Slashdot Mirror
Science Magazine "Sting Operation" Catches Predatory Journals In the Act
sciencehabit writes "A sting operation orchestrated by Science's contributing news correspondent John Bohannon exposes the dark side of open-access publishing. Bohannon created a spoof scientific report, authored by made-up researchers from institutions that don't actually exist, and submitted it to 304 peer-reviewed, open-access journals around the world. His hoax paper claimed that a particular molecule slowed the growth of cancer cells, and it was riddled with obvious errors and contradictions. Unfortunately, despite the paper's flaws, more open-access journals accepted it for publication (157) than rejected it (98). In fact, only 36 of the journals solicited responded with substantive comments that recognized the report's scientific problems. The article reveals a 'Wild West' landscape that's emerging in academic publishing, where journals and their editorial staffs aren't necessarily who or what they claim to be."
How many of the open access journals rely on click through advertising? Follow the money, I say.
work in progress
Seems like degree-mills are more common than actual universities by the same token.
In SOVIET RUSSIA... erm...NSA AMERICA, the Internet logs onto YOU!
What matters is the results from the top journals only, or maybe expand that to only the ones that people are currently trusting. The same argument is made about the number of crappy apps in a specific app store. Go ahead, add another ten million crappy apps to the library. It's irrelevant. Show the number of crappy apps that actually get downloaded or show up high in search results. Nobody cares how many fake journals are out there as the majority are painfully obvious. What matters is if the top ones have poor quality.
Did he send the bogus articles to closed publishers too? How did the rates compare? I tried to RTFA, but didn't see anything about controls.
Wow, clearly I should avoid publishing in those no-name open journals, and stick to big-name proprietary journals like Science!
Science is just a liiitttle bit biased here. I don't doubt the result, but I'd like to hear it from a neutral source.
A lot of people cite the democratizing power of "open access" and "crowd sourcing". I feel this is an example of the same principle at work.
On one hand, it is easier for those that are not entrenched within the bastions of power to be heard, but on the other hand, all data received from these sources must be treated much more cautiously.
In the past "being published" was a big deal, as it required a fairly high bar of factual accuracy, and that is still the case of many prestigious journals, but in the rush to Twitter-ize research and accept as many publishable details as rapidly as possible in the name of profit and prestige, the barriers to entry have eroded.
In much the same way that hard investigative journalism with strong ethical guidelines, verifiable sources and solid editing will always have a place in my heart, these reputable journals can serve to establish a foundation of trust in the scientific arena. And now, in much the same way that one should treat any writing within the "blogosphere" as suspect until verified, many open access journals must now be treated with the same level of suspicion until it is proven otherwise that they hold themselves to a higher standard.
TLDR: Democratization is not always a good thing.
I've never heard of this person John Bohannon.
I get regular solicitations via email to submit papers to these open-access journals - the big selling pitch is usually speedy review and acceptance. It's very disquieting.
I've made comments before comparing science and religion, and too often people think that I'm a religious person trying to belittle a genuine quest for knowledge. On the contrary, I think the genuine quest for knowledge is an amazingly worthwhile thing. However, science has become a method for the "practitioners" and "priests" to exert social, economic, and institutional influence by swaying the beliefs of those who are not educated enough or informed enough to differentiate between genuine knowledge and blind dogma.
It's less that I'm a backwoods book-hating theist. It's that I've "lost the faith" and don't believe in what we call "science". We've gotten into muddy waters, studying soft sciences in ways that will never reach definitive answers, and allowed politics and media to have too much sway. We've gotten better at engineering, and worse at knowledge.
Go ahead. Mod me as flamebait.
For years we have known that there is a glut of graduates in the system. I remember my freshman year at university, the attitude of a lot of students was "the Masters is the new Bachelors, you have to have one to get an entry level job" or when I got closer to graduating it was "well I don't want to be done with school and my parents are helping me out so I'm going to go for my Masters". While education is awesome, the fact is that you don't have to be all that smart anymore to get a Masters or PhD.
Even as an undergrad I was pressured to publish. I didn't have the time nor the resources to do anything meaningful but my professors all said that I had to publish to even consider going to graduate school. They said that pretty much no matter what I do, even if its not novel or valuable to the academic community there will be a journal that will publish it. That's the current state of academics now.
Lets be clear: I'm not talking about MIT or Berkley. I'm talking about the thousands of research institutions across the country that while also doing amazing research, churn out Masters and PhDs like a printing mill. When you dilute the pool of researchers there is going to be subpar research. When there is a glut of subpar research there will be journals that see the business opportunity and publish anything you pay them to publish. This is not new.
I didn't see the names of the creationists who accepted the articles listed. Since it's known that this group is the only one practicing dubious science, I'd have preferred if their names were given. You know, to keep track of them.
Science has an axe to grind here, obviously, and this "experiment" is seriously biased.
It does not appear that it was submitted to any closed, for-profit journals (like Science). It would have been much more interesting to see how many of them would have accepted the paper.
I don't read your sig. Why are you reading mine?
What are the numbers if you try the same with pay for read journals?
I'd guess if you try the same with several hundred non-open journals the number would not be that different...
And this is different from the average Science paper... how?
Ask any academic and they will tell you how to get articles published no matter what.
Did they try this with traditional journals and get better results?
BTW, the readers are supposed to be trained in the subject. They should be able to spot a paper riddled with obvious errors and contradictions.
BTW didn't Pons and Fleischmann, publish a paper in Science?
The problem is that serious decisions are made by people who have no idea which journals are top quality. Bad tenure decisions, bad engineering choices, and god forbid bad medical decisions are being made daily on the basis of nothing more than "hey, the European Journal of Chemistry sounds legit."
I am not a scientist, but isn't the point of publishing a paper in a journal, so it can be reviewed and tested by other scientists around the world who will either confirm or reject (parts of) it.
If this is the case, then what's the difference between this and any other erroneous paper, other than the fact that in this case it was done intentionally?
Science published the "Arsenic in DNA" paper. They decided to publish it because the results were unusual, therefore "interesting". They didn't seem to care the results were false.
This article is being widely panned as lacking controls, published without any critical review, and driven by self-interest from a traditional publisher with the most to lose from Open Access taking off (as it is). Some have gone so far to assert it's an over-reach for how badly it was done, and will make Science as a journal look partisan.
For example, quick scan brought up these three scathing responses:
Mike Eisen (HHMI Berkeley Professor)
http://www.michaeleisen.org/blog/?p=1439
Peter Suber (Author of the book "Open Access", Director of the Harvard Open Access Project, Faculty Fellow at the Berkman Center)
https://plus.google.com/u/0/109377556796183035206/posts/CRHeCAtQqGq
Mike Taylor (programmer with Index Data and a research associate at the department of earth sciences, University of Bristol)
http://svpow.com/2013/10/03/john-bohannons-peer-review-sting-against-science/
I'm sure this will heat up some much needed debate about poor quality journals and the failings of peer review, but with the lack of any controls at all, it says basically nothing about open access as a model for publishing.
He's published on Facebook and LinlkedIn, he must be legit.
This article is being widely panned as lacking controls, published without any critical review, and driven by self-interest from a traditional publisher with the most to lose from Open Access taking off (as it is). Some have gone so far to assert it's an over-reach for how badly it was done, and will make Science as a journal look partisan.
For example, quick scan brought up these three scathing responses:
Mike Eisen (HHMI Berkeley Professor)
http://www.michaeleisen.org/blog/?p=1439
Peter Suber (Author of the book "Open Access", Director of the Harvard Open Access Project, Faculty Fellow at the Berkman Center)
https://plus.google.com/u/0/109377556796183035206/posts/CRHeCAtQqGq
Mike Taylor (programmer with Index Data and a research associate at the department of earth sciences, University of Bristol)
http://svpow.com/2013/10/03/john-bohannons-peer-review-sting-against-science/
I'm sure this will heat up some much needed debate about poor quality journals and the failings of peer review, but with the lack of any controls at all, it says basically nothing about open access as a model for publishing.
This paper is a tour-de-force of ironic brilliance.
This is a paper describing an experiment with NO CONTROLs, and SCIENCE snapped it up because it met their editorial biases. Bohannon sent the other buggy paper to no closed-access journals, and this one to no open-access journals.
http://svpow.com/2013/10/03/john-bohannons-peer-review-sting-against-science/
Such subtlety must be admired.
I've been studying this (publishing) for some time, in the context of learning, verifying assumptions, and the scientific method.
It turns out that there is really no bar in scientific publishing. It doesn't have to be understandable, nor innovative, nor even correct. You only need to be ethical (ie - don't lie about the data), cite anything that you got from other sources, and show that there is less than a 1-in-20 chance that you are wrong (p > 0.5).
What exactly do we want in a published paper, anyway?
Many cancer studies can't be reproduced. Many studies are statistically significant but valueless (the IQ of people in NYC is higher than Chicago by 1 point: this can be statistically certain but have no practical significance). There are lots and lots of ways to frame the conclusion the wrong way such as confusing correlation with causation, reversed conditionals (if the defendant is innocent, there is a 1 in 1 billion chance that this evidence is wrong), and other logical errors.
Then there's the enormous economic incentive of needing to publish to keep your job, that reviewers will oppose maverick thought and agree with community beliefs, and that no one examines their assumptions.
Would you like to publish a paper? MathGen will write one for you. Pass it around and chances are it will be accepted.
So when I talk to people about my research, the inevitable comment is "you should publish". And my inevitable answer is: why?
What do we want in scientific papers? What are they even for?
In Norway, we have a "level" system that is used in academia throughout the country. It is used for evaluating researchers and research groups when it comes to employment, tenure, funding etc. Your "point score" is summed up, 2 points for publication in a "level 2" journal, 1 point for "level 1".
A journal is either "level 2", "level 1" or "level 0". "level 2" is a selection of top journals from each field in science, 2000 in total (for all of science, from computational physics to the sociology of music). "level 1" means the remaining serious peer-reviewed journals. "level 0" either means "bullshit journal" or "journal that was founded just last year".
Researchers may nominate journals for a change in status, e.g. 2->1, 0->, etc. The decisions are made by a government-appointet body on a yearly basis. It's nowhere near perfect, but it's a lot better than nothing.
for i in `facebook friends "=bday" 2>/dev/null | cut -d " " -f 3-`; do facebook wallpost $i "Happy birthday!"; done
That science journal had been flaunting its low standards all over town!
Dark Reflection
It's more who is reviewing the material, and to what level, that matters.
A lot of high-grade peer reviewed journals, like Science and Nature, have been hoodwinked by researchers from South Korea and China, where cheating is more endemic than here.
Or, as most of us say, Wait Until The Second Journal Article.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
And if you are just writing them off and basing your reading on the "top ones", of what value are these?
While science journals are often used by researchers to find out what their colleagues are doing and can thus be vetted by the reader, they are quite often the bases for undergraduate and graduate educations, and putting deliberate crap in front of them is a Bad Thing.
This is the same problem the internet has faced right from the beginning, and is not confined to academia: who do you trust online, and how can you be sure they're on the level? Someone or something is needed to weed out the bad apples... In other words, moderation. And yes, the same basic principles apply equally to discussion forums like Slashdot as they do to online scientific research journals. Ultimately it comes down to reputation, and some form of karma system. Slashdot's system uses temporary moderators selected by an algorithm, but for scientific journals there is currently just the one site mentioned in the article, run by one guy who is single handedly attempting to keep track of who the legitimate journals are. I don't see why this function couldn't eventually become more automated, perhaps even incorporating random moderation and meta-moderation overseen by an algorithm, just like Slashdot. There's been plenty of research into reputation management systems over the years, surely there must be something that could apply to the chaotic research journal situation described in the article, perhaps even an already existing software package. The phenomenon of open online academic journals is relatively new, these things usually work themselves out over time, as with any new technology. The idea of open journals is a good one, sooner or later some system of useful self-regulation will emerge, and the useless and/or predatory journals will eventually fall by the wayside.
But it would have cost him millions of dollars. And there was no chance that the open journals would pay him to discredit their competitors.
Is there a list of the open journals that caught the fraud?
... the real probem is that as problem size increases, the human brain just can't deal with all the stress and energy one must expend to fact check everything. This is why we need automation in checking papers for errors and contradictions, i.e. the number of facts you need to know grows exponentially as things get more complex. What we're really seeing is that the human brain is the biggest bottleneck since human beings have limited time and energy. So no one should be surprised it's easy to 'dupe' or game a system because the resources you need to stop untrustworthy people is unrealistically expensive. Any area of human endeavor is only as good as the people themselves.
Shady journals and conferences might be a problem when it comes to someone applying to a job at some small company that doesn't have any PhDs in that field, but for anyone who's spent any time in legitimate academia, this isn't an issue. If someone comes claiming to be an expert in networks with a whole bunch of great publications, and none of those publications are in SIGCOMM, NSDI, CoNEXT, etc. I'm going to assume they're a fraud.
I like the comments above about this being perhaps somewhat of a shrill reactionary takedown attempt on open access venues. Paywalled conferences/journals are absolutely disgusting, given the setup today - a bunch of professors (and/or their grad students) reviewing papers for free, because it's what's expected of them. There's really no excuse, especially with USENIX as a model (good peer review, they run nicely put together conferences, and once the conferences are done, the papers are free for the world to read).
Mod Journal modder up!
How can anyone keep up with the current science in any field when there are 304 places to look?
1. By reading specific articles that colleagues recommend.
2. By using a search engine.
I've never heard of this person John Bohannon.
John Bohannon is a biologist, science journalist, and dancer based at Harvard University. He writes for Science Magazine, Discover Magazine, and Wired Magazine, and frequently reports on the intersections of science and war. After embedding in southern Afghanistan in 2010, he was the first journalist to convince the US military to voluntarily release civilian casualty data. He received a Reuters environmental journalism award in 2006 for his reporting on collaborative research in Gaza. He was also involved in some controversy over an article he wrote critiquing the Lancet survey of Iraq War Casualties.
At Science Magazine, Bohannon also adopts the ''Gonzo Scientist'' persona, where he ''takes a look at the intersections among science, culture, and art -- and, in true gonzo style, doesn't shrink from making himself a part of the story. The stories include original art and accompanying multimedia features.'' As the Gonzo Scientist, Bohannon's research on whether humans can tell the difference between pate and dog food led to Stephen Colbert eating cat food on the Colbert Report.
Bohannon is probably best known for creating the Dance Your PhD competition, in which scientists from all around the world interpret their doctoral dissertations in dance form. Slate Magazine ran a profile on Bohannon and the competition in 2011. He performed with the Black Label Movement dance troupe at TEDx Brussels in November 2011, where he satirized Jonathan Swift's A Modest Proposal by modestly proposing that Powerpoint software be replaced by live dancers. Bohannon then went on to perform with Black Label Movement at TED 2012 in Long Beach.
Advisory Board - John Bohannon
While visiting the Harvard University Program in Ethics and Health, he is working on two areas of research: 1) torture --- in particular the complicity of scientific and medical workers in torture, and 2) ethical problems involved with obtaining global health data, stemming from his journalistic coverage of the controversial attempts to estimate the health and mortality of the Iraqi population since the US-led invasion.
After completing a Ph.D. in molecular biology at the University of Oxford in 2002, John focused on bioethics as a Fulbright fellow (2003 --- 2004) in Berlin.
Have gnu, will travel.
This article sounds like the DICKS plugin for nmap that was described in this issue of hakin9. This was a beautiful trojan horse.
Here's the problem with doing that so systemically: it is fundamentally anticompetitive, and leads to stagnation. Nobody would bother submitting to a "level 0" journal because it won't earn them any props at all, which means that the journal can never become anything more than a "level 0" journal. This means that you don't get fresh blood with new ideas on the review boards, so progress moves at a snail's pace. There's something to be said for disruptive innovation, even in academic publishing circles.
Also, the entire notion of judging the value of your scientific contribution based on what journal agreed to publish it is as absurd as judging the value of a car based on what dealer sold it. A paper should stand or fall on its own merits. A good article that pushes science forward, even if published in a minor journal, should weigh significantly in your favor for tenure, and a lousy article, even if published in a major journal, should not. A system that does the opposite is abject stupidity, pure and simple.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
Who handed over the cash for this study? I'm guessing Elseiver, Springer or some other big publisher who use academic subscriptions as their cashcows had a hand in it.
Which Journals accepted the paper?
1. By reading specific articles that colleagues recommend.
Hmmm. So you know only what they know. Could work ok.
2. By using a search engine.
Search engines find words and phrases. They don't vet the material they return, nor do they usually return only what you are actually looking for. You've replaced the problem of finding relevant articles in the tables of contents of 304 journals with the problem of finding relevant articles in the 345,289 hits returned by Google.
And if you are going to just Google for the articles, why have 304 journals at all? Just put all the articles on the web and use Google to find them.
One man alone can be pretty dumb sometimes, but for real bona fide stupidity, there ain't nothin' can beat teamwork.
How can anyone keep up with the current science in any field when there are 304 places to look?
You don't need to look in 304 places; only one or two.
Read Slashdot news for nerds, stuff that matters
I hear everything that really matters winds up on there :)
That's right - because no journal ever published an article without checking it over.
Wi Tu Lo
Bang Ding Ow
Rick B.
I think that open-access is a great idea, however like most open services and products they lack any tight reviews by experienced people in a particular field. This gives these anti-science people more reason to discredit science.
I've said it before, science isn't a guarantee, and is not written in stone, research and new findings will and should always be taking lightly with an open mind. But with the media/press, internet taking everything literally, even tho I do have hope a majority of the populous do not just jump in head first believing the media/press.
The whole journal publishing idea seems like one great big obfuscating scam. It seems like publishing has nothing to do with it at all, it is all about the reality of peer review or it's absence. What seems to be the most important issue here is not publishing but the article peer review process. How many people reviewed it, who are they and what are their qualifications with regard to suitability to be involved in the review process. When left to private for profit enterprise this seems basically to be a major screw up and as lives appear to be at stake with regard to what is done with this information a much more government regulated and controlled environment needs to be set up to monitor and control the whole peer review and publishing process.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
In all seriousness, I - as a researcher myself - understand the need of easy access to publications. However, I never supported the open access models that came into existence and are being built and pursued today. Why? Because it's all about the money and a lot of such journals absolutely do not care about quality, or about having big name editors who'd perform very thorough revision of reviews and make proper decisions about paper acceptances. Big journals have good editorial and review staff, and they simply can't allow them to be bad and irresponsible, because they actually care about their reputation and credibility. New breed open access journals on the other hand only care about revenue.
The instititue I work at has mandated open access publication as well as others did, however, they did not provide funding for us to actually publish open access versions at big name journals, so we try to play the system whenever we can, and publish in traditional journals with traditional publication schemes. I do not care about some politician-flavored scientists' (most of them not even publishing) dreams about some utopistic open access world. I care about publications appearing in credible journals, reviewed by credible people, producing quality publications - even if they are only attainable for money.
I am putting myself to the fullest possible use, which is all I can think that any conscious entity can ever hope to do.
Reputable journals are only marginally better. Just witnessed a back and forth where some research was attacked by a prominent scientist. The assumptions the latter made weren't quite on target, so the attacked researchers submitted a paper pointing this out. This passed anonymous peer review but then the paper solicited the opinion of this star scientists. He dismisses the paper with the most bizarre arguments that give the impression that he didn't even read it. Then the prestigious journal turns around and endorses this position and rejects the paper.
Absolute astounding and sobering.
Disclaimer: I am not a party or author in this but covered the controversy on my blog, and hence have been shown the rejection email.
Yes, but that requires management to actually read the papers in order to make an informed decision and *gasp* know what they're doing.
It's so much easier to just count the number of published papers. It is college after all, where they rate wine by the ABV.
"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be."
If you still think this way and are a scientist you are part of the problem. You people are stupidly setting yourselves up as fall guys.
I need to move to Norway. For some reason, it seems to be the only sensible country on earth. Now if we could just tilt the rotational axis of the earth a little farther up, and we'd solve it's only problem: eternal days and eternal nights.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.
Read journals from before "the government" got involved in funding. I mean pre-WW2 and then those by people trained from that era (decreasingly so up to the 90s). The average report was 10x as credible even with far less tech and no charts. They carefully describe what they did along with describing individual results and why they differ from each other. Now it is just average plus some error bars.
More importantly, experiments were designed to gain evidence for or against a theory rather than to say something was unlikely due to chance.
we all know that most - way more then 50, more like Sturgeon's law level - of "peer reviewed" journals are crap
we don't say it, cause we might have trouble with funding.
The Journal of Molecular Biology is still pretty good, and used to be one of the most prestigous journals in the field
iirc, the back page had condensed instructions for authors which included
a significant finding is often followed by replicate findings in other organisms. in general, the JMB won't publish such follow on reports....
lets have some truth here: "science" magazine is the top 1%, or even 0-.1% of science papers
most of these other journals are just crap; 3rd rate scientists publish in them and cite each other, but nothing of importance happens, as you can verify by looking at citation rates
A paper should stand or fall on its own merits.
Yep, and quality papers is what they should be competing for. The journal ranking systems used by univisities (not just in Norway) are designed to give more weight to journals that have a long track record of doing that. This is why the Nature and Science journals at at the top of the list, their long publishing history and track record of quality papers speaks for itself. A low ranked journal will stay a low ranked until it's track record is such that it can be deemed a reliable source. If it does nothing to improve it's record then it follows it will never be respected.
A good article that pushes science forward, even if published in a minor journal, should weigh significantly in your favor for tenure, and a lousy article, even if published in a major journal, should not.
The "impact factor" of individual papers is generally weighed by the number of citations, not the name of the journal.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
Or just tell us who caught the issues so we know what open journals are worth reading. This headline could have been really uplifting. What about "List of the 36 most reliable Open Access Journals."
"...all men are Created equal and endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights..."
This is a religious statement. But religion gets you laughed at these days, while science put a (heterosexual married White cis)man on the moon and split the atom, so science is infallible.
So the first part has to be reinterpreted as "all identifiable demographic groups have equal average intelligence". Which is a scientific statement, is laughably false, and is boldly asserted and backed up by threats as much as any religious dogma ever was.
The second part needs to be reinterpreted as "governments which respect these rights are better than governments which don't". This is _not_ a scientific statement, and can never be transformed into one, until you define what makes a good government, which is a value judgement.
There are people who will assert that both parts are settled science. They call themselves "progressives", and what they mean by "science" is not the same as what we mean by "science".
For every class of decision a modern government makes, from diplomacy to economics to issuing fishing licences, there exists a caste of scholars in the social sciences, carefully selected for their race, gender identity, sexual orientation, intelligence and/or political reliability, who "use the methods of science" to divine the correct public policy. None of these professors is in any way, shape or form responsible for the success or failure of these policies.
Decisions are not personal, but procedural. A procedure is a better procedure if it cuts more stakeholders into the loop - if it is a more open process. Here we see clearly what the State is doing: it is building a support base from its own employee roster, and it is purchasing support by exchanging it for power. The feeling of being in the decision loop produces a remarkable effect of emotional loyalty, no matter how trivial the actual authority may be. There is just a slight downside to this: when socialism fails, no one is responsible. No system of ideas, even, can be responsible - for a system of ideas would be an ideology, and public policy is not determined by ideology. Thus many will tell you that economics failed in the crisis of 2008, but no one can possibly do anything about it.
While you raise an interesting point, that open journals should be very suspicious and scrutinize probably better than closed systems, the point is regarding a study which was not at all scientific. If an experiment is done to show people accepting bad papers and only one group is tested, how is this "science". More importantly since this is an article, how is it "fair" journalism?
Since I see garbage on closed proprietary sites as well, why would they not also submit the same bogus papers to closed journals? If you want examples read just about every corporate sponsored report on GMO foods and Global Warming. Perhaps they did sample closed systems, and they did not publish the result. Did the result not favor their implication that "open is bad"? This becomes a very important question.
Hell, maybe it's a spoof report to see how many suckers fall for the gag. I doubt it, since censorship has been a hot topic to the string pullers for quite some time.
Analogy time for the people not seeing it. This "study" and article is like having people inspect Super 8 motels and finding roaches in more than half the rooms, then claiming "More than half of all Hotel rooms are infected with roaches.".
That is obviously sensationalizing a study which is not at all scientific.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
Thiswould only be true if you wanted to start a journal which only accepted submittions within the country. Meanwhile, there are nearly 200 countries in the world, each one with their academia. If a journal is started and in spite of having a pool of nearly 200 countries-worth of academics it doesn't manage to attract a respectable amount of relevant papers then Norway isn't the one to blame here.
Science Magazine "Sting Operation" Catches Predatory Journals In the Act is a trash act, since the author of then sting operation did not test together open-access and the traditional journals.
In 2001 Nature published papers that NSAIDs can be inhibitors of gamma-secretase, and thus potential cure for Alzheimer's disease. The authors observed inhibition when they used NSAIDs at several hundred microM!?!?!? At that concentration any aromatic compound from a compound library would be a hit. No surprise that up to now we had several hundred drug candidates for Alzheimer's disease that failed.
Furthermore J Biol. Chem, i Nucleic Acid Research published papers that mammalian Dnmt1 is a highly processive enzyme, even though the enzyme activity was expressed in raw cpms, and the enzyme can not make more than two turnovers in 5 hours!!?!?! The processivity studies got more than 300 citations!?!?!
Traditional journals are as trashy or good as PLoS One. We all know all of that, and we know how to read papers to spot trash. We just do not want to pay extreme prices to read research supported by the taxpayers money.
I'm convinced that if the right buzzwords and writing style is used, a sizeable percentage of so called "reputable" journals will fall into the same trap!
Clicks are not the problem. Journals don't get any money from advertisement clicks. Real problem is :
At present, "Open Access Publishing" mostly means "Author Pays". If the author is your customer, then obviously you publish whatever they want. We must abandon the extortionate academic publishers like Elsevier all together by building an arXiv overlay filters that take over the journal's role of reviewing and declaring papers important. And these must be paid for by tax money because the customer should be society.
Just like with universities, Britain has rampant grade inflation because the students all pay 15k USD per year (9k GBP). St Andrews has a 98% graduation rate. A 98% graduation rate tells me the university did basically no "selection" on their admitted students, all selection occurred when an admissions person read their test scores from high school. In other words, the student is the customer and the product is a little piece of paper. This is why Britain sucks so bad at engineering and must create that blatantly bullshit ranking system by THES to make themselves look good.
In continental europe, almost everyone who finishes high school can attend university without paying, but the universities select students by failing out the shitty ones, well society is the customer and the students are the product. It's infinitely more fare because gaming the system in high school does nothing and people who never really hit their stride until the find challenging material do well.
The Christian religion has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world. -- Bertrand Russell
I need to move to Norway. For some reason, it seems to be the only sensible country on earth. Now if we could just tilt the rotational axis of the earth a little farther up, and we'd solve it's only problem: eternal days and eternal nights.
Well, Norway also produce this.. Btw. the 24-hour dark in winter/24-hour sun in summer is just northern Norway.
Use scholar.google.com or another specialised search engine, and quit your whining. Or did you honestly think you'd found a massive flaw in the system all by your little self, and then thought it awesome to bash keys in a cloud of pride in order to spread the word? Muppet.
"In closing, we would like to thank the underwriters of our story: Elsevier."
As part of my PhD work on credibility in the AGW debate landscape, I studied 9,332 papers published in support of AGW. Those 9,332 papers had 726,712 citations, of which 631,989 were from "open access" journals. Of those 726,712 cited works, 711,349 of them had at least one author who was connected to the citing author either by being at the same institution or by sharing authorship on another paper.
I also studied 1,454 papers published "against" AGW. Those 1,454 papers had 154,365 citations, of which only 16,403 were from "open access" journals. Of those 154,365 cited works, 14,589 of them had at least one author who was connected to the citing author either by being at the same institution or by sharing authorship on prior paper with similar findings to the citing paper.
"Anti" papers had far more citations per paper, and from more "closed access" journals, than the "pro" papers did, and far, far more of the "pro" papers can be connected professionally to the citing author, which creates credibility problems, especially with citing someone who co-authored a prior work with you.
Oddly I am having to fight my own institution to include this data in my dissertation. I wonder why. Researchers at my institution has published 9,423 papers in support of AGW and just 492 against, and I suspect there is significant administrative coercion that is the root cause of that.
management could review on formatting, since that is what a lot of these open access journals do.
The problem is that serious decisions are made by people who have no idea which journals are top quality.
I'm not an academic, but I am fairly certain that the publishing portion of tenure decisions means publishing many papers in high impact factor journals ("impact factor", by the way, is the google search term that you're going to want to use if you want to look more into journal rankings).
There are established and readily-available metrics to measure journal quality. Department chairs, researchers, engineers, and doctors are not stupid people. They know that a paper in an open access journal whose results have never been replicated might as well have been "written" by an academic bullshit generator.
They don't grade fathers, but if your daughter's a stripper, you fucked up. --Chris Rock
Yep. You 1) only randomly find out about things that your various colleagues and friends have found, and find interesting or insightful. Or 2) Only find out about things that you're specifically looking for. And 3) find out about anything any of those sources point you toward.
Welcome to how the rest of life works, just without the advertisement-driven drivel.
The last time I checked, the editorial staff at a journal wasn't expected to vouch for or ascertain the scientific merit of a paper. Journals are the realm of proof reading for spelling errors etc etc, not doing peer review.
The way it's supposed to work is
1. A paper is written
2. A paper is submitted to a journal
3. The journal ascertains the subject of the paper
4. Journal sends copies of that paper to other experts on the subject of the paper
5. Those peers then vouch for or criticize the paper
6. Journal either rejects or accepts the paper for publication.
Wow. Glad to see the level of civil discourse in /. has not dropped considerably.