“Fake News” is a real topic these days, but should those reading medical journals be concerned with it? Bloomberg has published an interesting, in-depth case study  involving Srinubabu Gedela, Ph.D., whose quest to stock his home town’s library with more research journals for his diabetes studies has grown into an “internet publishing powerhouse” claiming 1,000 open-access journal titles posting 50,000 articles annually.

Per a 2016 lawsuit, the Federal Trade Commission terms his companies a “predatory publisher duping professionals.” The medical journal industry is not a small one: a 2015 study in the journal BMC Medicine estimated revenue generated at $10.5 billion annually for traditional journals from global subscriptions.

Jeffrey Beall, librarian from the University of Colorado, Denver, has ended up at the center of the controversy, having been tracking publishers for the past few years who seem to publish articles with little to no peer review, the traditional cornerstone of the industry. Beall estimates that as many as 25% of the publishers of “scientific” journals could fall into the “predatory” category.  Check out this article in Bloomberg for more details.