Last month, I made note of the 'open access sting' carried out by John Bohannon and published in Science. Last week, this post at the Scholarly Kitchen features an interview with Bohannon in which he is given an opportunity to answer his critics. I find all of his answers persuasive. Bohannon has adequately defended his work, in my view.
However, I still sympathize with the critics who would have liked a control group of non-open-access publishers as well as those who believe the peer review system, writ large, is broken. Bohannon makes clear that addressing both of these issues was out of scope for his project. That's fair. Many of us, however, are indeed concerned with these broader matters. I don't think it would be necessary to carry out a 'sting' to demonstrate that non-open-access publishers, including top-notch ones like Science, have a track record of publishing substandard or even deeply flawed research. I wrote at length about this earlier.
H/T: In the Pipeline
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