The Sensitivity of Research on COVID-19: An Analysis of the Response of Peer Review Systems of Predatory Journals

Introduction

Open Access (OA) is a noble concept that was supposed to herald a revolution in scholarly publishing by making research freely accessible to anyone online. However, it has turned into academic racketeering because of the rapid rise of questionable and low-quality journals. The problem of compromised quality appeared in scholarly communication as a result of a new open‐access publishing model called gold open‐access. The model is mishandled by a group of publishers whose primary focus is monetary gains. Such practices threaten research integrity and honest scholarly pursuits. The victimizer is what has come to be called predatory publishers. The term Predatory publisher was introduced in 2010 by Jefferey Beall. Experts still hung up on the term after so many years of introduction of the term, focusing on whether it is appropriate or not. However, the term is not so important; what is essential is to understand the underlying threat to scholar's communication and the damage to early career researchers and researchers based in developing countries from becoming the victims of these publishers. Predatory publishers are essentially counterfeit publishers. They pretend to be genuine scholarly publishers, but they aim really to generate as much revenue as possible from researchers. They employ the gold access model, charging authors a fee upon acceptance of a research article for publication. Many claim to be scholarly institutes, scholarly societies, or associations when they are just a sole proprietor running multiple journals from a dwelling. Some copy the titles of existing journals or create titles very close to those of respected journals. They use spam as their primary advertising method, filling the inboxes of countless scholars around the world. Such journals often lack and compromise the Peer review, which is a pillar of Science and research. Peer reviewers typically recommend that unscientific or unsound research be rejected for publication, preserving the integrity of the scholarly record. It also serves to help improve articles before they are published. Reviewers point out errors and omissions in manuscripts, problems that can be fixed in the next revision of the paper. Since predatory journals fail to manage an honest and proper peer review, many of the papers published in them are not only unscientific but crude, unpolished, often flawed drafts. One such example is the experiment presented in this paper, when a deliberately flawed and manipulated paper recommending certain medicines as a potential treatment for the deadly disease COVID19 is submitted in the selected sample of journals about the sensitive issue declared as the pandemic and global health emergence by World Health Organisation. Misinformation about Covid-19 might be deadly for millions of people around the globe.