Friday, October 4, 2013
The demise of peer review?
Scientists are often inundated with numerous requests to submit their papers to 'open access' journals with no track record, no editor-in-chief, and dubious sounding promises. Why this explosion in dubious journals? -simple, there is money to be made. Many of these journals are scams meant to maximize profits. As it turns out, they don't even bother with peer review. In a recent, fascinating story in Science, John Bohannon sent fatally flawed bogus articles to hundreds of open access journals, with more than half being accepted with little or no peer review. This article is a must read for anyone concerned about science publishing.
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As much as Science is spinning this as being a problem with open-access per se, it's really more about the growing number of predatory journals out there (and we've all received indiscriminate emails from them, asking us to submit to some journal which has nothing to do with our research). These journals are taking advantage of open access as a business concept (nothing like an unregulated market), but on the other hand, PloS One passed Bohannon's test with flying colours. It's really too bad that a pioneering, reputable journal like Plos One might be tarred with the same brush as some journal based in India with predatory charges, no peer review, and which has only publish 10 papers, just because both can putatively be labelled "open access".
It seems like the real issue here is figuring out some form of quality control or regulation for publishing?
This is not only a problem of OA journals; Science fall in the same trap: http://www.michaeleisen.org/blog/?p=1439
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