Communication in Science: Pressures and Predators

The October 4, 2013, issue of Science features a special section, “Communication in Science: Pressures and Predators.” The item receiving the most attention is a sting operation by John Bohannon, who submitted versions of a fake, deliberately flawed article to 304 open access journals. Roughly half of them were actually accepted for publication. It is difficult to separate those journals who did so due to a slipshod editorial process (which is shared by many traditional journal publishers) and those that are deliberately predatory, the topic of Jeffrey Beall's blog.

Bohannon's experiment was criticized by Michael Eisen for not including a control group, that is, a group of traditional, subscription-based journals, in its sample. Philip Moriarty at Physics Focus echoes Eisen's criticisms. Both are fairly hostile to traditional journals for similar reasons. The epidemic of nonreproducible research, discussed in earlier posts on DTLR, serves to illustrate the broken-ness of the peer review system that they speak of. (Ironically, Eisen himself is interviewed in the piece that follows Bohannon's in the Science special feature, about “heretical” publisher Vitek Tracz.)  Eisen and Moriarty are pretty angry at Science for their hypocrisy, but they should have read the rest of the special feature. Jennifer Couzin-Frankel's piece on “The Power of Negative Thinking”, which advocates publication of negative results, is quite blunt about the epidemic of non-reproducible research. For me, Couzin-Frankel's piece is the most important article in the special feature, and I will dedicate a separate post to it shortly.  (Also of great interest is the Policy Forum piece by Diane Harley -- I may write further about that one too.)

In the meantime, the points made by Eisen and Moriarty are well taken. Nonetheless, as Bohannon, Beall, and others have shown, the open access journal movement has opened the floodgates for hundreds of predatory online journals that maintain no standards whatsoever. This surely deserves the widespread coverage that Bohannon's piece has garnered. I only wish that Couzin-Frankel's article had attracted equal scrutiny, along with the recent moves by Nature to raise its level of play on these matters, discussed earlier on DTLR.

It should be disclosed that I once served as a referee for an open access journal from a publisher on Beall's list. Thus I can testify that they (OMICS Group) at least did send out one paper from one journal for review. (Fortunately my review was positive and the paper was published; I do not know what would have happened had I submitted a negative review. I also strongly suspect that I was chosen to referee the paper because the submitting author was asked to provide a list of names of potential reviewers. Many traditional journals do the same.) Some of the other publishers on Beall's list do not even bother with even the appearance of a legitimate review process. I have also had a paper of my own rejected by an open access journal, one not included on Beall's list. The publisher of that journal, Hindawi, also passed Bohannon's test and rejected his phony paper.

Recommended reading

The Special Section in Science contains the following items (as well as a number of sidebar pieces by Jon Cohen and the other authors). Readers' attention was also called to a number of related Perspective and other items appearing in the same issue.

Richard Stone and Barbara Jasny, 2013: Scientific discourse: buckling at the seams. Science, 342: 57.

A cartoon by Randall Munroe (XKCD).

John Bohannon, 2013: Who's afraid of peer review? Science, 342: 60-65. (“A spoof paper concocted by Science reveals little or no scrutiny at many open-access journals”)

Tania Rabesandratana, 2013: The seer of science publishing. Science, 342: 66-67. (“Vitek Tracz was ahead of the pack on open access. Now he wants to rewrite the rules of peer review”)

Jennifer Couzin-Frankel, 2013: The power of negative thinking. Science, 342: 68-69. (“Gaining ground in the ongoing struggle to coax researchers to share negative results”)

David Malakoff, 2013: Hey, you've got to hide your work away. Science, 342: 70-71. (“Debate is simmering over how and when to publish sensitive data”)

Eliot Marshal, 2013: Lock up the genome, lock down research? Science, 342: 72-73. (“Researchers say that gene patents impede data sharing and innovation; patent lawyers say there's no evidence for this”)

Jeffrey Mervis, 2013: The annual meeting: improving what isn't broken. Science, 342: 74-79. (“Annual meetings are moneymakers for most scientific societies, and scientists continue to flock to them. But as the world changes, how long can the status quo hold?”)

Diane Harley, 2013: Scholarly communication: cultural contexts, evolving models. Science, 342: 80-82.