How do I complain to chair if my advisor regularly writes to scam journals to get tenure?

Question

My advisor and his PHD Students are writing regularly to journals published by a publisher, which is on Beall’s list of Predatory Journals. I emailed Beall and he told me that the journals were advertising as non-profit but usually publish if you pay them.

I am in US. So recently the PHD Student and advisor published to this predatory journal’s conference taking place half way down the world and obviously it got accepted. So my advisor approved the student’s trip to that country (almost 1500 $, so it had to be approved by chair), but the chair rejected it saying it’s not worth the expense.

Now I want to directly email my chair and point out to him about my advisor’s publishing record. I am angry that instead of publishing to genuine journals, my advisor (who I believe is incompetent but has good political clout in the university) is publishing to these scam journals and wasting university money to achieve her tenure requirements.

Since I am still working in lab, I need advice on how to approach my chair so that I can keep myself safe from possible wrath of my advisor and at same time negate the contributions of these journals for his tenure.

Edit 1: The conference listed Google Scholar as one of its sponsors, so I emailed Google and they told me they never sponsored this journal and will order removal of their name from the sponsors list. So yeah, these are all first rate scam journals and I have all these emails, if I ever need to communicate with the chair. I have done my investigation; I just need to get my results across.

Answer 1

Your relationship with your advisor is extremely important for you getting a PhD. I would only contact the chair if you are absolutely certain that you would be able to find a new advisor if things went bad between you and your current advisor. When her tenure comes up for review, someone on the panel will know that these are scam journals. The fact that the chair has already denied one of her expenses means there is likely a red flag in her file (metaphorically). Now if she forces you to publish in one of these journals, you should absolutely complain, but don't complain about what she is doing with other students unless you think it is worth losing your advisor completely and creating enemies in the department. You can talk to the student who actually was going to go to the conference suggest he complains, but ultimately I think that is his responsibility. So again, refer to the first point; make sure you have an escape plan so to speak, and make sure that you are OK with potentially not earning your PhD because you stood up for yourself.

Answer 2

It sounds like the chair may already be aware of the situation, if they are not approving travel to said conference.

Typically those in the field, especially those who've been around a few years, and especially those in positions of authority in universities, will know which journals/conferences are high quality and which are not. These are generally backed up by various metrics (e.g. impact factor), which try to quantitatively assess the quality/impact/popularity/etc.

Academics are often measured on such metrics, rather than simply number of papers published. A single article in Nature, for example, would give significantly greater benefit to one's publication score than a dozen in the International Conference for Scamming and Profit. I would hope your university uses such metrics in some way or another, and from what I've seen, more and more universities are doing this, with a variety of standard/external and customised/internal performance metrics.

If you really feel you must make a point of it, I'd suggest simply having a discussion about the List of Predatory Publishers, rather than a specific discussion about your advisor.

You may find the chair is well aware of the list, but has their hands tied by university policy. Or they may be enlightened by the list and be able to have the tenure policy changed to exclude or reduce the benefits of such publications.

Just remember it's not your job (and is someone else's job) to assess the advisor's academic performance, and you want to be careful how you come across if you try (a) tell them how to do their job, (b) make academic assessments of tenured staff as a student, (c) heavily criticise your advisor, which will likely be ignored if there's any suggestion of an existing grievance between the two of you.

For all you know, your advisor and the chair may be close friends, or at least closer colleagues to each other than "some unqualified upstart of a masters student!" (hypothetically their words, not mine :P)