Monday, April 22, 2019

Medical journals published by "predatory" publisher claim three University of Toronto faculty members are editors -- here's the university's reply after I asked about that [UPDATE: The three faculty members names have been removed from the publications' mastheads]


As I blogged about a week ago, in the course of reporting about a study published in the International Journal of Clinical Skills (IJOCS), I learned the journal is published by Pulsus Group, a company which has a London address, but is owned by Omics International. 

For more about Pulsus and Omics, the headlines of these two first-rate articles should provide some focus.

Medical Journals Have a Fake News Problem: With help from drug companies, Omics International is making millions as it roils the scientific community with sketchy publications by Esmé E. Deprez and Caroline Chen, Bloomberg News, August 29, 2017.

$50-million fine for predatory publisher that swallowed up Canadian science journals by Tom Spears, Ottawa Citizen, April 4, 2019.

Per my item, Sally Richardson -- a faculty member at Kingston/St George’s University London -- was listed as "Senior Associate Editor" on the IJOCS's  masthead. 

In response to my inquiry, she replied, "My name shouldn’t be on this list as I haven’t been part of this journal for many years and will have my name removed." 

Sure enough, within a couple of days, her name vanished from the IJOCS masthead.

That got me wondering if mastheads on other Pulsus journals might also be inaccurate. 

Pulsus publishes IJOCS via OpenAccessJournals.com, so I started with the first journal listed on their website, Diabetes Management, whose masthead includes:

 
...and on the Editorial Advisory Board:


I've never reported about Dr. Denis Daneman, but I recognized Dr. David Jenkins's name  from a story I blogged a couple years ago about his involvement with a failed nutrition rating system called NuVal. He's a prominent name in the field of nutrition science, so I was curious to learn more about his role at Diabetes Management.

Are other University of Toronto faculty on mastheads of other journals in the OpenAccessJournals.com stable? 

A quick search led me to the masthead for another of their journals, Clinical Practice (Therapy), whose Editorial Board includes:


Last week I wrote Philippe Devos, the university's Media Relations Director, and asked him if he'd ask the three professors if the information on the mastheads was accurate.

This afternoon he replied:
In response to your questions, the University of Toronto has the following response:

Denis Daneman resigned all editorial associations with the journal Diabetes Management in August of 2016.

David Jenkins cannot recall ever agreeing to serve on the Editorial Advisory Board of the journal Diabetes Management.

Bruce G. Pollock resigned all editorial associations with Clinical Practice (Therapy) in 2014.

We will be contacting the journals in question to request the names of these faculty members be removed from the respective mastheads.

Further, we have found the following contact info for Diabetes Management.

Daphne Boulicault, Commissioning Editor, d.boulicault@futuremedicine.com, Unitec House, 2 Albert Place, London, N3 1QB, UK, +44 (0)20 8371 6090

Jeanette Hedgson, Journal Coordinator, Diabetes Management, diabetes@openaccessjournals.com

Thank you for bringing this to our attention.
More to come...

UPDATE, 4/25/19:

Drs. Daneman and Jenkins have been removed the masthead of Diabetes Managment.

Dr. Pollock has been removed from the masthead of Clinical Practice (Therapy).