In pursuit of the degrees, scientists of Kazakhstan fall into “money” traps.

Hundreds of thousand dollars are getting away from Kazakhstan because of the scientists, who pays money to the "predatory" scientific publishers. In 2015, Kazakhstan researchers published 267 articles in fake journals.

Scientists need that articles to get new degree – and they are ready to pay for those publications. Unfortunately, they pay for nothing — “predatory” publishers are called like that for a reason, they gladly take money from authors for the publications, however those articles have no scientific value. That means money wasted for nothing. Roughly speaking, 25% of scientists from Kazakhstan, who published abroad in 2015, ended up as naive victims of the experienced swindlers. That naivety simply doesn’t make science of Kazakhstan look good — it inflicts the financial damage to the country, make the money to flow away abroad to the swindlers’ pockets.

This year Kazakhstan scientists published their works in the following fake publishers with the bad reputation:

• Mediterranean Journal of Social Sciences – published 74 articles of scientists from Kazakhstan;
• Asian Social Science – 59 articles;
• Review of European Studies – 32 articles;
• Modern Applied Science – 19 articles;
• International Education Studies – 6 articles.

– Every year, starting from 2013, almost one third of Kazakhstan scientists’ articles (35%) are publishing in the predator-like journals, – says Daniyar Sapargaliyev, the young scientist from Almaty Management University (formerly IAB). – We have analyzed the indexes of 2015 year, although the year haven’t ended yet, you can clearly see the main quantitative indexes. Unfortunately, we have to tell that, almost 25% of the Kazakhstani articles are published on pseudoscientific publishers. Although, if previously, in 2013 and 2014, Kazakhstan scientists published their works on 2-3 “predatory” journals, this year number of journals like that has grown to 11.

You can assume that fame of the naive Kazakhstan scientists are spread all over the world, swindlers are actively working up Kazakhstan people, who want to publish their scientific works abroad for money.

It’s worth noting that about 21 thousand journals are indexed in the Scopus base. Of course, on this quantity there can be a faulty in statistics, which makes it possible to fake editions to get into the base, but their quantity there is not very large, about 80 «fakes» to 21 thousand genuine scientific editions. What is surprising is that specifically Kazakhstan authors somehow find pseudoscientific journals out of twenty one thousand and publish their works in them.

– “Predatory” publishers have learned to cheat, falsely declare their indexation in Scopus, ascribe someone else’s achievemnts, names of famous scientists to approver their researches, that those scientists have never heard of. Furthermore, they write impact factor (index of citation, criteria of importance of the scientific magazine, — approx. ed.) from not existing fake companies just like them. That means, not existing companies give the rating to the fictional publishers just like them. It’s a double cheat, – explains the situation Jeffrey Beall, the librarian and scientist, well known to the whole world by his fight against artificial publishers.