Crack Open the Make Believe: Counterfeit, Publication Ethics, and the Global South

Abstract

concept of “counterfeit.” The research context of my short intervention draws on ethnographic and archival work, engaging the question of how people experience but also imagine legality/illegality. Since 2010, as part of my interest in the category of “publication ethics,” I have been conducting ethnographic observations of the quarterly forum of the global charity Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE). My research also looks at how the category of “research misconduct” has taken form in the context of disciplinary adjudication by regulators (Jacob, 2014, 2016a) and of modern patterns of documentation more generally (Jacob, 2017). In brief, I am as much interested if not more in institutional watchdogs of academic misconduct than I am in alleged perpetrators of academic misconduct. Pausing over the mutually exclusive dichotomy of real versus counterfeit journals, my short intervention approaches the idea of counterfeit by way of making three points in relation to public harm and denunciation, the idea of the authentic, and watchdogs. Through these anchor points, I hope we can better see the eruption of counterfeit scientific journals as more inexorable than strange or outrageous. The idea here is not to justify the counterfeit of academic journals by claiming that counterfeit exists elsewhere; it is also not to exoticize or, worse, romanticize counterfeiters. Rather it is to examine it on its own terms, from the point of view of its craft, and to highlight dexterity as one of its most underexplored aspects. As James Siegel has beautifully shown in his ethnography of counterfeiters in contemporary Indonesia (Siegel, 1998), there exists a certain power in making fake university certificates, or fake divorce certificates, and so on. Aside from being about the financial profit it brings, it is a power for crafting “a sort of authority for one’s self” or “one’s own rubber stamp” and for attesting to one’s creative abilities. Given the transformations of scientific research and publishing over the last thirty years, described extensively in 19 Crack Open the Make Believe: Counterfeit, Publication Ethics, and the Global South