It is hard not to notice that the Malaysian academia has been getting a lot of bad press lately. One issue that was raised that Malaysia is among the top five listed to be publishing in 'predatory journals' within the Scopus database. For physical sciences, Malaysia is the second. The source being the Scientometrics article by Macháček and Srholec entitled, "Predatory publishing in Scopus: evidence on cross-country differences". This was first brought to my attention by a colleague in UM in her social media post. Now, the problem is probably known to some of us much earlier, that there are Malaysian authors who send articles to unknown journals that might have very low level of peer review, but we did not know to what degree. To generally blame the authors capitalizing on such journals for their self-promotion is perhaps too hasty and needs a second proper look. This is in no way an attempt of condoning unethical practices but just being cautious on claiming what are the intents of the authors. We know very well, that academics are being pressured to publish as many articles as possible (sometimes rather at an unnatural rate) and probably will be in the sequence of causes for unethical practices. Hence, as such, one might need to look into more primary causes. By all means, do investigate what is going on and help how to solve this (which is more important). Personally, I have always cringed at the number of publications some super-prolific authors produce, sometimes producing at the rate of (more than) two articles per month. Think that's fantastic? Then try to read this. It always amazes me how much work that these authors can do. See also Malaysia cases in retractionwatch.
One of my reservations with the bad press is that the academia gets stereo-typed easily without a solution at hand and the innocent ones get hurt along the way. First, let us note that the problem is not unique to Malaysia but the fact that Malaysia is in the top five deserves swift attention. It is mentioned that the maturity of research culture plays a part in the matter. Indeed, Malaysia's research culture probably started during the IRPA days around forty years ago and this is relatively young. It will be interesting to study what influences the trajectory of the research culture and what has gone wrong. Second, current emphasis on the number of publications should be relooked carefully and simply typifying a caste system of publications can just backfire, One should learn about Goodhart's law: once a particular (numerical) indicator is identified, then it can be gamed by the players in the system. These numbers may appear objective but the problem is what meaning it carries is subjective. It is best to put proper peer review or measures of narrative nature in place. If there is no stable pool of experts in the country, just bring experts from abroad and beware of systemic bias. Third, be watchful of the publication culture and trends for the future. Being once a chief editor of a local journal, I am aware of so many problems with respect to the processes leading to publications. Finally, it comes to what I've said in a social media post, scientists publish their research to be read by other scientists in the same or related field. In other words, journals are there to serve specific community whether it is large or small (the same goes to conferences). There needs to be contextualization with regards to the fields or community. There are also trends for open access publications either by professional societies or commercial publishers and they may serve different interests. A nice debate can be found here. There is now a push for journals with arXiv overlay and it can be read here. Final point, do what is natural for researcher's ecosystem and there is no one single universal solution for all. While publishing is a must for scientists, where it should be, can be contextual. Not all research results are deemed publishable in journals (regardless of what tier it is) if proper peer review system is in place. Flexibility of producing technical reports (and books, which requires bigger efforts) could be put in place. I see this is still put in practice in some places (see e.g. https://scholarship.richmond.edu/mathcs-reports/). Or simply put one's publication on the arXiv (while there is no peer review, the content is still screened by the admin and scientists at large, and if not careful, one's category can get demoted to general physics or general mathematics) and there are cases of retraction.
The above are mere suggestions. Whether it may help solve problems or realistic enough to implement, I leave this to the experts. Initially, I did not want to be dragged into this sensationalised problem but I am concerned of the after-effects of the bad publicity.
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