New Delhi: An academic watchdog has asked the University Grants Commission to crack down on "predatory journals" amid fresh allegations of plagiarism and the fabrication of fraudulent papers.

The Society for Scientific Values, which seeks to protect ethics in academia, has described as a "racket" the emergence of hundreds of predatory journals that, for a fee from scholars and teachers, publish poor-quality research without peer review.

The Society's appeal to the commission, the higher education regulator, follows concerns that more than half the 3,300 academic papers from India published in predatory journals over six months in 2015-16 had come from faculty and scholars in government or private institutions.

Teachers are required to publish papers for career progression while research students have to publish to get their PhD degrees.

"Predatory journals are pulling down standards. They don't care about the quality of research, they publish whatever they receive as papers - and make money," said Kasturi Lal Chopra, former director of IIT Kharagpur and president of the Society.

The watchdog has said that the list of journals approved by the commission includes a large number of predatory journals.

"Such journals get an ISSN identity (a registration number) without any scrutiny and, on payment of Rs 2,000 to Rs 4,000, publish papers without scrutiny," Chopra said.

"When a plagiarism charge is brought up, they simply retract the paper, but those who wrote the paper continue to cite it in their CVs."

Senior faculty members from two engineering colleges have claimed the predatory journal industry also allows vested interests to make false charges of plagiarism.

J.P. Saini, director of the Delhi-based Netaji Subhas Institute of Technology and V.K. Pathak, vice-chancellor of the A.P.J. Abdul Kalam Technical University, Lucknow, claim they are "victims" of false portrayal as plagiarists.

Teachers at the Netaji Subhas Institute have said, requesting anonymity, that Saini had co-authored a paper in the May-June issue of the International Journal for Advanced Scientific and Technical Research that had reproduced portions of a paper published by a four-member Japanese-Pakistani team in 2012.

Saini denied any plagiarism, claiming the allegedly plagiarising paper was a "fabricated" document concocted by "persons with mala fide intentions".

He sent The Telegraph a version of his 2014 paper, which is different from the 2012 paper, from the same journal.

The journal is published by R.S. Publication, based in Ujjain, Madhya Pradesh. An email sent by this newspaper to the journal seeking an explanation for the existence of two versions of the paper remains unanswered.

Pathak claims his name was used without his consent in a paper published by Rohit Katiyar, one of his former students, in February 2010 in the International Journal of Computer Science and Information Security. The paper allegedly plagiarised text from an earlier publication by a scientist in the UK in 2007.

Katiyar told this newspaper he had added Pathak's name as a co-author in the paper "by mistake".

"We had removed this student from the PhD programme as his work was not up to the standard. Yet, he went ahead and published this paper without my consent," Pathak said.

"I've been pleading with the UGC (University Grants Commission) and the All India Council of Technical Education (AICTE, the technical education regulator) to do something about predatory journals."

Nandula Raghuram, dean of the school of biotechnology at the Guru Gobind Singh Indraprastha University here, blamed the regulators and university authorities for the menace of plagiarism and predatory journals.

Last September, the University Grants Commission had put out a draft regulation to check plagiarism but it is yet to be finalised.

Raghuram, who also edits the journal Physiology and Molecular Biology of Plants, said a few hundred predatory journals operated in India and some of them were on the list of journals approved by the commission.

"The UGC is facilitating plagiarism by delaying its regulation to check it. It should also review its own approved list of journals, (where) there are many predatory journals," he said.

AICTE chairman Anil Sahasrabudhe said the council had issued a notice asking teachers in its approved colleges to publish in journals listed in the well-known database of the citation indexing service, Web of Science.

An email sent to commission chairman D.P. Singh on Wednesday had evoked no response by Thursday evening despite assurances from his staff. In its appeal, the Society has said that many of the predatory journals included in the commission's list are advertising themselves as "UGC-approved journals"

An independent study of a sample of 1,009 journals approved by the UGC has labelled 88 percent as "low quality" on the basis of several measures. More than 50 percent of these journals provided false information such as incorrect registration numbers or false claims about impacts, according to the study published on Sunday in the journal Current Science.

"This study reflects the sad state of affairs," said Subhash Lakhotia, distinguished professor at the Banaras Hindu University, Varanasi, and a coauthor of the study that calls on the UGC to revise its list of approved journals.