No matter how tempting it might be:
Jim Vander Putten suspected that some education conferences accepted any study pitched by someone willing to pay a registration fee. He worried that the gatherings enabled scholars to pad their publishing records while tainting research in the field.
To test his hypothesis, he sent fake research-paper summaries larded with unforgivable methodological errors to the organizers of 15 conferences he believed to have lax standards. All responded by offering to let him present his findings and to publish his papers as part of their proceedings.
But instead of exposing the dissemination of bad research, Mr. Vander Putten now stands accused of research misconduct himself.
Administrators at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock, where he is an associate professor of higher education, have told him he violated policy by undertaking a study of human subjects without the approval of the campus’s institutional review board. They have rejected his defense that an outside, commercial review board signed off on his plans — after Little Rock’s board failed to do so. A research-integrity officer on his campus has called on him to relinquish the data that he gathered. University officials took such actions after conference organizers he had duped threatened to sue.
Mr. Vander Putten’s unusual case highlights inconsistencies in the judgments that review boards make. It also raises questions of how much commercial boards, which account for a growing share of such reviews, can be trusted to safeguard colleges’ interests.
Mr. Vander Putten served six years as head of the university’s own review board, from 2000 to 2006. ...
via chronicle.com
Moral of the story: good luck to the university professor who brings a lawsuit to his/her campus. The interesting part is that, since the study was the sting, the conference reviewers were the human subjects! The UA-LR IRB wouldn't approve the sting.
So, what if I write a goofy paper with made up data and send it to an environmental economics journal on Beall's list, it gets accepted and published and then I expose the sting? Do I get in trouble for academic dishonesty? In spite of this:
Jeffrey Beall believes such ruses have been highly effective in exposing lax standards in scholarly publishing. Mr. Beall, a scholarly-communications librarian at the University of Colorado at Denver who writes the blog Scholarly Open Access, says such stings have "saved people from submitting good manuscripts to bad publishers." Citing a widely publicized2013 exposé in Science magazine based on the acceptance of a fake, obviously flawed scientific paper by dozens of open-access journals, he said often "the only way to expose a counterfeit is by using their own methods."
I think so. If the publisher threatens to sue the university then I get thrown under the bus.
