How Universities Shape Power, Silence Dissent And Influence Society
Below is a section from my new book which is due for release on 24 July 2026. It will be available on amazon priced £11.99 in the UK and $15.99 in the USA
The following is an excerpt from Chapter 6; “Corrupting Peer Review”
Predatory journals, fake conferences, and plagiarism
Alongside the well-known problems of peer review and academic publishing incentives, another development over the past two decades has reshaped the research landscape: hundreds of predatory journals and fake academic conferences.
These outlets mimic the appearance of legitimate scholarship while operating primarily as businesses whose revenue comes from publication fees rather than intellectual quality.
Their growth has created new opportunities for academic fraud, plagiarism, and the large-scale dissemination of unreliable research.
The business model of predatory publishing is simple. Researchers receive unsolicited emails inviting them to submit papers to journals with impressive titles or to present work at international conferences.
They promise rapid publication and “rigorous peer review”. Once the author pays the publication fee, sometimes hundred or even thousands of pounds, the paper is accepted and published with minimal or no review.
These journals usually deliberately adopt names that closely resemble those of reputable publications or conferences to create an impression of legitimacy.
Examples include titles such as International Journal of Advanced Computer Science and Applications, which can easily be mistaken for the legitimate International Journal of Computer Science and Applications.
Conferences branded with titles like “World Congress on Engineering and Computer Science” are organised by commercial conference companies but marketed in ways that resemble established academic meetings with similar titles.
The differences are often subtle enough that even experienced researchers can be misled.
The damage caused by these predatory outlets operates in two directions. First, they deceive legitimate researchers into paying publication fees under the impression that their work will appear in a credible peer-reviewed venue.
Many early-career academics and researchers in institutions where publication pressure is intense are particularly vulnerable to such invitations.
Second, these outlets provide a convenient vehicle for academic plagiarism. Because editorial scrutiny is minimal or non-existent, plagiarised work can easily be published under a different author’s name.
Once the paper appears online, it may be indexed by search engines and citation databases, giving the plagiarist apparent academic credit while obscuring the original source.
Martin Neil and I discovered we were victims of plagiarism when colleagues started emailing us about papers they had found online that looked strangely familiar.
One case we discovered was especially blatant [1] as can be seen in Figure 8. Our paper “Using Bayesian Networks to Predict Software Defects and Reliability” (published in the Proceedings of the Institution of Mechanical Engineers, Part O: Journal of Risk and Reliability in 2008) was reproduced almost word for word in another paper titled “Predicting Software Reliability and Defects Using Bayesian Networks”.
The supposed authors, from Rivers State University of Science and Technology in Nigeria, made the most superficial alterations to the text; they changed the order of a few words in the title and abstract while leaving the paper unchanged.
The plagiarised version appeared in the predatory European Journal of Computer Science and Information Technology, which could be easily confused with the reputable European Journal of Information Systems.
Unfortunately, this was not an isolated case. Other papers of ours have been plagiarised in slightly more subtle ways [2] such as by changing the title completely, adding a small amount of new text relevant to the new title, but otherwise reproducing verbatim most sections.
The authors cite some related literature but omit any reference to our work, making the plagiarism unmistakable.
The damage does not remain confined to obscure journals. Once published, many of these papers are indexed by widely used search tools such as Google Scholar, which often harvests citations automatically with minimal filtering.
As a result, poorly reviewed or fraudulent articles can appear alongside legitimate research in search results, accumulate citations, and even influence metrics used in hiring and promotion decisions.
Indeed, the plagiarised version of our paper in Figure 8 was discovered when a colleague encountered it during a Google search on Bayesian-network approaches to defect prediction; it appeared among the top search results.
For readers outside academia, the distinction between rigorous scholarship and predatory publishing can therefore become almost invisible.
The scale of the problem can be seen in the case of OMICS International, a publishing conglomerate that launched hundreds of journals while charging authors large publication fees and providing little meaningful peer review.
In 2019, a U.S. federal court ruled that OMICS had engaged in deceptive practices after misleading researchers about the legitimacy of its journals and editorial processes.
Similar vulnerabilities were exposed through automated hoaxes using SCIgen, a program created by MIT students that generates meaningless computer-science papers filled with technical jargon.
Journalists and researchers discovered that dozens of SCIgen-generated papers had been accepted by low-quality conferences and journals.
Not all instances of plagiarism occur in obscure outlets. In one particularly disturbing case, large portions of work produced by myself and Martin Neil were reproduced without attribution in a book from one of the most reputable publishing houses.
The book was written by an individual who had briefly been registered as a PhD student with us before leaving without explanation. Much of the material in the book reproduced our work, including research that predated the author’s time as a student, yet none of it was credited.
When we notified the publisher and demonstrated that the author’s listed qualifications and endorsements were themselves questionable, no corrective action was taken.
In such an environment, the traditional signals of academic credibility, journal titles, conference proceedings, and even the appearance of peer review can no longer be taken at face value.
The result is a research ecosystem in which the mechanisms intended to signal credibility increasingly fail to distinguish genuine scholarship from imitation.
References
[1] https://probabilityandlaw.blogspot.com/2014/11/an-even-more-blatant-case-of-plagiarism.html
[2] https://probabilityandlaw.blogspot.com/2013/04/bayesian-networks-plagiarism.html
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