About Science and open access

In a clever sting operation, Science magazine revealed recently that many of the open access science journals that have proliferated in the last few years are not what they ought to be. As you can read in much more detail here, the magazine worked with researchers to create a sham article, convincing in many ways but fundamentally flawed both ethically and in experimental design. Any competent peer reviewer should have caught the problems and rejected the article. Instead, over half of the 304 journals that received the paper accepted it. Some open access journals such as PLOS ONE (which Science says was the only one to flag potential ethical problems, as well as ultimately rejecting the paper for poor scientific quality) passed the test. Still, plenty of folks who should know better were taken in (ahem: Science didn’t send the paper to Open Medicine). The list of journals that were sent the article was very broad, including journals published by big players like Sage and Elsevier, and like Kobe University. The chosen journals were selected from open-access journals listed on the respected Directory of Open Access Journals and from a list of ‘predatory’ journals created by University of Colorado library scientist Jeffrey Beall. Beall’s markers for a ‘predatory’ journal are idiosyncratic, for example he apparently considers poor English a sign of an untrustworthy journal, thus putting many majority world publications on his list, perhaps more than deserve to be the...
Source: Open Medicine Blog - - Category: Medical Publishers Authors: Source Type: blogs