FTC hits predatory scientific publisher with a $50M fine
FTC hits predatory scientific publisher with a $50 million fine

                      
                      
          It used to be that publishing a scientific journal was a significant undertaking, requiring infrastructure for peer review, printing, and distribution, and the costs were often defrayed by charging authors for the honor of publishing. Now, it's possible to simply convert submissions to PDFs and throw them online. With those barriers gone, science quickly became plagued by predatory publishers who decided to eliminate peer review as well. Instead, they simply published anything from people who have the money to cover the publication fees.
The profits of these "predatory publishers" come from a mixture of genuine scientists who are unwary, people who want to pad their publication records, and fringe scientists who just want to see their ideas in the literature regardless of their lack of merit. All of them can end up putting misinformation into the scientific record and confusing a public that generally doesn't even know about the existence of predatory publishers.
Now, the Federal Trade Commission has won a summary judgement that just might cause some predatory publishers to step back from their business model. An India-based predatory publisher has been hit with a $50 million dollar judgement for deceptive business practices, along with permanent injunctions against most of the activities that made it money.
Deceptive practices
The FTC brought this action back in 2016 under Section 5 of the FTC Act, which covers unfair or deceptive practices. The commission targeted two companies—OMICS Group, a publisher, and iMedPub LLC, which organized scientific conferences—along with an individual, Srinubabu Gedela, who runs the two companies. Part of the case involved showing that these were actually a single entity, sharing business addresses in both the US and India.
The practices of the companies, as documented by the FTC, are pretty egregious. While the OMICS Group claims that its publications are peer reviewed, two different journalists have submitted nonsense papers to its publications and had them accepted without revision. Scientists who have submitted articles indicate that they came back from review in a matter of days; the court recognized that peer review typically takes months. In some cases, the manuscript was simply published without warning after submission.

          
                      
                  