An Open Access Trash Heap

Science magazine and writer John Bohannon have done us all a favor. There's a long article out in the latest issue that details how he wrote up a terrible, ridiculous scientific manuscript, attached a made-up name to it under the aegis of a nonexistent institution, and sent this farrago off to over three hundred open-access journals. The result? 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. Well, sure, you're saying. Given the sorts of lowlife publishers out the...
Source: In the Pipeline - Category: Chemists Tags: The Scientific Literature Source Type: blogs