4 ms·

It is a dire situation, but the fact that the researcher(s) went to great effort to get into that particular journal shows that at least the perceived quality o

It is a dire situation, but the fact that the researcher(s) went to great effort to get into that particular journal shows that at least the perceived quality of the journal is still being used as a rough metric for the quality of the research. So quality is still a factor, even if quantity has far too much weight. If they had simply wanted to get published, then it seems like there are plenty of journals that will accept almost anything (they get paid on publication). More than 150 out of 300 open access journals accepted an obvious spoof paper last year[1]. [1]http://www.sciencemag.org/content/342/6154/60.full http://www.sciencemag.org/content/342/6154/60.full

p4bl0 12y ago
Of course, the "impact factor" of the journal also counts, however it is gamed too. For instance there are publishers which artificially increase the impact factors of their journals by requesting that authors of accepted papers cite a few articles recently published in their journal. Now, I would like to come back to the "article" you cite. Let me get this straight from the beginning: this text (by John Bohannon) is a piece of shit. Let me explain why: The article aim to compare open access journals and closed access ones. The method that is used for that purpose is quite remarkable. It consists in sending a paper of very poor quality with wrong results in it to many gold open access journals (this means that there are what is called "Author Processing Charge": the authors pay the journal to publish), and to see how many of those will accept the paper. What happens is that a bit more than half of them accept the paper with, of course, not a single sign of peer-review happening. The author then conclude that open access journals are for the major part of poor quality, implying that they are worse than "traditional journals". This conclusion is eminently ridiculous. First, if you want to compare open access and closed access journals, you also need to actually test the closed access journals. You can't just assume that they are good, especially when it's implied and not a single reason to think so is given (trust me it could be hard in many cases). Second, the method makes no sense. No researchers sends his or her paper to unknown journals. When a paper is submitted to a journal, the journal is chosen depending on at least two criteria: on one side its prestige, because the more prestigious, the more read, and the goal of an academics is of course to be read by the other researchers in his domain; on the other side, for the seriousness of the journal (which is tacitly known in its academic community), because the peer-review process is very important for the authors (no academics like to have a paper published and then discover that there is a mistake in it). Amusingly, this is something that scientific news magazine such as Nature and Science are not that good at. Third, the real conclusion of the poorly carried experiment that the author makes is that the bibliometrics pressure on researcher (“publish or perish”) coupled to their desirable and natural wish to be more widely read, and thus to publish in open access journals, gave birth to an unhealthy publication business that is harmful to research and science (I recall that the author only experimented with authors-pay open access journal, calling it simple "open access", as if he was, strangely, paid by publishers lobby to increase the already existing confusion between gold open access (where authors pay) and open access, which exists in many different models). To me, the real solution to all these problem lies in Diamond Open Access and Open Peer-Review.
- FatalLogic 12y ago
  I'm not qualified to comment on every point you made, but it's certainly true that his methodology was not very scientific. Some publications are quoted in the article as saying that they would have reviewed the paper later, and then they would have rejected it. As he wasn't prepared to pay the publication fee, he had no way of testing this.

p4bl0 12y ago

Of course, the "impact factor" of the journal also counts, however it is gamed too. For instance there are publishers which artificially increase the impact factors of their journals by requesting that authors of accepted papers cite a few articles recently published in their journal. Now, I would like to come back to the "article" you cite. Let me get this straight from the beginning: this text (by John Bohannon) is a piece of shit. Let me explain why: The article aim to compare open access journals and closed access ones. The method that is used for that purpose is quite remarkable. It consists in sending a paper of very poor quality with wrong results in it to many gold open access journals (this means that there are what is called "Author Processing Charge": the authors pay the journal to publish), and to see how many of those will accept the paper. What happens is that a bit more than half of them accept the paper with, of course, not a single sign of peer-review happening. The author then conclude that open access journals are for the major part of poor quality, implying that they are worse than "traditional journals". This conclusion is eminently ridiculous. First, if you want to compare open access and closed access journals, you also need to actually test the closed access journals. You can't just assume that they are good, especially when it's implied and not a single reason to think so is given (trust me it could be hard in many cases). Second, the method makes no sense. No researchers sends his or her paper to unknown journals. When a paper is submitted to a journal, the journal is chosen depending on at least two criteria: on one side its prestige, because the more prestigious, the more read, and the goal of an academics is of course to be read by the other researchers in his domain; on the other side, for the seriousness of the journal (which is tacitly known in its academic community), because the peer-review process is very important for the authors (no academics like to have a paper published and then discover that there is a mistake in it). Amusingly, this is something that scientific news magazine such as Nature and Science are not that good at. Third, the real conclusion of the poorly carried experiment that the author makes is that the bibliometrics pressure on researcher (“publish or perish”) coupled to their desirable and natural wish to be more widely read, and thus to publish in open access journals, gave birth to an unhealthy publication business that is harmful to research and science (I recall that the author only experimented with authors-pay open access journal, calling it simple "open access", as if he was, strangely, paid by publishers lobby to increase the already existing confusion between gold open access (where authors pay) and open access, which exists in many different models). To me, the real solution to all these problem lies in Diamond Open Access and Open Peer-Review.

FatalLogic 12y ago
I'm not qualified to comment on every point you made, but it's certainly true that his methodology was not very scientific. Some publications are quoted in the article as saying that they would have reviewed the paper later, and then they would have rejected it. As he wasn't prepared to pay the publication fee, he had no way of testing this.