Pay to Win Journals, a better metaphor

Pay to Win (PTW) refers to a video gaming design in which players convert some form of real-world currency into an in-game advantage. Most multiplayer games, to varying degrees, feature PTW. Some games build PTW directly into the architecture, ala Candy Crush. When visiting my parents I like to play their Pogo games. The solitaire variants are freaking hard, but they'd be a lot less hard if I just opened up my wallet and bought an array of powerups.

PTW isn't always intended. Games often have shadow economies, that is, real-world marketplaces which facilitate real-world transactions for in-game resources but which are not supported by the game's designers. So, players in World of Warcraft who purchase equipment or entire characters are paying to win, even though the game's internal universe features no such mechanism.

I used to play a lot of Diablo 2—I mean, A LOT of Diablo 2—and got so tired of farming high runes that I finally broke down and spent $2 on a high rune pack. Yes, that's two U.S. dollars. Pretty good deal, I thought, considering that I'd have to farm oh I don't know 9,182 hours or something to get those runes.

Two bucks or two years of your life.

What's this have to do with scholarship?

Some academic journals are, in fact, PTW.

As a whole, we have misunderstood "predatory" journals. These journals are so named because they allegedly prey on unsuspecting, naive academics. Their publishers, rapacious and often deeply Third World, swindle desperate fools out of their hard-earned money in the form of Article Processing Charges. These are the fees authors must pay to see their papers published "open access." Such journals lack standards, peer review, editorial boards, sleek websites, and an endorsement from your friendly neighborhood Impact Factor.

They're not like commercial publishers, who may also be rapacious but in a genial First World kind of way: they dominate the publishing market, crushing competitors, relying on the free labor of journal referees (oh, and let's not forget AUTHORS), demanding opaque subscription fees so outrageous they devastate collection budgets, and while, yeah, they also charge open access Article Processing Fees, they expect authors to grab external funding for them, i.e., to shake down grant funders (aka, taxpayers), which, again, is just good ole fashioned First World greed. Nothing wrong with THAT.

Predatory publisher = BAD

Commercial publisher = GOOD

A lot of people conflate the concept of open access with these journals. That's pretty nuts. One has logically nothing to do with the other. Open access simply means that a journal's contents can be read by anyone with an Internet connection (insert the obligatory take that those without the Internet cannot read OA, or those behind the Great Firewall of China, and so these journals are not truly OA). This conflation is a transparent but apparently effective way to reinforce the traditional publishing industry's power. OA believes in sharing research not with a select group of academic elites and their underlings but with, like, the whole world.

You know, a world infested with research parasites, according to the editor in chief of the New England Journal of Medicine.

Nothing about OA mandates charging APCs. Indeed, many good OA journals exist (like this one) which don't charge any such fees whatsoever, and they exist all without conglomerate publishers. I know, I know, it seems impossible to do that without a publishing machine. Like, who's going to foot the bill for hosting fees, what with the 50 unique monthly visitors (bots excluded)?

We could also discuss how laughable it is to believe peer review does quality control. It doesn't, it hasn't for a long time, and it may never have done so. We've all heard the milquetoast defenses:

It's not perfect, but like democracy it's the best we have.

It's not perfect, but like mustard it's good enough.

It's not perfect, but like #statstwitter it's more often right than wrong.

The only way to do any sort of credible peer review is through what's called post-publication review, with all data and methods published. Anyone can read the work, anyone can analyze the data, anyone can check the references, and anyone can discuss anything about anything. Anyone can also point out, as is pretty common on PubPeer, correlation values exceeding 1.0. Usually this will be a small circle interested in, like, the soil density underneath hibernating brown bears. But when something blows up and gets popular, as happened with certain COVID-19 research, everyone can laser in on it, from research parasites to data thugs to methodological terrorists and even some traditional academic researchers who are so deep in the SPSS that they use it as a web browser.

But let's instead discuss how predatory journals aren't so predatory after all. They are, in fact, Pay To Win, and their service is not exploitative so much as symbiotic. And, granting that, they're not much worse than accepted academic practice.

Some researchers figured this out, or, at least, finally published about it. I found mention back to 2012 by Theresa Hammond calling such journals "pay to play." Pretty accurate.

Frandsen recently reviewed the subject, noting that academics may notice their colleagues using PTW journals and becoming "zombie professors." Ferris and Winker, in 2017, concluded that "the term 'predatory' may not always refer to the journal's relationship with the author." And these eye-talian folks recommended researchers avoid PTW journals and thus break the "vicious cycle of inclusion-citation-promotion."

Probably the most high profile case involving PTW journals concerned Derek Pyne, an associate professor of Thompson Rivers University who alleged that his colleagues deliberately published in them. He got lots of mainstream coverage at the time. Pyne eventually was suspended from his university and reinstated after an independent investigation found that the suspension had violated his academic freedom. The university's records said that he choked someone, so who knows.

One of the faculty at Pyne's school, Panagiotis Tsigaris, responded by claiming that Pyne had greatly exaggerated the number of PTW journals in which his colleagues (and presumably he) had published. Tsigaris's response found a welcome home in Publications, a journal of MDPI, one of the publishers frequently alleged to be predatory, e.g., here.

Incidentally, Tsigaris has, since Pyne's article, enjoyed quite a prolific run complaining about journal blacklists. But before Pyne's article, he was certainly no stranger to publishing with the Clute Institute, a PTW publisher that engages in a practice low down even by PTW standards: charging a $75 submission fee as a "plagiarism scan." You know, like a college application. Because applying for college and submitting a manuscript are basically equivalent. I'll illustrate via analogy:

CLUTE INSTITUTE:UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN::HANDFUL OF LOW PAID RANDOS:THOUSANDS OF EMPLOYEES TO FACILITATE THE WELLBEING AND EDUCATION OF THOUSANDS MORE YOUNG ADULTS

Academics are no different from non-academics. They're people, and as people they generally care most about themselves and the things which constellate themselves, that is to say, their careers and the outcomes of those careers, that is to say, fame, fortune, and sufficient prestige to be an invited keynote speaker in July Boston or January Miami.

If conference ads were honest.

When you're in a system that rewards publication counts, then maximizing those counts makes sense. If that means paying $500/publication in a PTW journal, then this is a rational decision, given the high stakes. True, you won't command the prestige you'd like, because "top journals" still inspire awe and fear among so many doe-eyed academics, but you can hit your tenure or promotion benchmarks. Maybe such padding can help you ascend to higher forms of administrative office, which really is what politics is all about. Play your cards right, and you, too, could be on a Clute Institute editorial board.

All the superheroes are villains

Using PTW journals is no different, fundamentally, from the legitimate practices many academics use to assert authorship. It just involves money and is new, so it feels dirtier. It's like the Gatsby of publishing.

We know about unscrupulous chairs or lab chiefs who insist on having their names on papers without doing any work. We even defend lab chiefs for this. We may say, if it weren't for their lab, we couldn't have done any of the science. And just as we permit co-authorship to utility companies for providing the electricity, water, and sewage disposal necessary for the lab's smooth operation, so we shall...er, wait.

We don't do that.

We know about doctoral committees that put their members' names on papers resulting from a dissertation's Manuscript Option. Boy, that doesn't sound at all like a system ripe for wholesale abuse, where the doctoral student and maybe a junior faculty member do the work but senior members, all of whom have substantial weight in determining whether the doctoral student graduates or the junior faculty member is promoted, have the luxury to do nothing whatsoever.

We know about solicitious senior faculty who toss their graduate students' or junior colleagues' names on anything up to and including toilet paper, in the hopes of getting them ahead. It's like grade inflation. If you're not doing it for your students, they're at a disadvantage.

Recently I heard a faculty member discussing how he had proofread a manuscript for authorship credit. He wasn't speaking ironically, with shame, defensiveness, or anything; it was stated matter of factly, like that was completely normal. He read the paper over, maybe pointing out a comma splice, an omission of the literature (didn't you read his work?), and he became an author.

(A good treatment of this subject can be found here.)

This is, obviously, because academia has just become a career mill like politics or any other professional universe. Of course people will game systems to increase their publication counts when those publication counts approximate research quality, productivity, and overall value, and those things translate into real-world rewards. When you have no way to judge value except crude numbers, then you get this kind of sideshow. And when these are the people who predictably rise to power, it's no surprise that they'll wield that power to maintain their power.

Academics as a game

Let's suppose academia were like World of Warcraft. Most of the players would just play the game, grinding out papers, applying for and managing grants, endlessly applying for and managing grants, running experiments, refereeing, attending conferences, justifying sabbatical requests to tropical climates, mentoring students, suffering through the instruction of undergraduates, complaining about the resultant student evaluations of teaching. Some will be better than others, and maybe a few will take shortcuts, but their fate will be determined by the many idiosyncratic factors that contribute to the success of any enterprise: a disproportionate blend of skill, luck, timing, and real-world accommodations.

Others will simply leech off the stronger players, perhaps by abusing some real-world authority. Why Get Good when OTHERS can Get Good and you can just tag along? Maybe they'll even lie about what they've done, their professional experiences and accomplishments, so as to appear more appealing. They're not good enough to keynote January Orlando but they're doing it anyway. Or maybe they're nice enough people, well-meaning and Try Hards, and good players will happily carry them the best they can.

And then some will open up PayPal and ship the money. GG.

Of course the analogy doesn't work, because in a game like World of Warcraft you can't fake it all that long. Everyone eventually notices that you're the one who keeps Standing in the Fire and wiping the raid. You're the one who keeps pulling random trash, you're the one at the bottom of the damage charts, and you're the one who keeps holding the raid up because you have to keep letting your goddamn dog in and out.

But, then again, you can always be one of the raid's million healers. You could even go fullblown Peter Principle and become the raid leading bear tank, which means you basically just stand there and yell.

So maybe the analogy isn't that bad, after all.