{"id":20,"date":"2013-10-04T11:05:00","date_gmt":"2013-10-03T22:05:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/deborahfitchett.com\/blog\/?p=20"},"modified":"2013-10-04T11:05:00","modified_gmt":"2013-10-03T22:05:00","slug":"open-access-and-peer-review","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/deborahfitchett.com\/blog\/2013\/10\/open-access-and-peer-review\/","title":{"rendered":"Open access and peer review"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>We\u2019re likely to be hearing about John Bohannon&#8217;s new article in <em>Science<\/em>, &#8220;<a href=\"http:\/\/dx.doi.org\/10.1126\/science.342.6154.60\">Who&#8217;s afraid of peer review?<\/a>&#8221; Essentially the author created 304 fake papers with bad science and submitted one each to an &#8216;author-pays&#8217; open access journal to test their peer review. 157 of the journals accepted it, 98 rejected it; other journals were abandoned websites or still have\/had the paper under review at time of analysis. (Some details are interesting. PLOS ONE provided some of the most rigorous peer review and rejected it; OA titles from Sage and Elsevier and some scholarly societies accepted it.)<\/p>\n<p>Sounds pretty damning, except&#8230;<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/plus.google.com\/u\/0\/109377556796183035206\/posts\/CRHeCAtQqGq\">Peter Suber<\/a> and <a href=\"https:\/\/theconversation.com\/flawed-sting-operation-singles-out-open-access-journals-18846\">Martin Eve<\/a> each write a takedown of the study, both well worth reading. They list many problems with the methodology and conclusions. (For example, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.doaj.org\/doaj?func=byPublicationFee&#038;uiLanguage=en\">over two-thirds of open access journals listed on DOAJ aren&#8217;t &#8220;author-pays&#8221;<\/a> so it&#8217;s odd to exclude them.)<\/p>\n<p>But the key flaw is even more obvious than the flaws in the fake articles: his experiment was done without any kind of control. He only submitted to open access journals, not to traditionally-published journals, so we don\u2019t know whether their peer review would have performed any better. As <a href=\"http:\/\/svpow.com\/2013\/10\/03\/john-bohannons-peer-review-sting-against-science\/\">Mike Taylor<\/a> and <a href=\"http:\/\/www.michaeleisen.org\/blog\/?p=1439\">Michael Eisen<\/a> point out, this isn&#8217;t the first paper with egregiously bad science that&#8217;s slipped through <em>Science<\/em>&#8216;s peer review process either.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>We\u2019re likely to be hearing about John Bohannon&#8217;s new article in Science, &#8220;Who&#8217;s afraid of peer review?&#8221; Essentially the author created 304 fake papers with bad science and submitted one each to an &#8216;author-pays&#8217; open access journal to test their peer review. 157 of the journals accepted it, 98 rejected it; other journals were abandoned [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[],"tags":[4,3],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/deborahfitchett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/deborahfitchett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/deborahfitchett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deborahfitchett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deborahfitchett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=20"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/deborahfitchett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/deborahfitchett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=20"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deborahfitchett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=20"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deborahfitchett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=20"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}