Who's Afraid of Peer Review? - A spoof paper is accepted by Open Access journals

[SidDithers]

http://www.sciencemag.org/content/342/6154/60.full

On 4 July, good news arrived in the inbox of Ocorrafoo Cobange, a biologist at the Wassee Institute of Medicine in Asmara. It was the official letter of acceptance for a paper he had submitted 2 months earlier to the Journal of Natural Pharmaceuticals, describing the anticancer properties of a chemical that Cobange had extracted from a lichen.

In fact, it should have been promptly rejected. Any reviewer with more than a high-school knowledge of chemistry and the ability to understand a basic data plot should have spotted the paper's short-comings immediately. Its experiments are so hopelessly flawed that the results are meaningless.

I know because I wrote the paper. Ocorrafoo Cobange does not exist, nor does the Wassee Institute of Medicine. Over the past 10 months, I have submitted 304 versions of the wonder drug paper to open-access journals. More than half of the journals accepted the paper, failing to notice its fatal flaws. Beyond that headline result, the data from this sting operation reveal the contours of an emerging Wild West in academic publishing.

From humble and idealistic beginnings a decade ago, open-access scientific journals have mushroomed into a global industry, driven by author publication fees rather than traditional subscriptions. Most of the players are murky. The identity and location of the journals' editors, as well as the financial workings of their publishers, are often purposefully obscured. But Science's investigation casts a powerful light. Internet Protocol (IP) address traces within the raw headers of e-mails sent by journal editors betray their locations. Invoices for publication fees reveal a network of bank accounts based mostly in the developing world. And the acceptances and rejections of the paper provide the first global snapshot of peer review across the open-access scientific enterprise.

Many of these pay-to-publish journals are nothing more than scams designed to maximize revenue, and frequently publish the most outlandish agenda-based "research" from "researchers" pushing an ideological position.

Beall's list is a great resource to see if the journal you're using as source is more interested in making money than publishing good science.

http://scholarlyoa.com/publishers/

Sid

[FSogol]

1. Heard this story on NPR the other day. K&R. n/t

[SidDithers]

2. It's a subject I've been interested in for a while...

here's another thread from earlier this year that I started, with a couple more good articles.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/10022644059

There are a few excellent blogger at scienceblogs.com who post regularly about the topic. There are posts at DU once in a while, where some bit of medical woo is presented as peer-reviewed, cutting edge research, and the supporting research paper is published in some open access journal.

Open access journals are not all bad, but enough of them are that they're use shouldn't be automatically accepted as good sourcing.



Sid

[MineralMan]

3. Open Access Scientific Journals Are the Blogosphere

of the scientific community. While some are fine, a great number, as demonstrated here, are bogus and are merely cash cows for those who operate them. I'm going to put that link in my favorites list and use it to check citations.

Woo has now gotten peer-reviewed, and it failed the review.

[redqueen]

4. K&R

[snooper2]

5. Journal of Natural Pharmaceuticals now out of business ROFL

"This journal is no longer active and hence does not accept any new submissions."




http://www.jnatpharm.org/

[FarCenter]

6. Academic publishing is a huge business

The emphasis on publications as a measure of researcher's performance has created a huge demand for space in publications.

There is also a built in market for publications, since university libraries feel compelled to subscribe to new publications, often at the urging of their faculty members who are on the editorial boards, review for, or publish in the new journals.

So unscrupulous publishers are creating more and more journals with loser an loser standards for accepting papers. Many of these are off-shore.