LAUSR

Dear Editor, We would firstly like to congratulate Dr. Deora and his team for their article on about predatory publishing in Neurosurgery [1]. Being an early career neurosurgeon from a developing country, this has been a problem often encountered by myself and my colleagues. The article picks out a list of predatory neurosurgical journals from various blacklists making it easy for a researcher to avoid them. More importantly, it summarizes well the different open-access platforms available and steps to identify predatory publishers. Dare we say these issues are equally important for developed nations as has been demonstrated in the article. Predatory publishing was born out of a vicious cycle fueled by systemic failure. The Medical Council of India, to promote research and publications in the health sciences domain, forced faculty of all medical colleges to publish or perish. Remuneration and promotions were tied to research output by universities and medical schools. Clinicians who had never published before took shortcuts to publish. They were unaware of ethical publishing or research methodologies during formative training. This led to a generation of clinicians not versed with ‘how’ to publish ethically but ‘need’ to do so desperately. In 2015, the Medical Council of India published guidelines for academic promotions which was received with widespread criticism [2, 3]. It recognized Index Copernicus, a sham index, which allowed predatory journals to flourish. They did not include e-journals/online-only journals which were the new upcoming way of publishing [2]. While the main objective was to prevent predatory publishing, researchers lost the opportunity to publish in several reputed online journals and predatory journals very quickly released print versions with an International Standard Serial Number (ISSN). These guidelines were revised in early 2020, which accepted journals indexed in Medline, PubMed Central, Citation index, Sciences Citation index, Expanded Embase, Scopus and Directory of Open Access Journals (DoAJ) [4]. While this list is inclusive, it leaves a degree of uncertainty, where publication in any journal with a citation index is accepted. Unfortunately, this includes Google Scholar, which indexes most of these predatory journals, as it is simply a search engine for scientific literature that indexes the full text or metadata [5]. This has been used by some predatory publishers, who claim to be recognized by theMCI under the 2020 guidelines using misleading impact factors [6]. A useful list of fake metr ics ( impact factor) can be found at ht tps: / / predatoryjournals.com/metrics/. Open-access publishing is becoming increasingly popular with China leading the way with funding from various government agencies [7]. In India, government research funding is a fraction of overall GDP and is relatively small—0.6% in comparison to the 2.1% of China and 2.8% of the USA [8]. The non-availability of grants and funding makes it difficult for researchers to afford any category of open access. The Indian Council for Medical Research (ICMR) does provide financial support to promote good quality research amongst postgraduate residents. They provide a one-time grant of INR 50,000 (~ 680 USD) limited to 100 recipients per year [9]. This probably is insufficient to cater to the 44,000 doctors who enter speciality training every year. This lack of funding further results in poor quality trials being conducted and published from India and China. A recent systematic review by Zhang et al. noted that reporting of trials in major Chinese and Indian journals falls short of that achieved in the gold standard Western journals and may reflect underlying inadequacies in the design and conduct of these trials [10]. They also noted that Chinese trials appear biased and may selectively report positive outcomes while ignoring neutral or negative outcomes. This leads to multiple rejections from legitimate journals and the development of a bias against studies reported from these countries. This article is part of the Topical Collection on Neurosurgery Training