I submitted my research paper in a dubious journal. Need advice.

[Grilled_chicken]

Hello everyone,

I wanted to ask some advice. I am in residency and while I have worked on research projects before, I am pretty inexperienced being a first author and leading projects by myself. To make a long story short, I worked on a research paper and submitted it to a couple of relatively famous journals and it got rejected from there. After that, I submitted it into a journal that looked fine on paper. At least on their website, it looked like it had a relatively good impact factor reported there. After it got accepted and published there, I realized that i made a huge mistake. The journal is not indexed by medline so my article doesn't show up in PubMed. The only way to search my article is to google it and go to the journal website.

What are my options now. I have yet to pay the APC fees. I have emailed them that I would like to withdraw my paper however they are refusing saying that it is already published and so I will need to pay the APC fees and I cannot withdraw it.

Anyone here who faced a similar situation? Is my paper lost cause now? They are asking for a lot of money too which is not really the issue but it just feels bad wasting a paper that i worked so hard on.

Also, I recognize that I am ******ed for doing this

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[DrMetal]

Hello everyone,

I wanted to ask some advice. I am in residency and while I have worked on research projects before, I am pretty inexperienced being a first author and leading projects by myself. To make a long story short, I worked on a research paper and submitted it to a couple of relatively famous journals and it got rejected from there. After that, I submitted it into a journal that looked fine on paper. At least on their website, it looked like it had a relatively good impact factor reported there. After it got accepted and published there, I realized that i made a huge mistake. The journal is not indexed by medline so my article doesn't show up in PubMed. The only way to search my article is to google it and go to the journal website.

What are my options now. I have yet to pay the APC fees. I have emailed them that I would like to withdraw my paper however they are refusing saying that it is already published and so I will need to pay the APC fees and I cannot withdraw it.

Anyone here who faced a similar situation? Is my paper lost cause now? They are asking for a lot of money too which is not really the issue but it just feels bad wasting a paper that i worked so hard on.

Also, I recognize that I am ******ed for doing this

These predatory journals are a dime a dozen nowadays.

Don't pay the fees. Maybe they wont publish it. In fact, you don't want them to publish it, b/c then you wont be able to submit elsewhere.

You might be able to negotiate a fee to get it back without them publishing it. Yes, essentially pay them a ransom for your now 'kidnapped' paper.

If it's by chance an American based journal, you may have legal recourse against their publishing company. If not American, no way.

 

[Grilled_chicken]

These predatory journals are a dime a dozen nowadays.

Don't pay the fees. Maybe they wont publish it. In fact, you don't want them to publish it, b/c then you wont be able to submit elsewhere.

You might be able to negotiate a fee to get it back without them publishing it. Yes, essentially pay them a ransom for your now 'kidnapped' paper.

If it's by chance an American based journal, you may have legal recourse against their publishing company. If not American, no way.

Thank you so much for your response. Essentially they have put up my article on their website and they are saying I cannot retract it since I have already published it. I will try to see if I can negotiate a "fee" for them to take down the article. This is such a stupid mistake that I made and could have been easily avoidable if I just researched the journal more. Never again.

 

[GoSpursGo]

While I generally agree that predatory journals suck and should be avoided, at the same time there is probably some utility in having this off your plate and just being done. Of course YOU spent a ton of time on this paper, but at the end of the day it doesn't sound like it was found to be of much interest at more "legit" journals. Is it really worth all your time and money to get them to take the paper down and just for you try and peddle this paper elsewhere and maybe be able to add a PMID to what is ultimately just a line on your CV? Frankly if your fellowship application relies so heavily on this paper getting accepted then you may have bigger problems.

Try talking with your senior author and get their feedback. If this is actually a good paper that should be publishable elsewhere, then maybe it's worth your time to "get it back." But if it's just a case report or a small case series... I might just see this as a sunk cost and cut your losses. While it's painful, you could spend a lot of time and money getting this paper back and still not wind up getting it into a decent journal.

Does your article have a DOI?

 

[dozitgetchahi]

Thank you so much for your response. Essentially they have put up my article on their website and they are saying I cannot retract it since I have already published it. I will try to see if I can negotiate a "fee" for them to take down the article. This is such a stupid mistake that I made and could have been easily avoidable if I just researched the journal more. Never again.

Any journal *should* allow an article to be retracted if all authors request it to be retracted (or, in some cases, if some/any of the authors request a retraction). The question, as stated otherwise, is whether it would actually get published anywhere else.

Even if it isn’t indexed by Medline, this article *is* at least published in a journal somewhere - and it can be seen if you go to the journal’s website. That’s not great, but it’s better than nothing. You can put that in your CV. (And let’s be honest - most articles published by residents for the purpose of matching fellowship are straight up garbage anyway, no offense. So I’m not sure it matters too much where this is published. I saw a lot of my co residents publishing garbage papers in pay to play journals to try to pump up their CV for fellowship - and it seemed like it worked out for a lot of them.)

 

[anonperson]

Hello everyone,

I wanted to ask some advice. I am in residency and while I have worked on research projects before, I am pretty inexperienced being a first author and leading projects by myself. To make a long story short, I worked on a research paper and submitted it to a couple of relatively famous journals and it got rejected from there. After that, I submitted it into a journal that looked fine on paper. At least on their website, it looked like it had a relatively good impact factor reported there. After it got accepted and published there, I realized that i made a huge mistake. The journal is not indexed by medline so my article doesn't show up in PubMed. The only way to search my article is to google it and go to the journal website.

What are my options now. I have yet to pay the APC fees. I have emailed them that I would like to withdraw my paper however they are refusing saying that it is already published and so I will need to pay the APC fees and I cannot withdraw it.

Anyone here who faced a similar situation? Is my paper lost cause now? They are asking for a lot of money too which is not really the issue but it just feels bad wasting a paper that i worked so hard on.

Also, I recognize that I am ******ed for doing this

Tell them you can't afford the APC fee due to budget cuts in your department.

What are they going to do?

Take solace in knowing that most research published by residents and fellows is garbage anyways.

 

[Apollyon]

Back in my day, someone said that the glut of end of year "research" was about 80% unmitigated trash. GIGO, to be able to GTFO.

 

[comp1]

I think the most important thing for the OP is to let this go. This is one of those things where you really want to conceptualize it as "is this something you will care about in five years or not?" I can promise the OP it is not.