Inside STAT: Fining one 'predatory' publisher won't end bad science in journals

Science publishers aren’t supposed to be in the disinformation business — or that’s what a federal judge said late last month when she slapped OMICS International with a $50 million penalty in a suit brought by the FTC. The ruling is a clear win for the honest brokers in scientific publishing, but it’s not the solution to the problem of the more than 900 estimated “predatory” journals that exist. But such journals are symptoms of the fundamental problems in scientific publishing, not the problems themselves. Even legitimate pre-publication peer review doesn’t catch fraud and allows plenty of junk science to enter the literature. “Don’t expect the fundamental problems in science publishing to go away without an effort to address their root causes,” Adam Marcus argues in the latest Watchdogs column for STAT.