail.com>
Cc: vsg@u.washington.edu
Subject: Re: [Vsg] predatory journals

Liam,  Yes, that is correct.  The English translation I sent out was from this Tia Sáng article.

Best

Judith

Judith Henchy, Ph.D., MLIS

Head, Southeast Asia Section

Special Assistant to the Dean of University Libraries for International Programs

Affiliate Faculty, Jackson School of International Studies

From: Liam Kelley via Vsg <vsg@u.washington.edu>
Sent: Saturday, June 15, 2024 10:18 PM
To: Hue-Tam Tai <huetamtai@gmail.com>
Cc: vsg@u.washington.edu
Subject: Re: [Vsg] predatory journals

Dear Hue Tam and list,

This is the same article that Judith originally referenced (I think, right?).

While I rambled and ranted a lot, I think Hiep made good points.

1) The fact that a journal has many people on the editorial board, and that it charges a considerable amount of money does not automatically mean that a journal is predatory. This is a new model of publishing that has emerged. You have to look deeper.

2) The fact that there is a team of assistant editors in India or China also does not automatically mean that a journal is predatory. Again, this is a new model of publishing that has emerged, and you have to look deeper.

3) Saying Le Thanh Tong King instead of King Le Thanh Tong also isn't an automatic sign that a journal is predatory. In general, many of the big publishers have cut back on their editorial services. It's been common where I work for colleagues to apply for a grant of say $5,000 to have a volume professionally edited because the big publishers will only do minimal editing. I have a colleague who publishes with a long-established (think centuries) and reputable academic publisher which also no longer provides close editing, and he has a grant from his university to employ someone to edit each issue, for about the same amount that I just mentioned.

The alternative is to do what I do, which is to spend godzillions of hours doing the editing myself, line by line, word by word, citation by citation, bibliographic entry by bibliographic entry. I didn't have to do that in the early 2000s, but I do it all the time now, because I know from experience that many publishers will no longer do that, and I don't have money. . .

So, while I guess some publishers somewhere must still provide comprehensive editing services, much of the rest of the world is in DIY editing mode.

3) Then there is the problem of the difficulty of finding reviewers. This is a point that Hiep made for the sciences. I think it is even more acute for the fields of premodern Vietnamese history, Han Nom studies, premodern literature, etc. which Tran Trong Duong works in.

Even before the movement to get Vietnamese to publish in "international" journals, there was only an extremely small number of people in the world who were able to review submissions in those topics. As such, there was already a problem of flawed works getting published because of a lack of capable reviewers, and that was happening in the relatively small world of "legacy/traditional" publishers, before the recent expansion in journals began.

I've seen all sides of this. I've seen, for instance, manuscripts on premodern Vietnamese history sent to people who work on the colonial era or who work on someplace in Southeast Asia out of the belief that those people must somehow be capable of reviewing the manuscript. They are not, and it would be unthinkable, for instance, for someone to send a manuscript on say Ming dynasty history to an expert on Republican China or Heian Japan. However, somehow because Vietnam is "Vietnam" and it's "Southeast Asia" this type of practice has long been accepted, and the consequences have been predictably disastrous.

So, this is not a story of "good vs bad" (proper publishing vs publishing in predatory journals). Just because a journal is a certain way or an article has typos does not mean it is inherently "bad" and the international field of premodern Vietnamese history/literature has definitely not left a record that it can hold up as a model of "good" publishing for a new wave of scholars to follow.

The problem is that the fields of premodern Vietnamese history/literature are weak (dying tbh) everywhere, and we now live in a kind of DIY world of publishing where the chance that the editors/reviewers will not have expertise about manuscripts in these fields is even greater than it already was. In such a world, I sympathize with people who try to get published.

Liam Kelley
Universiti Brunei Darussalam

From: Hue-Tam Tai via Vsg <vsg@u.washington.edu>
Sent: Saturday, June 15, 2024 8:35 PM
To: vsg@u.washington.edu
Subject: [Vsg] predatory journals

Recently, Tran Trong Duong (formerly of Vien Han Nom and now at VNU) published an article on the subject of predatory journals that is relevant to our discussion.

https://tiasang.com.vn/van-hoa/tieu-chi-tap-chi-san-moi-khoi-nganh-nhan-van/?__cf_chl_tk=eU_1p4rU3dUbHW9Ll8kpozqQBoBJQQhbwitUxYvF2x8-1718508402-0.0.1.1-4970

Hue-Tam Ho Tai

Harvard University emerita

From: Hiep Duc via Vsg <vsg@u.washington.edu>
Sent: Friday, June 7, 2024 10:17 PM
To: Liam Kelley <liam@hawaii.edu>
Cc: VSG <vsg@u.washington.edu>; Judith A N Henchy <judithh@uw.edu>
Subject: Re: [Vsg] Debates inside Vietnam about low-quality academic papers about Vietnam studies: seeking for international scholars' opinion

A few years ago, Music department disappeared from two well-known universities in Australia (Australian National University and University of Sydney). Probably there is no more Music department in Tertiary Education in Australia. It is ridiculous to demand staff at Music department to publish research papers to increase the university rank and to boost the number of enrolled students. The university should cross-subsidise these art departments from more profitable departments

Dear Liam and list,

Without Arts there is no civilisation. The people who set up the global ranking of world universities metric must include this as a factor in their metric. Not only facilities (libraries, laboratories, equipment,..), teaching, class sizes, scholarship (publication, citation, impact factors),

number of Nobel or Fields prizes, sustainability, resources are criteria but humanities, social sciences and community contribution have to be included… . Including the Arts as another criteria will do enormous boost to these studies.

Another thing to worry is that The Times ranking and Shanghai ranking criteria (and other ranking systems) that administrators rely on are skewed toward well-established and well-funded universities. I don’t know if there is hidden agenda to make this well-entrenched and bias against struggling smaller universities in many countries that are forced to play this game of chasing rank. Just a week ago, newspapers in Australia reported on the improved world ranking of some of the Group of 8 Australian prestigious universities. The well-funded and richer universities always have advantages in having better facilities, better campus, attracting new students, research funds, good staff because they are older, well-known (“prestigious”). And hence they are good in the rank order and attract more students (foreign or domestic). A virtuous cycle. Universities with less opportunities are forced to game the criteria of these global ranking of world universities to improve their rank and in the process of doing so create so many other ethical problems. Many of these universities are from the developing countries

This is the root of problem. Why do we have to play this game of chasing ranks  designed by some organisation which is accountable to no one ?. Can universities get together and declare that they don’t want to participate in and play this game ?     

Hiep

DCCEEW, NSW, Australia

From: Liam Kelley via Vsg <vsg@u.washington.edu>
Sent: Friday, June 7, 2024 4:58 PM
To: mchale@gwu.edu
Cc: VSG <vsg@u.washington.edu>; Judith A N Henchy <judithh@uw.edu>
Subject: Re: [Vsg] Debates inside Vietnam about low-quality academic papers about Vietnam studies: seeking for international scholars' opinion

Dear Shawn and list,

On the issue of there being no measurement for prestige, well actually at the university level in the rankings there is. I don't know the actual breakdown, but there is a significant proportion in the QS rankings that is granted to university "reputation." Getting that metric to go up has been a challenge for some universities.

But I get your point, and especially the part about how at some stage it just gets too obviously ridiculous, or one would think. And one can get hopeful when, for instance, China announces that it will not long participate in the QS rankings, etc. However, you don't then see a positive alternative emerge, just some new variation of the same approach.

One way some universities have tried to measure quality and prestige is by going deeper into the metrics and looking at where people get cited. So, not only do people have to publish in a Q1 journal, but they also have to be cited in articles in Q1 journals. Does this actually document quality? No, because if you cite yourself, that counts, and if someone cites you to say "this guy has no idea what he's talking about," that counts too. And it is requirements like this one that drive the citation cartels that were discussed in the article that Minh shared.

The practical way that universities deal with the absurdity of the rankings is, as I said in the previous post, by focusing on parts of the rankings that seem to make some kind of sense. Now UN Sustainability Goals are hot, and there is a huge effort to make universities "sustainable" and to produce scholarship on sustainability. Does that make more sense than telling people to just publish more? It seems like it does, but people are still being asked to do the same thing - publish as much as possible. So, I would argue that it serves as a way to deflect attention away from the ridiculousness of it all. And again, focusing on AI and machine learning will be next when it becomes too obvious how shallow the sustainability craze is.

And as for prestige, to make a shameless plug, you can read any of the many writings by my wife (Phan Le Ha), such as Transnational Education Crossing ‘Asia’ and ‘the West’ Adjusted desire, transformative mediocrity and neo-colonial disguise. What I think she would argue is that the prestige in higher education is at places like Oxford, Cambridge, Harvard, Yale, Berkeley, Columbia, etc., and that no matter how much universities develop in other parts of the globe, this sense of prestige never changes. For instance, she documents how international students see highly-ranked universities in Asia as a stepping stone to a prestigious university in the West, not as an end-point. Meanwhile, the enormous branch-campus industry is all fueled by that prestige and a desire for it, a desire that cannot be met by non-Western universities no matter what they do.

On that note, we recently talked to a colleague at University College London who said that they continued to be inundated with applications from foreign students, while the same program in other universities in the UK were struggling for their lives as they did not have enough students to sustain their programs. What explains that? Prestige, but a prestige that long predates the current ranking systems.

Finally, as for humanities somehow continuing outside Europe and North America, 1) students numbers are declining, so that means no new hires (and the eventual merging or closing of programs), 2) if there is an open position that someone in the humanities could apply for, that person would only have a chance if s/he is working on something related to whatever the hot rankings topic is, but in reality that person would probably not have a chance because s/he would not have the metrics to compete (and yes, universities want to see that freshly-minted PhDs already have a citation record), and by now administrators know perfectly well that such a person will never produce the metrics that the university wants. So, from that perspective, humanities scholars are actually more expensive to support.

Another way to look at this is to take a look at new "Western" universities that have been established in Asia. See if you can find an Anthropology or a History department at places like Duke Kunshan or NYU Shanghai. These places have some limited form of China Studies, but that's it. The University of Nottingham in Ningbo has a Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences which houses the School of Economics, School of Education and English, School of International Communications and the School of International Studies, and a Language Centre. Go deeper into the School of International Studies and you will find that you can get an MA in International Relations and World History, or International Relations and International Business.

You can see the direction everyone chooses to take. Yes, you can study about other parts of the world if you focus on politics or economics. But even that is just a tiny element in the university as a whole. Will any of these places see the need for an historian of the Indochina wars, or colonial or premodern Vietnam? Definitely not. However, someone who works on international river management and sustainability might have a chance, as long as they already have a good citation record.

As for things like culture, I think the Graduate School of Culture Tecnology, KAIST (https://ct.kaist.ac.kr/) is at the forefront of one direction things will go, and that is to focus on creating "cultural products" in some kind of digital form. KAIST is at the forefront, but I think we can see a lot of other places trying to go in this direction by say having a "media and culture" department. At present, in such departments you can find a lone area studies person, often an anthropologist, who is responsible for the "culture" component. Will such people still be there in the future? Or will ChatGPT tell students what they need to know about culture?

I'm talking about this to inform people who are not aware of the severity of the situation. Five years ago if we had had this discussion, I still would have seen some hope for say the humanities continuing to exist on a limited scale. I totally don't see that anymore except at an extremely small scale. Yes, there will occasionally be the lone person from the Duke Kunshan's of the world who will have majored in China Studies and who will go on to study at one of the elite universities in the West and then. . . not sure where the person will end up.

So, on that note, Tran Trong Duong, the author of the Tia Sang article that sparked this discussion, really doesn't need to worry. He just needs to wait things out. Yes, there are substandard articles getting published now on Vietnamese history, but as time goes by there will be fewer and fewer. It's the people who work on international river management and sustainability who need to worry, as their field is going to continually expand and to continually be flooded (ha ha, good pun!) with substandard scholarship.

Liam Kelley

Universiti Brunei Darussalam

From: Shawn McHale via Vsg <vsg@u.washington.edu>
Sent: Friday, June 7, 2024 10:54 AM
To: Judith A N Henchy <judithh@uw.edu>
Cc: VSG <vsg@u.washington.edu>
Subject: Re: [Vsg] Debates inside Vietnam about low-quality academic papers about Vietnam studies: seeking for international scholars' opinion

Dear all, 

I am not completely pessimistic about the future for the humanities. When the QS World University rankings puts the National University of Singapore 8th, Caltech 10th, Nanyang 15th, the Universiti Malaya 60th, the Universidad de Buenos Aires 71st, and UC San Diego  . . . . 72nd, one scratches one's head. Quantity of output is being measured, not quality or significance. One might as well be producing widgets. 

There's a point at which the existing metrics like the QS World University rankings simply look stupid, and that point is now. Unfortunately, governments and university administrators are addicted to them.  Such rankings drive policy in South Korea, China, Singapore, Australia, the US, Canada, Europe, etc . . .  which leads to the proliferation of really lousy journals to publish papers . . . to be measured. 

You know that. But even the metric mavens realize the problems with metrics. For example, traditionally, as Scopus notes, "Most publications are created with the input from multiple co-authors. Traditional citation metrics give each co-author the same citation impact, even though the actual contribution of each researcher will not have been even.". To a historian or anthropologist, many of whom write single-authored works, this way of measuring is absurd. 

Perhaps realizing this absurdity, Scopus now states, as of 2023: 

"Scopus is proud to announce a new metric available on the Scopus Author Profile page.  This metric is. designed to help researchers better track and understand their research performance. It helps researchers. pull together a comprehensive overview of their research performance and expand metrics they can. provide on promotion, tenure and grant applications."  (https://blog.scopus.com/posts/scopus-introduces-the-author-position-metric-a-new-researcher-signal#:~:text=How%20does%20Author%20Position%20work,will%20not%20have%20been%20even.)

But this improvement does not address a knotty problem: there are diminishing returns to measuring lots and lots of articles, some of which are junk. When more and more universities churn out similar kinds of mediocre work, it becomes impossible to move up in the rankings. How does one distinguish a junk article from one published in Nature? The Journal of Asian Studies?  There is no measurement of PRESTIGE. 

 The problem is analogous to what we see in the creation of luxury markets: one used to be able to get away with buying counterfeit Gucci bags, but THAT INCREASINGLY WON'T DO. Only the real luxury item will do. The luxury market itself is segmented, so that billionaires can feel superior to those with tens of millions of dollars, who can then feel superior to mere millionaires.  We are seeing the same process of prestige segmentation driving university knowledge production. 

Where am I going with this? The humanities are shrinking in size in Europe and North America, but I would not be surprised in globally, it holds on, especially if those slavishly devoted to metrics lavish more attention to measuring quality and the cost of achieving such quality. Face it: those in the humanties are cheaper to support and fund than scientists. 

Shawn 

From: Judith A N Henchy via Vsg <vsg@u.washington.edu>
Sent: Friday, June 7, 2024 7:51 AM
To: Liam Kelley <liam@hawaii.edu>; Hiep Duc <Hiep.Duc@environment.nsw.gov.au>
Cc: VSG <vsg@u.washington.edu>
Subject: Re: [Vsg] Debates inside Vietnam about low-quality academic papers about Vietnam studies: seeking for international scholars' opinion

Liam,  Thanks.  And in all of this, they have found gleeful and gloating partners in the Clarivates, the Elseviers, the RELXs and the Springer Natures willing to mop up the profits from the pernicious cycle they themselves have help set in motion.

Best

Judith

Judith Henchy, Ph.D., MLIS

Head, Southeast Asia Section

Special Assistant to the Dean of University Libraries for International Programs

Affiliate Faculty, Jackson School of International Studies

From: Nguyen Van Suu via Vsg <vsg@u.washington.edu>
Sent: Friday, June 7, 2024 12:29 AM
To: David Marr <phanmarr@gmail.com>
Cc: VSG <vsg@u.washington.edu>; Judith A N Henchy <judithh@uw.edu>
Subject: Re: [Vsg] Debates inside Vietnam about low-quality academic papers about Vietnam studies: seeking for international scholars' opinion

Dear Anh Liam for insightful discussion! 

Anthropologists have adapted in many ways to cope with the new contexts of research. They now do participant observation offline, and online, and hybrid one, therefore cover both offline and online spaces/worlds, and between. This adaptation has enable them to explore a variety of new research issues in the digital age while remain anthropologists! 

Nguyen Van Suu

VNU Hanoi Anthropology

From: David Marr via Vsg <vsg@u.washington.edu>
Sent: Thursday, June 6, 2024 11:23 PM
To: Liam Kelley <liam@hawaii.edu>
Cc: VSG <vsg@u.washington.edu>; Judith A N Henchy <judithh@uw.edu>
Subject: Re: [Vsg] Debates inside Vietnam about low-quality academic papers about Vietnam studies: seeking for international scholars' opinion

It sounds like historians may gradually be pushed back to the 19th century, when most had to rely on an independent nest egg. At the Catholic University here in Canberra, seven humanities professors were recently terminated in one go.

David Marr

ANU emeritus

From: Liam Kelley via Vsg <vsg@u.washington.edu>
Sent: Thursday, June 6, 2024 9:36 PM
To: Hiep Duc <Hiep.Duc@environment.nsw.gov.au>
Cc: VSG <vsg@u.washington.edu>; Judith A N Henchy <judithh@uw.edu>
Subject: Re: [Vsg] Debates inside Vietnam about low-quality academic papers about Vietnam studies: seeking for international scholars' opinion

Dear Hiep and list,

Solution? Oh, no, no, no!! I don't offer solutions. :)

Seriously though, I can't speak for the sciences. Perhaps because they can actually involve life and death matters, some kind of concensus might emerge at some point about some kind of standards for say the health sciences. One would at least hope so.

As for the social sciences and humanities, I don't see any solution possibly coming from the world of universities that are racing after the global rankings (and that's a big percentage of the globe). A solution would require dealing with quality, and that in turn requires knowing about about quality in different fields, and that is not an interest of most universities. Instead, what I see happening is that universities will change the way that they seek to improve their rankings from time to time, but those changes will never have a positive effect on quality of scholarship.

So stage one is to produce as much as possible. Then a university might realize that it could improve its sustainability metrics, so the emphasis will then change from quantity in general to quantity about sustainability matters, etc. I don't think that there is an AI metric yet, but certainly one is coming. That will be the next stage.

As this process continues, fields like mine (History) will disappear (and already have in some places) because they can't achieve the metrics that universities desire. Yes, when the rankings first began there were university administrators who said "Oh, yes, we know that the humanities are different. We appreciate that." As anyone could have guessed at the time, that sentiment lasted for about as long as it took to utter those words.

Fields like Anthropology, meanwhile, can only survive if they become more like Sociology. So, no more hanging out in a community for a year doing "participant observation." Instead, you do an online survey and then quantify and analyze the data, and that data better be about sustainability, because that metric needs to be boosted.

All of this then affects hiring. People who do not fit this model will not get hired (and that in turn is one of the ways fields like History and Antropology disappear).

Is there a solution that can come from places that are not racing after rankings? I doubt it because even if people come up with one, they will be significantly outnumbered by people who do not follow their system.

My sense is that the type of scholarship that those of us over say 50 (?) grew up with, and the system that we are familiar with - that will all shrink in scope and will mainly be the preserve of a small number of elite universities that can afford to support a large faculty because they charge their student enormous amounts of $$ for tuition. As I said in my original post, those places will probably always have the lone graduate student who will keep the fire burning and will hopefully find employment at another elite university, because such people will never get hired at the you-must-publish-3-Scopus-indexed-articles-on-sustainability-every-year universities around the world, and those universities are now the norm.

I would love to be optimistic, but I've crossed over to the Dark Side and seen what's there. And once you've seen that, your understanding of the global world of higher education and knowledge production changes forever.

Liam Kelley
Universiti Brunei Darussalam

From: Hiep Duc via Vsg <vsg@u.washington.edu>
Sent: Thursday, June 6, 2024 6:30 PM
To: Liam Kelley <liam@hawaii.edu>; Judith A N Henchy <judithh@uw.edu>
Cc: VSG <vsg@u.washington.edu>
Subject: Re: [Vsg] Debates inside Vietnam about low-quality academic papers about Vietnam studies: seeking for international scholars' opinion

Liam, insightful and well-written your post.

I would like to add that the role of good reviewers is central to the integrity of the scientific publication. But they are harder to find and their number is decreasing despite the effort of good traditional journals to appeal to them in the face of the explosion of information and research submission. In the past, several papers per year (say 5 or 6) to review is fine with many reviewers. But nowadays they are asked by the editors from many journals which find them via reviewer database to review totally about 50 or 60 manuscripts per year (more if they do not decline some of the review requests). Clearly this is unsustainable and the review quality can suffer. Recognising this, many traditional journals try to recognise the central role of the reviewers by giving them free access to the journal issues or certificates (Publons and later Webofsciences include the reviews performed in the profile of researchers next to the list of publications). But this is in no way to cope with the situation.

Good reviewers are imbued with ethics and follow guidelines (constructive as much as possible as you can help budding careers of young researchers). Recently they are NOT allowed to use AI technology such as ChatGPT in the reviewing process such as to check the information or the topic of the manuscript, even though some journals allows the authors to use AI tool in some part of the manuscript as long as it is quoted as using it in that part or the programming tools such as Python generated by AI. Due to the lack of reviewers, journals now can ask researchers with only a few publication in their areas of expertise to review submitted manuscripts with minimum preparation on reviewer guidelines such as COPE.

Publication demand from increasing number of researchers grows but reviewer supply is scarce, crisis and problems including standards as we discuss is happening as a result. Solution ?

Best

Hiep

Principal scientist

DCCEEW, NSW, Australia

From: Liam Kelley via Vsg <vsg@u.washington.edu>
Sent: Thursday, June 6, 2024 5:11 PM
To: Judith A N Henchy <judithh@uw.edu>
Cc: VSG <vsg@u.washington.edu>
Subject: Re: [Vsg] Debates inside Vietnam about low-quality academic papers about Vietnam studies: seeking for international scholars' opinion

Dear Judith and list,

Oh, the topic of "standards" and "Western scholarly tradition" would open up another enormous can of worms.

If such standards ever existed in such a tradition, rather than being an ideal or perhaps just a myth, they are long gone now.

Whether it is the endless number of articles that get retracted (https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2023/3/9/hms-research-retractions/), or now the journals from "reputable" publishers that have been shut down (https://retractionwatch.com/); or the hoaxes that show that with the right politics and jargon one can get fake scholarship published; or the problems associated with mega-journals and citation cartels; or the discussions that I'm sure many of the people on this list could get into that would demonstrate how certain long-established academic presses have published some extremely substandard works (but let's avoid having that discussion). . . all of that is taking place inside of the "Western scholarly tradition." And the above issues are all ones that were in place prior to the emergence of AI.

At this point, I think it's more a case of there being individual editors and scholars who maintain some form of scholarly standards (whether or not they are "Western" or just common sense is debatable), and those people can be found anywhere, but unfortunately, they definitely cannot be found everywhere. At this point, I don't see enough of anything that we can talk about "preserving," "protecting" or "defending." Ok, in this small VSG group we could perhaps come up with a list of certain standards or a list of acceptable journals or something like that, however the world of knowledge production is now much much bigger than the world of scholarly groups, and profs who need to fulfill KPIs and administrators who need to check boxes focus on the metrics, not the ideas of scholarly groups.

Back in the 1990s, I remember reading somewhere in Benjamin Elman's 1000+page book on the history of the civil service exams in China that there was this big "crisis of knowledge" a thousand years ago during the Song dynasty period. The new technology of woodblock printing had made it possible to mass produce information and economic growth brought wealth to many people who then sought to pursue the life of the educated elite. The super-elite at that time complained about the superficiality of the knowledge of the masses of scholars who were trying to pass the exams. I remember reading this and thinking "Oh, come on, it couldn't have been that bad. These guys were just being elitist snobs." However, I now keep thinking back about that phenomenon. It is clear to me now that it is possible for human beings to overwhelm themselves with information, and when that happens, "standards" of "scholarly traditions" suffer or don't survive. We are currently in an exponentially more intense period of excessive information than was the case during the Song dynasty period, and we are now stepping into the AI rocket that will propel us into information infinity. What "scholarly standards" can survive this? Certainly not the ones that are currently failing on many  fronts. Again, this issue is way bigger than predatory journals.

Liam Kelley
Universiti Brunei Darussalam

From: Worthen, Helena Harlow via Vsg <vsg@u.washington.edu>
Sent: Thursday, June 6, 2024 2:28 PM
To: Judith A N Henchy <judithh@uw.edu>
Cc: VSG <vsg@u.washington.edu>
Subject: Re: [Vsg] Debates inside Vietnam about low-quality academic papers about Vietnam studies: seeking for international scholars' opinion

This article in the May London Review of Books by Amir Srinivasan at Oxford is prompted by the ongoing campus protests in the US but is really about the question of academic freedom, freedom of speech, reasoned discussion as the paradigm of free speech, etc.  It is relevant to this discussion because in addition to other things, we are talking about what is “good research” and how and by whom its value is recognized.

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v46/n10/amia-srinivasan/if-we-say-yes

Helena Worthen

U of Illinois Labor Ed retired

From: Judith A N Henchy via Vsg <vsg@u.washington.edu>
Sent: Thursday, June 6, 2024 10:43 AM
To: Judith A N Henchy <judithh@uw.edu>; Hiep Duc <Hiep.Duc@environment.nsw.gov.au>; Liam Kelley <liam@hawaii.edu>
Cc: VSG <vsg@u.washington.edu>
Subject: Re: [Vsg] Debates inside Vietnam about low-quality academic papers about Vietnam studies: seeking for international scholars' opinion

Correction; it seems that HSSC is not indexed in DOAJ.  I presume since it’s a Nature journal they don’t feel the need to include it.  Only one title from the Nature  portfolio is included in DOAJ.

Best

Judith

Judith Henchy, MLIS, Ph.D.

Head, Southeast Asia Section, University of Washington Libraries

Interim Head, International Studies

Special Assistant to the Dean of University Libraries for International Programs

Affiliate Faculty, Jackson School of International Studies

From: Judith A N Henchy via Vsg <vsg@u.washington.edu>
Sent: Thursday, June 6, 2024 10:28 AM
To: Hiep Duc <Hiep.Duc@environment.nsw.gov.au>; Liam Kelley <liam@hawaii.edu>
Cc: VSG <vsg@u.washington.edu>
Subject: Re: [Vsg] Debates inside Vietnam about low-quality academic papers about Vietnam studies: seeking for international scholars' opinion

Thanks to Hiep and Liam for encapsulating the very different perspectives of sciences and ss/humanities journal publishing.

The Scholarly Kitchen, a blog that tracks publishing trends and issues, published this post this morning on the role of the Directory of Open Access Journals (https://www.doaj.org/which lists HSSC).  “ DOAJ’s Role in Supporting Trust in Scholarly Journals: Current Challenges and Future Solutions.”  https://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2024/06/06/guest-post-doajs-role-in-supporting-trust-in-scholarly-journals-current-challenges-and-future-solutions/?informz=1&nbd=39586b33-3aba-4730-b2fd-d0461852614b&nbd_source=informz

Jeffrey Beall used to maintain a database of predatory and fraudulent journals, but stopped publishing it, apparently for various legal reasons.  It is still available, but not current: https://beallslist.net/

Clarivate, the mega-information broker behind Web of Science, claims that its product Publons serves the same purpose of guiding authors to legitimate journals. (Fox guarding hen-house?)

https://clarivate.com/blog/bealls-list-gone-but-not-lost/

As Liam and Hiep both note, the question is ultimately quality.  In the course of creating the VSG bibliography, I’ve looked at a lot of predatory journals, and HSSC looks a lot like one to me at first glance.  However, as Liam also notes, even articles that don’t meet EuroAmerican standards of review can nevertheless contribute to scholarship.  Are we due for a revision of those standards, as this bastion of Western scholarly tradition is increasingly challenged by alternative perspectives of value from outside of this tradition? 

Best

Judith

Judith Henchy, MLIS, Ph.D.

Head, Southeast Asia Section, University of Washington Libraries

Interim Head, International Studies

Special Assistant to the Dean of University Libraries for International Programs

Affiliate Faculty, Jackson School of International Studies

From: Minh Nguyen via Vsg <vsg@u.washington.edu>
Sent: Thursday, June 6, 2024 12:32 AM
To: Judith A N Henchy <judithh@uw.edu>
Cc: vsg@uw.edu
Subject: Re: [Vsg] Debates inside Vietnam about low-quality academic papers about Vietnam studies: seeking for international scholars' opinion

Dear colleagues,

this article on The Chronicle of Higher Education about megajournals and citation rings might be of interest for this discussion: https://www.chronicle.com/article/the-dark-world-of-citation-cartels?sra=true

Best regards,

Minh (Bielefeld University, Germany)

From: Hiep Duc via Vsg <vsg@u.washington.edu>
Sent: Wednesday, June 5, 2024 7:29 PM
To: Liam Kelley <liam@hawaii.edu>
Cc: VSG <vsg@u.washington.edu>
Subject: Re: [Vsg] Debates inside Vietnam about low-quality academic papers about Vietnam studies: seeking for international scholars' opinion

Thanks Liam,

Yes you are right on the root of the problems: the requirements from the institution that everyone have to have a measured output.

But why the institution have this requirement in the first place ?. For academic or universities, it is the ranking and the money come with this in enrolling students (domestic and foreign students). For other places such as mine, the administrators will ask what is your output and why we have to employ you and not the others who can produce scientific work every year instead of you every 5 years on quality science (it is too long for us to get funded budget every year to employ you). If they also ask the question why you are here. This will be most serious because they don’t need whatever the output or service you produce. You are made redundant. Ultimately it is the politicians who allocate budget every year and they demand quick results. This is no way long term research is done.

In Australia, this was how they did to CSIRO (Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation). Gone many fundamental research scientists. The same as today in all government-funded jobs and this is bipartisan policy.

So it is science policy in the time of economic competition that dictates everything we do (including publication). Chinese colleagues also told me that Chinese institutions are also on the same boats with so many competition for funds and jobs in their country.

But I also love to site down and write books in spare time.

Hiep

From: Liam Kelley via Vsg <vsg@u.washington.edu>
Sent: Wednesday, June 5, 2024 7:17 PM
To: Hiep Duc <Hiep.Duc@environment.nsw.gov.au>
Cc: vsg@uw.edu; Judith A N Henchy <judithh@uw.edu>
Subject: Re: [Vsg] Debates inside Vietnam about low-quality academic papers about Vietnam studies: seeking for international scholars' opinion

Dear Hiep,

It's interesting to read your comments. Coming from a humanities background, HSSC looks completely alien to me and it does not look legitimate, but from your science background, you have a different perspective. As the author explains, the norm in the humanities has long been for journals to publish say 10-20 articles a year, have a small editorial board, and not charge a fee.

The sciences have a different tradition, and publishers like Nature and MDPI grew out of that tradition, but have now expanded to included humanities and social sciences journals. Many of those journals have hundreds of members on their editorial boards. My guess is that they do this to solve the problem that you previously mentioned - the difficulty of finding reviewers. If you have direct connections to hundreds of scholars, you can reach out to them and ask them to review an article. This is one factor that leads to the quick responses that authors get.

Do authors get the best reviews possible? I can't answer that, as I have never submitted to this type of journal. However, such journals have been very aggressive in recruiting established scholars to produce special issues, and part of the deal is that the guest editor gets the publishing fee waived, so by this point, there are plenty of good articles in such journals.

In the case of MDPI journals, I've also found articles from say Chinese authors on really obscure topics in Chinese history (but precisely the topic that I am looking for information about). Those articles do not contribute to any larger body of scholarship, and might not be that substantial in their content, and as such, I think that they would probably not be published in "established" Asian history journals, however, such articles have been extremely helpful to me at times. I think that it's absolutely insane that 2,000+ Euros were spent to publish such articles, but when I come across exactly the information that I'm looking for and it's in such an article. . . I say "xie xie"!!

By this point, the publishing landscape has gotten extremely complex. So, back to that issue of creating a database of "predatory journals." Let's say that MDPI journals are included. What do I then do when I come across the exact information that I'm looking for in an MDPI journal? Ok, if I'm not allowed to publish there, can I still cite their journals? Will I get criticized for that? Or do I have to find some way to make the point that's in the MDPI journal without indicating that I learned this from an MDPI journal (not much academic integrity in doing that. . .)?

The situation is already crazy, and it's only going to get more insane.

Liam Kelley
Universiti Brunei Darussalam

From: Liam Kelley via Vsg <vsg@u.washington.edu>
Sent: Wednesday, June 5, 2024 7:09 PM
To: Hue-Tam Tai <huetamtai@gmail.com>
Cc: vsg@u.washington.edu
Subject: Re: [Vsg] Debates inside Vietnam about low-quality academic papers about Vietnam studies: seeking for international scholars' opinion

Dear Hue-Tam,

Thanks for mentioning Cross-Currents. I published one article there, under your editorship, and the process was the most intensive of any journal I have ever published in. However, that was possible because, beyond your involvement, 1) there was money coming from somewhere, and 2) the acting editor was super dedicated. These days, it's difficult to find both of those important elements.

And thank you for also mentioning all of the assistance that people have provided (for free) to colleagues. That is something that I see gets forgotten extremely quickly, and one of the things that I find unpleasant about the debate about academic integrity is the way that some people take the high ground and criticize others without acknowledging and being transparent about the considerable assistance they received in the process of getting published. Some people are very lucky to have kind and helpful colleagues. That should not be forgotten or omitted when discussing this issue, because it is not a black-and-white issue of "I can get published, why can't you?"

Liam Kelley

Universiti Brunei Darussalam

From: Hue-Tam Tai via Vsg <vsg@u.washington.edu>
Sent: Wednesday, June 5, 2024 6:44 PM
To: liam@hawaii.edu; Hiep.Duc@environment.nsw.gov.au
Cc: vsg@u.washington.edu
Subject: Re: [Vsg] Debates inside Vietnam about low-quality academic papers about Vietnam studies: seeking for international scholars' opinion

Many years ago, a new dean for the social sciences  (from the Psychology Department visited my department (History) and asked us how many articles we published each year. Most of us were stunned speechless. Eventually, one of us explained that we, historians, tend to write books, not articles, and that these take many years to complete.

Some Vietnamese colleagues discussed with me the pressure to obtain articles to fill their institutes' journals.
The editors of these journals often have to beg colleagues to write something, almost anything. This happened before the government imposed the requirement that scholars publish in international journals.

I have been wondering whether this recent requirement was intended to raise standards in Vietnamese journals by exposing authors to publishing conventions ordinarily adhered to in international scholarly journals. But this requirement has led to scholars becoming prey to predatory journals that offer no editorial support whatsoever.

I really mourn the disappearance of Cross-Currents. The editor offered not just copy-editing to correct spelling and grammar but also "developmental editing" as well, giving advice on how to structure an article and highlight its thesis.  I think JVS does the same.  Individually, some of us help our Vietnamese colleagues revise their papers for publication. This one-on-one help is time-consuming and its impact is limited to the recipient.  Perhaps, colleagues who studied in foreign institutions and have published in international journals could hold mini-workshops. It would not address the problem of predatory journals, but it may help produce articles for respected journals that do not seek to make money out of authors.

Hue-Tam Ho Tai
Harvard University emerita

From: Hiep Duc via Vsg <vsg@u.washington.edu>
Sent: Wednesday, June 5, 2024 6:22 PM
To: Judith A N Henchy <judithh@uw.edu>; vsg@uw.edu
Subject: Re: [Vsg] Debates inside Vietnam about low-quality academic papers about Vietnam studies: seeking for international scholars' opinion

Dear Judith,

Indeed it is very serious to state that the Journal Humanities and Social Sciences Communications (HSSC) as being predatory (the term coined by the now-retired librarian Geoffrey Beall in Colorado) by the author of Tia Sang article. However I found no evidence of this in reading the article.

The author provided some evidences: increasing number of articles published and increasing revenues. And

“A "sneaky" point of this journal is that all articles are numbered from page 1 to the end of the article (depending on the length of each article). This approach aims to conceal the very large number of pages in each issue of the journal. And the second "sneaky" point is that there is only one issue per year.”

This is normal with articles with doi references on web sites of many journals (page 1 from beginning). The author charges that HSSC is “Sneaky” in concealing the very large number of pages in each issue.  Is it truly the case or speculation . I don’t see on HSSC web site that it publishes only one issue per year but every month (https://www.nature.com/palcomms/research-articles).

Many reputable OA journals also have increasing articles published annually (and hence revenue). The charge of predatory against HSSC in Tia Sang article is weak so far.

Then, the author said

“However, predatory journals often have opaque editorial boards. Firstly, the Editorial Board members may have full names listed but lack clear affiliations or provide vague information. For example, the Editor-in-Chief of HSSC (link: https://www.nature.com/palcomms/editorialboard) is listed as Gino D'Oca with only the source stated as "London, UK". However, on the SpringerNature website, it is mentioned as "Managing Editor, Palgrave Macmillan" . Their scientific profiles indicate expertise in medicine (while HSSC focuses on social sciences and humanities). The six assistant editors all list "Pune, India" as their location. The Editorial Board comprises a list of 1350 individuals from around the world. Although their institutional addresses and nationalities are provided, they come from various fields of study. This clearly does not constitute a scholarly community but rather scholars volunteering (unpaid) for the journal's review process. They are both exploited for their labor and their names are borrowed to lend legitimacy to the journal.”

The information on editor-in-chief is not as the author of Tia Sang as stated only as “London, UK”. It is

“ Gino started working on Humanities and Social Sciences Communications in 2015 when it was first launched (initially operating as Palgrave Communications until the adoption of the present title in 2020). He has held a range of editorial roles in academic journal publishing since 2007, including at the Nature Research Editing Service, BioMed Central and elsewhere. His interests lie particularly in political science, and science and society.”.

“Associate Editor

Maree Shirota (Heidelberg, Germany)

Maree joined Humanities and Social Sciences Communications in 2022, after working in Springer Nature’s Book Publishing division. Prior to this, she completed her doctoral dissertation in History at Heidelberg University, Germany as part of the Collaborative Research Centre (SFB) 933; her research was in pre-modern European History.

“

The 6 assistant editors (usually communicating with authors of submitted manuscripts) are located in Pune, India. This is similar to many OA journals which has assistant editors to liaise with authors (like in MDPI OA journals from Switzerland using Chinese assistant editors)

And finally the author categorically said that the 1350 reviewers listed as in Editorial Board as being exploited by the journal HSSC and their names are borrowed to lend legitimacy, according to the author. A stated charge levelled against HSSC is without proof of intentional exploitation.

The authors referenced to some people such as Duong Tu, Nghiem Hue  (in Tien Phong paper) who I know from other science and education email forum as very vocal and anti-OA crusaders.

Overall the serious charge that HSSC as “predatory” is frivolous and bears the hall marks of ideological crusade against OA publishers. The Tia Sang article provides no solution to the stated problems in the introduction.

The ultimate test of a quality ranked journal is the quality and contents of the published articles. I have a quick look of the HSSC published articles and they are not low quality from my assessment (not as an expert on social science). The Tia Sang article does not single out HSSC as low quality nor low impact factor.

I don’t know much about social sciences and the publication processes behind but all editors of all disciplines should be members of COPE (Committee on Publication Ethics)  (https://publicationethics.org/)

COPE provides practical guidelines and solution to many ethical issues in reviewing and publication such as order of authors, author included without any contribution, affiliation, assignment of reviewers to avoid biases or closed colleagues (coterie), conflict of interests, referees known to be a closed friend or sympathetic to authors, self-plagiarism, chat GPT usage …

I also got this article on social science research and publication in Vietnam in looking at HSSC on the web. It is quite informed of the current status and OA publication which is opposite to the emotional charge (which is well known) as in Tia Sang article.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2405844020313669?via%3Dihub

(https://doi.org/10.1016/j.heliyon.2020.e04522)

Best

Dr Hiep Nguyen

Principal scientist

DCCEEW, NSW

Australia

From: Liam Kelley via Vsg <vsg@u.washington.edu>
Sent: Wednesday, June 5, 2024 5:41 PM
To: Hiep Duc <Hiep.Duc@environment.nsw.gov.au>
Cc: VSG <vsg@u.washington.edu>
Subject: Re: [Vsg] Debates inside Vietnam about low-quality academic papers about Vietnam studies: seeking for international scholars' opinion

On this topic, I just received an announcement for the following workshop:

"Scholarly Metrics for Tenure and Promotion: Quantifying Research Impact"

Summary: What are the tools and methods for providing quantitative assessments of research productivity? What metrics could you use to help explain the importance of your research work to those who are outside of your subject area and may not know the top journals? This presentation will show the resources provided by. . . to assist you in determining both standardized metrics of research impact, such as the H-index and Journal Impact Factor, and personalized measures such as altmetrics and article level metrics. No matter the field, from humanities to sciences, including such quantitative measures in your dossier can help you to demonstrate the impact of your work.

This announcement came from the US.

As for "standardized metrics" like H-index, I once went into GoogleScholar and clicked on the link that takes you to the articles/books that have cited your work, and then I went and looked at as many of those citations I could find.

Most of the citations were very generic: "Vietnam is a country that has a tradition of Confucianism (Kelley 2006)" or "Vietnam is a country in Asia (Kelley 2018)." Then there were those who cited my work in making an argument that was the opposite of what I said in the work they cited. . .

This is taking things away from the original post, which was about an article that talked about the problem of predatory journals and the need to create a database in Vietnam that would keep track of such journals, however, my point is that predatory journals are a symptom of a bigger problem, and the bigger problem is the system that demands regular publications and metrics to explain. . . basically everything.

Ok, so we can set up a database, but that's not really going to change much. Sure, it will be good for funding agencies to know that they shouldn't send $2,000 to the International Journal of Aerodynamics, Humanities, Agriculture, Engineering, Interior Design, and Space Exploration, but we're still going to be left with the same problem: People are being demanded to do something that they cannot do (and really which cannot be done).

One way to think of this is to imagine what would happen if this system was applied to a place where it currently isn't. As far as I know, I think North America has been relatively free of this new trend, although the above workshop announcement indicates to me that it is probably coming soon. What I remember from working in the US a few years ago is that there were many hardworking professors who could have 2, 3, 5, 7, etc. years go by with no publications. Further, they got into the profession thinking that this was the norm, and administrators at that time also told them that this was the norm.

Imagine then what would happen if all of the universities in North America suddenly said, "Ok, from this point onward you have to publish an article a year, and once every three years you must publish in a leading journal in your field. And you have to keep doing that for the rest of your career."

In the sciences where you can have 15 co-authors on a 3-page article, there are perhaps ways to get by.

However, in the humanities for sure, but I think also in the social sciences, I can imagine two predictable outcomes: 1) some people would conscientiously try to do this and would burn out, and 2) some people would find ways to cut corners, such as by recycling their work or co-authoring articles, etc. The cutting corners might not take the form of paying lots of $$ to a predatory journal, but I guarantee you that there would be other forms of "corruption," and in conference hallways people would be whispering to each other, "Did you read ABC's 'research article' in XYZ journal??!!" etc.

This is essentially what has happened around the world in the last decade or so. And it's happened not just at research universities but also at places like teachers colleges and vocational universities where the people who got jobs there never imagined that they would one day have to research and publish articles, let alone articles in "international" journals.

So, ok, set up a database to keep track of the ever-changing world of predatory journals. That's important, I guess, but the problem that led to the emergence of predatory journals will remain.

Liam Kelley
Universiti Brunei Darussalam

From: Hiep Duc via Vsg <vsg@u.washington.edu>
Sent: Tuesday, June 4, 2024 7:18 PM
To: Cau Thai <cvthai75@gmail.com>; Worthen, Helena Harlow <hworthen@illinois.edu>
Cc: VSG <vsg@u.washington.edu>
Subject: Re: [Vsg] Debates inside Vietnam about low-quality academic papers about Vietnam studies: seeking for international scholars' opinion

Hi Helena, Calvin

Many reputable journals have Open Review when both authors and reviewers agree to this. PLOS is open Review from the beginning.

Even the Royal Society, the oldest and most revered institution has Open Review many years ago. Their flagship publication  Proceedings of the Royal Society A (Mathematical, Physical and Engineering Sciences)

https://royalsocietypublishing.org/rspa/open-peer-review

emphasise the importance of Open review where the public and other experts can see how reliable, fair and competent a reviewer is (if you choose to accept open review).

This is keeping the traditional foresight of open science of this institution since 1830

“In December 1830, the Royal Society’s Council decided to print the abstracts of scientific papers read at meetings, for private circulation among the fellows. By spring 1832, these printed sets of abstracts were on public sale and had become the Royal Society’s second periodical, the Proceedings of the Royal Society of London. They appeared monthly, and could get new ideas into print more quickly than the traditional Transactions.

“

As a member of the Editorial board of Environmental Monitoring and Assessment, I witness the sheer volumes of submission every year and the difficulty of finding competent and expert to review on the research subject of the submitted manuscript. Some topic is so specialist in a particular area that it is near impossible to find a reviewer and whether the review accept the request for review even without the option of open review. Remember reviewing is a volunteer task and many experts do not have time to be open to review. There are other problems of finding the right reviewers (and in many case, you can’t). For examples, the authors suggest some names for reviewing and some other names not to ask for review (as the method or approach used can be different and critical to other using different paradigm or approach). How do you decide ?. To solve the problem of finding the right reviewers, some journals in addition also choose to publish the title and abstract of the submissions on its websites and the public and other qualified experts can choose which article they want to review.

As part of Open Science currently dominates the whole scientific, public policy and community, Open Access and Open Review are the norms. The  democratisation of Open Government, Open Science is the current thinking but maybe it is just follow the or catchup with the rapid trend (recent AI and its use in publication is worrying some journals) or failure to regulate ?

Dr Hiep Nguyen

Principal scientist

Climate Change and Atmospheric Science,

Department of Climate change, Energy, the Environment and Water NSW 

From: Hiep Duc via Vsg <vsg@u.washington.edu>
Sent: Tuesday, June 4, 2024 5:45 PM
To: Liam Kelley <liam@hawaii.edu>; Judith A N Henchy <judithh@uw.edu>
Cc: vsg@uw.edu
Subject: Re: [Vsg] Debates inside Vietnam about low-quality academic papers about Vietnam studies: seeking for international scholars' opinion

Dear Judith, Liam and all,

Thanks for raising this issue. This is a timely discussion on this list about publication in Open Access journals.

Liam summarises quite well the situation on publication and KPI used by nearly all institutions (academic, research institutes,…) not only in Vietnam but all over the world.

Let us look back to where this situation comes about. Before the 1990s, all research publication was via scientific organisation, society, … (like Royal Society Proceedings, Nature… with a history back in 18th century or even earlier). I remember my first publication in 1984, the manuscript was typed and sent by mail posted to Europe and waited for reviews back to Australia, then replied and then accepted and then galley proofed (all by paper) forward and backward... The process can take 2 years. The cost was born out by the institution I were with (Sydney University). The paper was published in the journal Biosphere which was subscribed by many libraries of the research and academic institution (quite a hefty sum of money). That was how the publisher (Elsevier) can cover the cost and make profit. Then in the early 1990, came the Internet and the Open Access movement which advocated that all scientific papers should be accessible to citizens not only to paid subscribers in institution libraries. The US government (and later followed suit by many western government) mandated that all publication from scientific researches funded by federal government have to be accessible to tax payers citizens in open access manners (listed in federal registry, web sites,..). Not only publication but all software from federal-funded researches must be available to citizens. That is why such prominent software tools as Weather Research Forecast (WRF), air quality model (CMAQ), graphics tools (NCL), satellite data analysis software from NOAA, NASA, health impact assessment (BenMAP)…  are in public domain and used by many people not only in US but around the world. The WRF weather forecast software are currently used in Vietnam (and many countries) for weather forecasting (what you see in weather forecast on TV in Vietnam are produced by WRF).

The first and most prominent Open Access organisation that becomes the vehicle for researches funded by government to publish was PLOS (Public Library of Open Science). PLOS One and PLOS medicine are some of its publication journals and are still some of top of quality journals (Q1) similar to New England Journal of Medicine or Nature. The new business model of publication funding (not library subscription but user-paid for publication) was taking off quite rapidly on the back of Internet . No longer that to publish a research article has to take a year of more to appear in scientific journal. To cater for rapid science innovation, Preprint journals online can publish quickly such as the research into Covid vaccines. Scientific researches from the lab can rapidly publish on Preprint in the race and exchange of results from labs around the world.  The Covid vaccines based on genomic researches into virus DNAs from labs benefited greatly from Preprint sites. After Preprints, papers there can be peer reviewed and published in proper renown journals.

Of course, the new Open Access model also attracted shonks and crooks in a rapid changing publication landscape demanding “publish or perish” ethos from competitive institution finding research funds and you can easily identify these journals (a lot from India). ISI Webofsciences, Scopus have to constantly weed out these journals when they become infiltrated and listed.

The old journals pre-1990 are still viable and survived albeit it takes longer to publish on these journals but they are still very rigorous (I am an editorial member of one of these journals). When I have no need to publish a research that I know has little competition I prefer to submit to those journals which cost nothing but my current institution is government-run so all researches are mandated to be published open access. Most of these journals also have option for open access articles for these public-funded researches. The government funded the publication cost for open access. The Open Access journals have to be reputable with solid editorial board and rigorous peer review process.

Now it appears in the humanities, the shonks and crooks also come to prey on people who want to publish as part of the demand by the KPI of their institution. This has been discussed in Vietnam in many forums. Use your common sense of easy publication and peer review offering as the saying “beware of Greeks bearing gifts”.

Hiep        

From: Cau Thai via Vsg <vsg@u.washington.edu>
Sent: Tuesday, June 4, 2024 11:45 AM
To: Worthen, Helena Harlow <hworthen@illinois.edu>
Cc: VSG <vsg@u.washington.edu>
Subject: Re: [Vsg] Debates inside Vietnam about low-quality academic papers about Vietnam studies: seeking for international scholars' opinion

Hi Helena,

I have located both Hiep Duc's 2023 paper and your review:

https://www.qeios.com/read/VFXT45
https://www.qeios.com/read/ZKH9GH

Best regards,

Calvin Thai

Independent

From: Judith A N Henchy via Vsg <vsg@u.washington.edu>
Sent: Tuesday, June 4, 2024 11:12 AM
To: Worthen, Helena Harlow <hworthen@illinois.edu>; Hawk, Alan J CIV DHA DHA R&E ACTIVITY (USA) <alan.j.hawk.civ@health.mil>; VSG <vsg@u.washington.edu>
Subject: Re: [Vsg] Debates inside Vietnam about low-quality academic papers about Vietnam studies: seeking for international scholars' opinion

Helena,  When people subscribe to the list, they understand that their posts could potentially be archived on our website, so I don’t think it’s a problem to share the discussions.  I have raised the issue of the exploitative character of this Nature journal with my library colleagues, and I hope others might do the same, if they have a chance to evaluate its quality and find it lacking.

Best

Judith

Judith Henchy, MLIS, Ph.D.

Head, Southeast Asia Section, University of Washington Libraries

Interim Head, International Studies

Special Assistant to the Dean of University Libraries for International Programs

Affiliate Faculty, Jackson School of International Studies

From: Worthen, Helena Harlow via Vsg <vsg@u.washington.edu>
Sent: Tuesday, June 4, 2024 10:00 AM
To: Hawk, Alan J CIV DHA DHA R&E ACTIVITY (USA) <alan.j.hawk.civ@health.mil>; VSG <vsg@u.washington.edu>
Subject: Re: [Vsg] Debates inside Vietnam about low-quality academic papers about Vietnam studies: seeking for international scholars' opinion

Two questions:

1) Has anyone else had experience with Quios? An open-access journal that appears to publish not just articles but also reviews? I may have spelled the name wrong, but I did a review for them about a year ago and suddenly found my review being distributed on the internet. The paper itself was a survey that was critical of academic freedom practices in Viet Nam.  Now when I search for “Quios” it has disappeared on the internet.

2) What are the standards about sharing messages like the ones below to colleagues not on this list?

Thanks,

Helena Worthen

U of Illinois Labor Ed Program (retired)

Ton Duc Thang various semesters 2015-19

From: Dan via Vsg <vsg@u.washington.edu>
Sent: Tuesday, June 4, 2024 8:40 AM
To: frank.proschan@yahoo.com
Cc: vsg@uw.edu; Judith A N Henchy <judithh@uw.edu>
Subject: Re: [Vsg] Debates inside Vietnam about low-quality academic papers about Vietnam studies: seeking for international scholars' opinion

One can find retracted articles from authors affiliated with Vietnam institutions by searching for Vietnam in the Affiliation field in Retraction Watch Database, now made available by Crossref for free searches.

http://retractiondatabase.org/RetractionSearch.aspx

I attach a screenshot of part of the first page of results.

Dan

Daniel C. Tsang

Librarian Emeritus 

University of California, Irvine

From: Hawk, Alan J CIV DHA DHA R&E ACTIVITY (USA) via Vsg <vsg@u.washington.edu>
Sent: Tuesday, June 4, 2024 8:18 AM
To: VSG <vsg@u.washington.edu>
Subject: Re: [Vsg] Debates inside Vietnam about low-quality academic papers about Vietnam studies: seeking for international scholars' opinion

I get a fair number of invitations to publish in these journals. Since I mostly publish on the history of medicine, my research seems tangential to the goals of the publication; occasionally ridiculously tangential. I received a solicitation from a journal whose topic was medical sensors referencing one of my articles about the Satterly Bone Saw!

I tend to be wary of flattery since there may be other agendas. Since I work for the Department of Defense, I am also a bit suspicious since if you check the journal, there is inevitably a Chinese connection, even in journals operating out of western nations such as Australia. Are they interested in my research or my employer’s network? Make sure you know from whom you are buying publication space from.

This is an issue in scientific community as well. These journals are the equivalent of buying an advertisement in the paper. The assumption of these journals is that your grant will pay for publication (not an option with the U.S. Government). Quality of the published work is variable.

Below articles may be of interest.

Why Scientific Fraud Is Suddenly Everywhere (nymag.com)

Junk Science, Junk Journals, and Junk Publishing Management: Risk to Science’s Credibility - PMC (nih.gov)

Open access journals: what you should know | The BMJ

V/r

Alan Hawk

Collections Manager, Historical Collections

National Museum of Health and Medicine

Defense Health Agency Research & Engineering Dir (J-9)

2460 Linden La.  Bldg. 178

Silver Spring, MD 20910

http://www.medicalmuseum.health.mil

http://www.health.mil

NMHM on X (Twitter): http://www.twitter.com/MedicalMuseum

NMHM on Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/MedicalMuseum

Phone: (301) 319-3361, DSN 319-3361

Fax: (301) 319-3373, DSN 319-3373

From: via Vsg <vsg@u.washington.edu>
Sent: Tuesday, June 4, 2024 7:53 AM
To: 'Judith A N Henchy' <judithh@uw.edu>; vsg@uw.edu
Subject: Re: [Vsg] Debates inside Vietnam about low-quality academic papers about Vietnam studies: seeking for international scholars' opinion

Dear colleagues,

Two anecdotes from my own career providing some comparative experiences:

1. In 1981 I presented in my second international scholarly conference, in Italy, on the semiotics of masking (as an undergraduate in 1980, I had already organized an international scholarly conference on puppetry, but I didn’t need a passport to attend). I marveled at the number of conference proceedings that people gifted me with, wondering why the U.S. did not have a comparable practice of publishing conference proceedings so prodigiously. My hosts explained that when it came time for tenure/professorship decisions, the judges got out a meter stick and measured the height of the stacked publications of the candidate, so that created the market that created the demand that created the supply. Trees suffered, but authors were published and professors were tenured, and meter sticks were put to heavy use.

2. In the early 1990s, while at Smithsonian, I secured a small internal grant to have translations prepared of selected Vietnamese anthropology and folklore articles, with an eye to eventual publication in an anthology or in U.S. journals. After securing a special license from the US Treasury Department under the Trading with the Enemies Act, we set about our work. With Dang Nghiem Van, we labored intensively to prepare an impeccable English translation of a magisterial essay of his, submitting it to the Journal of Asian Studies. Returning it unreviewed, the editor of JAS suggested that if I really wanted to make Professor Van’s ideas and research available to international readers, I should either co-author an essay with him, or simply publish his ideas under my own name. I did neither, of course, but submitted it to another reputable journal where it was accepted and has been cited numerous times since. (Even if one of the reviewers balked at Van’s mention of Marx, which Van had inserted simply to disguise the influence of Levi-Strauss for his Vietnamese editors; the reviewer wrote, “the author clearly knows nothing about contemporary Marxism”.)

The plague of metrification has afflicted many fields, and it should hardly surprise us that it has also reached the Vietnamese academy. What that also means is a vicious gyre, as Vietnamese students with limited access to prominent and reputable journals (locked behind paywalls and subscription mega-systems), are more and more likely to glom onto disreputable journals and shoddy scholarship that appears – superficially – to be internationally accepted.

Alas,

Frank Proschan
Independent part-time scholar and full-time curmudegon

From: Liam Kelley via Vsg <vsg@u.washington.edu>
Sent: Tuesday, June 4, 2024 5:44 AM
To: Judith A N Henchy <judithh@uw.edu>
Cc: vsg@uw.edu
Subject: Re: [Vsg] Debates inside Vietnam about low-quality academic papers about Vietnam studies: seeking for international scholars' opinion

Dear Judith and list,

A couple of years ago we had as the theme of the 13th Engaging With Vietnam conference "Knowledge Production in the Age of Metrics and Global Rankings." The issue that you bring up here is precisely what that theme was about, and what we discussed in keynote sessions, as we could clearly see the direction things were going.

The issue is much larger than the predatory journal mentioned in the Tia sang article, and way too big to be addressed by something like mentoring.

In essence, while universities in North America seem to be moving on the same path that they've been on for years, universities in many other parts of the world have gone into overdrive in an effort to rise up in the university rankings. One of the most important metrics is the number of publications that a university produces, and so that means key performance indicators (KPIs) for profs, such as, at least one publication a year, but depending on the place, it can be more. I can't remember exactly what it is in Vietnam now, but I think quite a few places want a publication a year, and then one publication in an "international" journal once every three years, and then there are requirements such as that you have to have international publications to be able to supervise graduate students, etc.

And this is happening in many more places than Vietnam, so. . . that means that there are A LOT of people who need to get published NOW. The journals that existed prior to this surge are not enough to handle the quantity, and some are too slow. At some established journals, it can take 3+ years from submission to publication. That's not going to work, because the KPIs have to be fulfilled now.

As a result, there has been a massive expansion in journals over the past 15 years to accommodate this new phenomenon. Further, those journals have to follow a new "business model." The days of journals being supported by subscribers is over (there may be people/libraries who/that still subscribe to journals, but publishers are not going to rely on that to start a new journal), and there has also been a push for journals to make their content open access (for reasons from saving trees to making it easier to get more citations).

What we now have is a wide range of different journals, and there is no simple way to categorize them. Each one has to be dealt with individually, and that's a problem (I'll get to that below).

Without subscribers, the money has to come from somewhere. Some journals are supported by institutions (that also helps their ranking). Some require authors to pay, and many universities are willing to support that payment as they believe that having their profs publish in open access format will increase the possibility that they will get cited, and that metric will benefit the university's overall ranking.

In this new world, there are people who have realized that they can make a lot of money if they charge people to publish their writings. At the same time, there are also more altruistic people who want to have a good journal and contribute to their field, and who do not have institutional support, so they also charge a fee. Further, the fee can range from like 150 US to 2,000+ Euros. So, "pay to publish" isn't a sufficient indicator of whether a journal is good or not. Instead, you have to go and look more closely at the journal.

That's a problem, because that takes time and effort. So, there are people who understand this and have devised a scheme to make that task easier. They index journals and if the journal has been indexed, then that is supposed to be a sign that the journal is ok. However, that system has its flaws. If you take Scopus, for instance, the metrics that it favors are ones that I like to think are the same as the metrics you would want for a product that you are trying to sell globally. Are there people from different countries involved in the journal? Yes? Ok, that's good. Are the authors getting cited a lot, and by people from around the world? Yes? Great! You're a Q1 journal.

So, on the one hand, there are certain established journals that were already like this, and they then got ranked highly. However, a new journal can also quickly achieve the same result by getting colleagues from around the world to organize special issues and to get people to cite each other.

Meanwhile, while I've been talking here mainly about the extremes, there is a huge continuum between those extremes.

At the end of the day though, it's all about numbers. For rankings to go up, the number of publications has to go up. For that to happen, profs need to meet KPIs. For that to happen, you need lots of journals, because everyone has to get published now.

Mentoring? That takes time, and no one has time. Profs have a KPI review twice or three times a year. Figuring out if a journal is good or not? That also takes time. Having the prof indicate on their KPI form which Scopus quartile it is in is much easier for the administrator who has to review the prof's performance.

This is the "Knowledge Production in the Age of Metrics and Global Rankings" that we talked about at EWV in 2022. The conference that year was held at the end of October. Then in November of that year, ChatGPT was released. . .

It's "game over," folks. Yes, there will always be a lone graduate student in an elite university doing things the "old school" way, but for the rest of the world. . . they've got KPIs to fulfill, and rankings to improve.


Liam Kelley
Universiti Brunei Darussalam

[Vsg] Debates inside Vietnam about low-quality academic papers about Vietnam studies: seeking for international scholars' opinion

From: Judith A N Henchy
Sent: Monday, June 3, 2024 6:00 PM
To: vsg at uw.edu<mailto:vsg at uw.edu>
Subject: Debates inside Vietnam about low-quality academic papers about Vietnam studies: seeking for international scholars' opinion

Folks, I’ve been asked to share with you information about the attached debate that is of concern to some scholars in Vietnam.

An article in Tia Sáng (redacted translation attached) is accusing the Nature publisher’s journal Humanities and Social Sciences Communications of being a predatory journal, based on: article processing cost ($1,700), lack of editorial board in appropriate disciplines, number of articles generated in a year, and poor peer review and lax editing. This journal is also included in the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ), which is supposed to vet its listings for quality.

This issue has come up in the Vietnamese academy as a result of the recent national demands that scholars publish in ISI and Scopus indexed journals. Arguably, Nature is pandering to this need (and similar trends throughout the developing economies), and doing so very profitably, by publishing substandard, poorly researched and derivative work.

I have raised the issue of predatory journals before on the list, with an argument that they do provide an outlet for foreign scholars who are not able to meet more rigorous review standards of established academic publishers, bringing their often worthwhile research and insights to light in the international scholarly forum. As the argument below sets out, however, having a prestigious publisher like Nature take advantage of its name for commercial exploitation of scholars who have few publishing options, is not only unethical but is a threat to academic integrity.

I think this is a question that the VSG community could profitably discuss. We have talked in the past about the need to mentor younger scholars in publishing standards and expectations. Perhaps this debate affirms this need.

Best

Judith Henchy
VSG List Administrator
University of Washington Libraries

Text of argument below:

----

 Vietnamese scholars are currently debating about publications about Vietnamese literature and history in the journal Humanities and Social Sciences Communications - HSSC] https://www.nature.com/palcomms/  

Some scholars question the quality of the journal because it publishes unoriginal papers having no methodology and including wrong knowledge about Vietnamese texts and history, and wrong quotations, and extremely carelessly referenced sources. One scholar published his concern in Tia sáng (May 4, 2024) , identifying predatory journals in humanities https://tiasang.com.vn/author/tran-trong-duong-66/  (rough English translation is attached in this email)

In this piece, Tran Truong Duong, the scholar, who is currently working at the Institute of Sino-Nom Studies (Vietnam Academy of Social Sciences), points out some seriously wrong translations…..

That is not to mention many other mistakes that a good quality journal should not allow its published paper to contain. Of those mistakes are providing wrong information about sources and putting in direct quotes that do not exist in the quoted source 

All these to indicate Humanities and Social Sciences Communications - HSSC] is a low-quality academic journal. 

Even as indicated in a piece by Tran Truong Duong, HSSC includes signs a of predatory journal including large amount of money each article published: each article incurring a fee of £1240.00/$1690.00/€1340.00, resulting in significant revenue generation; editors (chief-editors and association editors and associate editor lead) do not have clear background. Reviewing process needs to be put into question, given that reviewers apparently do not identify basic wrong information or the paper's author does not address it.  

The Vietnamese scholars who have experienced how hard it is to publish internationally in serious journals are quite surprised that why existing such a journal that publishes the papers apparently unchecking (just to mention those in Vietnam studies). It is noted that Associate Prof. Dr. Tran Trong Duong published some papers in good journals in the field of Vietnam Studies such as JVS https://www.jstor.org/stable/26537805 and Sungkyun Journal of East Asian Studies (Duke University Press): https://read.dukeupress.edu/sungkyun-journal-of-east-asian-studies/article/23/1/1/355109/Doctrine-beyond-Borders-The-Sinographic-Cosmopolis?guestAccessKey=27631824-36d5-4613-baff-d11cf26d17af. 

The way of publishing papers like with Humanities and Social Sciences Communications does harm equal opportunities among scholars, given that  the number of international publications  forms a decisive factor in evaluating funding applications and job promotion) -- please read more in Tran Trong Duong's piece in Tia sáng). 

Critically, this journal exploits the name of Nature - a famous scientific platform - to lure scholars to publish in it and to serve on the editor board (many scholars from famous United States universities are serving on this board apparently because of this possibly-called branch name Nature (in most communications with American scholars  did email some scholars and get the response highlighting the meta-link Nature). Some discussion about the questionable meta-link Nature has been raised in  international platforms such as  https://www.thecollegefix.com/open-access-journals-create-concerns-about-quality-former-academic/

  That would be great if we have opinions from international scholars especially those are in Vietnam studies (with the case of publications about Vietnam published in this journal). 

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