Flaky Academic Journals and Forestry

The legal community may be catching on to the proliferation of predatory, bogus, or just plain flaky journals of medicine, forensic science, statistics, and every other subject that might attract authors willing to pay "open access" fees. As indicated in the Flaky Academic Journals blog, these businesses advertise rigorous peer review, but they operate like vanity presses. A powerful article (noted here) in Bloomberg's BNA Expert Evidence Report and Bloomberg Businessweek alerts litigators to the problem by discussing the most notorious megapublisher of biomedical journals, OMICS International, and its value to drug companies.willing to cut corners in presenting their research findings.

The most recent forensic-science article to go this route is Ralph Norman Haber & Lyn Haber, A Forensic Case Study with Only a Single Piece of Evidence, Journal of Forensic Studies, Vol. 2017, issue 1, unpaginated. In fact, it is the only article that the aspiring journal has published (despite spamming for potential authors at least 11 times). The website offers an intriguing description of this "Journal of Forensic Studies." It explains that "Forensic studies is a scientific journal which covers high quality manuscripts which are both relevant and applicable to the broad field of Forestry. This journal encompasses the study related to the majority of forensically related cases."