Why some organizations run fake research and how is it used?
Fake research has become a major area of concern in India and many other countries around the world including China. For those who are familiar with the norms and processes of academic research, it is common knowledge that peer review plays a very important role in ensuring the quality of research papers. Peer reviews involve review of a research paper by one or more fellow research scholars who may be senior to the author of the paper that is being reviewed. However, like every other field, higher education too has its own share of crooks and criminals who focus more time on finding loopholes in the process of publishing research papers than actually doing any worthwhile research.
The lure of government grants and stipends in addition to recognition in academic circles that open up excellent career opportunities, is a good enough reason for reckless and unethical individuals in academia to compromise their standards. Thankfully, there are still many strong academicians in the high chairs of leading institutions who stand like giant rocks in the way of these criminals that are trying to pollute the institutional environment. That makes it difficult to circumvent the peer review process by scholars affiliated to such institutions. The only way out for the criminals is to publish their "work" without any peer review, which they manage to do with the help of equally crooked publishers.
As it happens in countries like India and China, every new area of opportunity achieves scale very fast because of the sheer number of stakeholders in such new areas of opportunity. It freaks me to term academic research as a 'new area of opportunity' in the commercial sense but let me clarify that I'm only using that metaphor to refer to the activities of the criminals in the garb of research scholars. Sadly for us, these criminals have already done massive damage to the country's prestige since around 42% of fake single journal publishers in the world are from India. The union and state HRD and I&B ministries should act fast before the situation gets out of hand.
Published on 04-Jan-2019 10:32:39
