I don't think it's particularly fair to push the responsibility of peer review onto journalists. Given that the state of diet science is in bad shape, I suppose journalists should be conscious of this fact and do their due diligence, but ultimately this is a failing of the academic world more so than the journalistic one.
This is sort of like saying “the problem is not that our security is bad, it’s that people post malware on the Internet. Someone should put a stop to that.”
There is no way to prevent anyone from starting a fake science journal. There is no worldwide registry of which academic journals are legitimate. They are just different groups of people who do their own thing. “Academia” is not a sufficiently coherent group of people to set standards in this way.
Maybe there should be a worldwide registry for which journals are real, but it wouldn’t be any easier to set up than a registry of which newspaper websites are real.
Journalists operate in a world where people try to trick them. That’s just how it is.
> There is no worldwide registry of which academic journals are legitimate.
I never thought about that before, and it genuinely surprises me.
Educational institutions like universities need to be accredited in order to be able to attract decent students, investment, etc.
It seems genuinely odd that there's no equivalent version of accreditation for journals and academic publishers. That ensures a certain level of qualification for board members, rigor in review process, peer review etc.
The academic world is so much about gatekeeping... that there's no gatekeeping around journals?
