On April 1, a strange bit of open-access scholarship appeared in the Scientific Journal of Research and Reviews: 鈥淲hat鈥檚 the Deal with Birds?鈥 A worthy query by researcher Daniel Baldassarre, surely, yet to the discerning eye, there is something odd about
For one thing, its abstract strikes an unusually ingenuous tone: 鈥淏irds are pretty weird. I mean, they have feathers. WTF? Most other animals don鈥檛 have feathers.鈥 And the sample size鈥攁 woodpecker, a parrot, and a penguin鈥攁lso seems suspiciously small. The main figure, a graph plotted along an x-axis ranging from 鈥渨eird beak鈥 to 鈥渓ooks like a fish,鈥 with a red line labeled 鈥渢he deal,鈥 is a textbook example of dadaist absurdity. The prose veers wildly between academic terminology and gormless observation. 鈥淭his is the first study I am aware of to attempt to quantify the deal with birds,鈥 Baldassarre writes. 鈥淯nfortunately, the results were ambiguous, although Bayesian approaches may prove useful in the future...When presented with weird behavior, birds exhibited a multimodal response including physical aggression and duetting, both of which were repeatable across highly variable contexts.鈥
Reading such a paper, one might draw the conclusion that the editors at Scientific Journal of Research and Reviews didn鈥檛 give it close enough consideration鈥攐r any at all鈥攂efore publishing the study. That鈥檚 because the SJRR is a predatory journal, designed to bilk unwary academics out of money, and Baldassarre鈥檚 paper is a joke鈥攓uite literally鈥攁t their expense.
Predatory journals are a in academic fields. They solicit manuscript submissions, charge authors exorbitant fees, and skip typical quality checks, including the gold-standard practice of peer review. Since legitimate open-access publications like PLOS One do sometimes charge for submissions, it鈥檚 not uncommon for people to get snookered.
鈥淭hey do all sort of sneaky things, like having fancy, sneaky looking websites,鈥 Baldassarre says鈥攅ven going so far as to list real scientists on their editorial boards, often without those scientists鈥 knowledge. Some journals are just automated money-making scams; others are a bit more hands-on at appearing legitimate. 鈥淭he common denominator is that they鈥檙e not real academic, peer-reviewed journals, so anything they publish is potentially just total garbage.鈥
Baldasarre first had the idea to submit a joke paper in early February, when the latest in a long line of emails from one of these scam journals landed in his inbox. He slapped together the first iteration of 鈥淲hat鈥檚 the Deal With Birds鈥濃攁 couple of paragraphs in the cursory format of a manuscript鈥攐nly to see it rejected, perhaps as an obvious parody. Undaunted, he inserted some selections from an earlier legitimate paper to pad it out and resubmitted it to SJRR. 鈥I wanted to bring to light how these guys operate, how ridiculous the process is, and that they are not, in most cases, reviewing these works,鈥 he says.鈥Some people who鈥檝e been in academia for a while are in the know, but there are clearly enough people who aren鈥檛 on the up and up and are just getting scammed.鈥
While SJRR initially demanded a $1,700 publication fee, Baldassarre was eventually able to bargain them down to nothing. 鈥淚 think they thought if they published the first one for free I鈥檇 be more willing to publish with them later,鈥 he says. As for whether the journal is aware of the prank, Baldassarre says the world of predatory journals is so ambiguous that it鈥檚 not clear whether the people running them are even paying attention to what鈥s published. His hope, meanwhile, is that the notoriety the piece has inspired will prompt people not to publish with SJRR in the future and to be more careful of predatory journals in general.
His cause is noble, no doubt. Yet an important question remains: What is the deal with birds? Baldassarre鈥檚 actual research involves bird behavior, and aims to discover why they do some of the strange and silly things they do. While observation and experimentation have their benefits, Baldassarre notes dryly, they can only take you so far. 鈥淥bviously it鈥檚 a joke, but it gets at a kernel of truth," he says. "That鈥檚 how science works, right? You鈥檒l never completely have all the answers. We may never truly understand what the deal with birds is.鈥