To summarize the concerns I have with this study: 1. To prove that open access is worse than close access, you need to do experiments comparing both, not just

To summarize the concerns I have with this study: 1. To prove that open access is worse than close access, you need to do experiments comparing both, not just do experiments on open access and say the results are bad. Try imagining a study using the same methodology to show that American journals are bad. 2. Even assuming that open-access journals on average are worse than closed-access journals, it does not follow that all open-access journals are crap. I think it is safe to say that 80% of all publications venues are crap regardless of their access policy. Fortunately, scientists usually do not choose a venue at random among open-access or closed-access ones, they pick those that have a good reputation. So to establish that open access is bad you should do so by evaluating the right venues. To give another analogy, this is like looking at random emails in transit, observing that they are spam, and concluding that email is worse than Twitter, without observing anything on Twitter, or taking into account the fact that people are not reading random emails. I think this study does exemplify the fact (well-known among scientists) that there is a huge mass of low-quality publication venues with little or no review of the submissions, but branding it as "open access is bad!" can only be explained by further political motives.