The Rigorous Standards of Open Journals.

JamesB

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JamesB
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Already posted this on the ole blog, but thought some of you might find this interesting.

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.
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And to save you the trouble of looking, yes, the only Bentham Journal queried fell for the scam.

bio0026.doc
accepted
http://www.benthamscience.com
Bentham open
http://www.benthamscience.com/open/tobcj/index.htm
The Open Bioactive Compounds Journal
 
An article by John Bohannon in the latest issue of Science describes a sting operation in which variants of a fake scholarly paper were submitted to 304 open access journals to test the rigour of their reviewing processes… The papers were carefully crafted to be superficially credible but contained major flaws which competent reviewers should have been able to spot. It is disappointing that 157 of the journals (52 per cent) accepted the paper for publication; in many cases without any evidence that the paper had actually been read by anyone. In only 36 cases were the flaws identified and commented on. Alarmingly, nearly half of these were later accepted by the editor in spite of the reviewers' negative comments.
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http://www.abc.net.au/science/articles/2013/10/04/3862443.htm
 
Out of curiosity, do these open journals charge the researchers to publish their studies?
 
Interesting. Is there no effort by any institution to impose standards? It appears absent publishing standards and rigorous scientific review and vetting, this open publishing system is fertile ground for scientific fraud.

I wonder why the standard reputable journals allow this and are they rejecting these papers? Did the Harrit team present their paper to any reputable journal? Was it rejected? Or did they pay to publish and avoid having their paper rejected?

Obviously the layman can't evaluate many scientific research and assume that the scientists who do research are ethical and competent. But scientific fraud is not unseen. Is the NT paper fraud? or are the authors deluded? I assume that the work has not been repeated. Are they playing fast and loose claiming that its findings stand and someone will come along and confirm/repeat their conclusions (maybe)?

If this is scientific fraud, would that be a civil crime? If so in what jurisdiction?
 
JSanderO said:
Interesting. Is there no effort by any institution to impose standards? It appears absent publishing standards and rigorous scientific review and vetting, this open publishing system is fertile ground for scientific fraud.

I wonder why the standard reputable journals allow this and are they rejecting these papers?
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There's nothing a "reputable journal" can do to prevent a bad journal from being published, per se. The institutions that index citations to journal articles do, of course, get to choose which journals they index. Generally, bad journals just don't get read by people who practice in the field. For practitioners, they might as well not exist (except for a few that become known as outposts for, e.g., climate change denialism).

Reputable journals do sometimes publish fraudulent or gravely deficient work, but they have incentives to avoid doing so.

Rule One for a layperson is that if you don't know anything about the reputation of a journal, then it's like anything else you might read on the internet: it may be good, bad, or ugly.

Related to that, it's helpful to understand that publication -- even peer-reviewed publication -- isn't a gold standard in itself. Being published in even an excellent peer-reviewed journal basically is a warrant that some smart people thought a piece was worth reading, but not a strong endorsement of the content.
 
JSanderO said:
Interesting. Is there no effort by any institution to impose standards? It appears absent publishing standards and rigorous scientific review and vetting, this open publishing system is fertile ground for scientific fraud.

I wonder why the standard reputable journals allow this and are they rejecting these papers? Did the Harrit team present their paper to any reputable journal? Was it rejected? Or did they pay to publish and avoid having their paper rejected?

Obviously the layman can't evaluate many scientific research and assume that the scientists who do research are ethical and competent. But scientific fraud is not unseen. Is the NT paper fraud? or are the authors deluded? I assume that the work has not been repeated. Are they playing fast and loose claiming that its findings stand and someone will come along and confirm/repeat their conclusions (maybe)?

If this is scientific fraud, would that be a civil crime? If so in what jurisdiction?
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As the article points out, while some OA publishers are effectively worthless vanity publishers some of the supposedly reputable publishers also accepted the spoof paper, e.g. Sage, Elsevier and Kobe University.
There are a lot of parasitic OA journals, using names deliberately similar to reputable journals and charging for publication, without any oversight.
First call for assessing a journal is Beall’s List of Predatory Publishers.
 
JSanderO said:
Interesting. Is there no effort by any institution to impose standards? It appears absent publishing standards and rigorous scientific review and vetting, this open publishing system is fertile ground for scientific fraud.

I wonder why the standard reputable journals allow this and are they rejecting these papers? Did the Harrit team present their paper to any reputable journal? Was it rejected? Or did they pay to publish and avoid having their paper rejected?
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What could be done about this? Besides, it's not really a threat to academic credibility. Legitimate researchers know what the leading venues are, and how to find out about the status of new venues when they hear about them.

There exists rankings of legitimate journals, such as SCOPUS and journals listed by Thompson Reuters. Not all high quality journals are found on these lists, but that's primarily because they're new.

Obviously the layman can't evaluate many scientific research and assume that the scientists who do research are ethical and competent. But scientific fraud is not unseen. Is the NT paper fraud? or are the authors deluded? I assume that the work has not been repeated. Are they playing fast and loose claiming that its findings stand and someone will come along and confirm/repeat their conclusions (maybe)?

If this is scientific fraud, would that be a civil crime? If so in what jurisdiction?
Click to expand...

But this isn't a world intended for the layman. The only reason it's being discussed here is because advocates for a 9/11 Truth can't understand why the world of legitimate science and engineering research doesn't take seriously much of what they talk about. 'Journals' like Bentham are intended for researchers in downstream economies where university professors don't have the resources or background to produce high quality research, but still need to look like their actually doing research. Here's list of free Bentham journals. Have a look at them and where their authors are from. It's almost all limited to poor countries and the less-than-leading universities of those countries.

I'm not defending the process, but it's only a problem that matters because it allows sleazy people to trick non-professionals. But then most of the non-professionals that care about being tricked appear to be involved in conspiracy theories of one sort or another. For professional researchers and their students in universities that demand high quality research, it's just not a relevant issue.
 
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My sense is that this process is part of a smoke and mirrors attempt to offer what amounts to sloppy research as science by making a *peer review* claim.. which sounds awfully authoritative on the face and will slide right by the average person.

I am not competent to evaluate the NT paper and claims, but unless it is looked at by others and verified or debunked it is presented as unchallenged.. it's sort of like publishing a peer reviewed paper about faces on Mars. Look! No other scientists has debunked this work in a peer review journal!

Along comes Millette who has also studied WTC dust and does not find NT. Why has this not ended the matter? (I refer to the truthers who are pushing the Harrit work) I don't want to get into the technical aspects of the matter... but the strategy of finding some less than reputable pay to publish journal as passing this off as a reputable peer review process is pretty shabby. Do they really expect to get away with this with professionals and people in academia? How about scientists like Lynn Margulis? What's with her?
 
JSanderO said:
Do they really expect to get away with this with professionals and people in academia? How about scientists like Lynn Margulis? What's with her?
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I don't know? Here we have Tony publishing in a downgrade journal telling everyone that it doesn't matter because the really good journals are all part of a conspiracy to keep out his Earth-shaking findings. I can imagine Jones was saying the same thing at one time. But the truth is that advocates for a 9/11 Truth, or at least the ones who speak in public, are increasingly not the scientists among them. When was the last time you heard a real bona fide scientist talking about 9/11 Truth? Really. Judy Wood? Tracy Blevins? My guess is that you'll have to dig back years to find anyone.

All of this reminds me of an often stated saying here on the JREF that conspiracy theory isn't about finding the truth but about bogging down the discussion. That's what his kind of publishing is intended to do. It's not work aimed at professional scientists or research engineers. It's the sort of thing that catches the attention of people on the edge of that world, and then the whole discussion gets bogged down in why Jones and his crew had to publish in something like Bentham. That ends up consuming huge amounts of time and most advocates for 9/11 Truth drop out and assume it's just a side issue.

Lynn Margulis can't answer this question anymore. But Tony Szamboti can and he just brushes it aside as though it doesn't matter. But it does. No one except journals that don't have the manpower to do proper reviews are willing to publish this sort of stuff. Some of these venues don't care about this problem (Benthem), others (IJPS) are just down grade journals.
 
JSanderO said:
Along comes Millette who has also studied WTC dust and does not find NT. Why has this not ended the matter?... Do they really expect to get away with this with professionals and people in academia?
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One wants to believe that many of them hope eventually to convince the professionals and academics, and rationalize the resistance to their Extreme Truth as psychologically and/or materially motivated denialism. For those who have stayed the course this long, it is hard to imagine what could end the matter.

As far as most professionals and academics are concerned, there is no matter to end -- and there is no Chuck Barris to ring a gong ending the performance, to the extent that anyone even notices it going on.
 
Typical FUD from a monopolist trying to retain market share.
It seems an Open Journal has fired back with their own BS.

The Assessment of Science: The Relative Merits of Post-Publication Review, the Impact Factor, and the Number of Citations.
Eyre-Walker A, Stoletzki N (2013)
 
indio007 said:
Typical FUD from a monopolist trying to retain market share.
It seems an Open Journal has fired back with their own BS.

The Assessment of Science: The Relative Merits of Post-Publication Review, the Impact Factor, and the Number of Citations.
Eyre-Walker A, Stoletzki N (2013)
Click to expand...
Interesting opinion. Tell me, which of the criteria for determining a predatory journal (linked here), do you discount?
 
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