Empower our academics against predatory journals

 

The recent revelation that Malaysian academics rank amongst the highest in the world for publishing in predatory journals has raised questions about the academic landscape in the country. Predatory journals are for-profit enterprises that manipulate the journal indexing systems and allow an easy (and lucrative) pathway for substandard academics who desperately need to publish. 

These journals feed into the insatiable drive of universities in developing countries to rise up the rankings through academic output in indexed journals. Such universities make it compulsory for their academics to publish journal articles regularly to maintain their key performance indicators (KPI) which is key to academic career progression.

While this may be news to the public, it has always been known to those of us in academic circles. When our academic institutions prioritise university rankings rather than worthwhile academic output, this is the logical conclusion; universities only measure the number of indexed publications rather than impact on society. 

As young academics, this poses a dangerous dilemma to us as we are forced to engage in such ruthless behaviour to maintain our KPIs or risk our academic futures by focusing on more groundbreaking research.

This KPI-driven environment is but the tip of the iceberg in what is a systemic issue that is permeating all of Malaysian academic society. From the educational foundations to how tertiary education is structured, all academic study in Malaysia has a teleological goal in mind: the commodification of academic study. 

We have been noticing two major trends in Malaysian academia: 1) the creation of an overly complicated tertiary education framework that oversimplifies academic quantity over quality which has resulted in 2) a new class of academics who view research as purely necessary rote work.

Tertiary education in Malaysia is monitored for quality through the Malaysian Qualification Agency (MQA) superstructure that puts in excessive amounts of bureaucracy and paperwork for all tertiary education institutions, which puts overwhelming busywork for all involved. The nascent purpose of this is to reduce the amount of direct monitoring that the Ministry of Higher Education has to undertake and also allows for easy startups for smaller private institutions. 

All an institution needs to do is to ensure that all the basic paperwork is available for audits every five years. Due to the overbearing nature of this “paperwork” (where certain departments or schools can dedicate up to a whole year in advance in preparation for it), tertiary institutions merely focus on ensuring that the necessary documents are present rather than actually focus on improving the quality of instructed education and research output.

This puts undue strain on larger more established universities that struggle to manage all this documentation without dedicated audit staff on hand and serves as a loophole for many of Malaysia’s “fly by night” private colleges. These unscrupulous colleges, often set up in rural and semi-rural parts of the country, would focus primarily on preparing these documents at the expense of all other aspects of academic services to students. 

In many cases, these colleges would run for a few years, enough to get a sizeable number of enrollments, but right before a full audit is needed, they disappear without a trace, leaving students stuck with no degree and tens of thousands of ringgit wasted and in debt to PTPTN with nothing to show for.

Within an educational framework that privileges paper qualifications over quality teaching and research, this will inevitably invite prospective academics to adopt the same values. When the value of an academic scholar is measured purely in numeric terms such as KPIs and number of publications, people enter academia with these same goals in mind. 

Change assessment criteria

While this may not look like an issue, this system does not have the nuance to differentiate a scientific researcher, who works in a team and can produce dozens of publications a year from a social science researcher who publishes a seminal book that takes years to write. This "one size fits all" approach has forced academics to adopt “publish or perish” mentalities which privilege publication quantity over research quality.

For a simple example, a cultural anthropologist would have to spend months (or ideally, years) with a community he or she is studying to collect substantial qualitative data. Only upon “returning” from their fieldwork would they be able to “write-up” their research. 

This includes considerable time to read existing scholarly literature that is relevant to their study, transcribe (and translate) hours of interview recordings, reflect upon and analyse their fieldwork findings. Then, the peer-review process of journal submission typically takes anywhere from a year to two years, from online submission of a manuscript to online publication of an article. 

This is especially true for legitimate “non-predatory” and well-established journals, where the review process and publication queue is significant. In consideration of these processes, coupled with the pressure to publish, on top of teaching and administrative duties, it is no wonder why so many Malaysian scholars are faced with the temptation of compromising their academic integrity to submit sub-par work to predatory publishers.

The solution may lie in changing university assessment criteria, especially when it comes to publications in a variety of academic disciplines. For example, an early-career academic in the social sciences and humanities would do well to focus on one or two, single-authored, publications in legitimate, international journals within their first two years of employment. 

We emphasise single authored-work in the humanities and social sciences in comparison to the large “teams” of authors found in science, medical and engineering publications that often involve significant amounts of input from multiple researchers involved in lab-based studies. 

Humanities and social science research do not and cannot operate in a similar manner where the methods and principles for producing new knowledge differ from that of the conventional sciences.

To also successfully empower young scholars, universities both public and private need to recognise that an allocation of enough time, on top of the heavy teaching and administrative load, will help in the production of better, well-meaning and impactful work. A reevaluation of work distribution is important to help struggling academics find the time to write the articles they want. 

There are still a number of significant issues to consider beyond this, such as the overall work culture and basic camaraderie, but if upper managements in Malaysian universities are open to some of these changes, then perhaps we may be able to see a significant and hopefully, positive shift for those early-career researchers, including those on the verge of starting careers in academia. 

We believe that such considerations need to be taken proactively, to address the current issue of Malaysian academics publishing in predatory journals. This worrying revelation about fraudulent publications as a result of an audit and KPI-culture also greatly undermines the earnestly executed and groundbreaking work that legitimate Malaysian academics — young and old, from and of the nation — have been advancing for years. - Mkini

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BENJAMIN YH LOH is a senior lecturer at the School of Media & Communication, Taylor’s University.

ADIL JOHAN is a research fellow at the Institute of Ethnic Studies (Kita), National Universiti of Malaysia (UKM).

VILASHINI SOMIAH is a senior lecturer at the Gender Studies Programme, Universiti of Malaya.

HELENA VARKKEY is a senior lecturer at the Department of International and Strategic Studies, Universiti of Malaya.

The views expressed here are those of the authors/contributors and do not necessarily represent the views of MMKtT.