Mega-Korchevatel

Active scientists, among other spam, often receive offers to publish articles in new, usually unknown open access journals. We have already talked about how a satirical magazine character was discovered on the editorial board of one of these electronic publications [1]. And last week, many online newspapers published a summary of the story told in the new issue of Science [2]. In short, it looked like all open access journals publish articles without peer review for a fee. In fact, the situation is a little deeper.

John Bohannon, Science Fellow , Ph.D. in molecular biology from Oxford (by the way, this university is one of the largest publishers in both the traditional and open access models), composed another “random” article. The randomness here was not in the text, but in the data, which was completely fictitious. The article was devoted to the effect of substance X from lichen Y on cells of the cancer line Z. Moreover, the data was not just fictitious, but obviously meaningless: the text contradicted what was shown in the graphs, the observed effects - suppression of cell growth - could not be explained by the presence of “substance X” in the solution ", and because it contained an unusually high concentration of ethyl alcohol, the controls were completely inadequate. In addition, the text contained a serious ethical error: the author concluded by suggesting that the next step would be to begin treating patients (without any clinical trials). Bohannon then messed up the language of the article by using a translator to translate it back and forth into French—after correcting obvious grammatical errors, the article appeared to have been written by someone whose first language was not English. Finally, he built a random African name and institution generator using Swahili words and standard patterns (such as Ocorrafoo Cobange from the Wassee Institute of Medicine), and an X, Y, and Z name generator.

Bohannon then submitted the article—or rather, random versions of it—to 304 open-access journals. The journals, one from each publisher, were taken from two lists: DOAJ (Directory of Open Access Journals) [3] - which lists journals after peer review of quality - and a list of unethical publishers maintained by Geoffrey Beall of the University Colorado in Denver [4].

The results are shown in the table (initial data taken from the blog [5]). It can be seen that the “bad” journals basically confirmed their reputation - they published the article in most cases with virtually no review (sometimes the author was required only to make purely cosmetic changes, such as writing a more detailed summary or reformatting references). What's more alarming is that almost half of the journals on the clean list also accepted the bogus article. This is what made the headlines, and what Bohannon discusses in his reporting. Another observation: the word American or European in the name means nothing. Most bad magazines are published in developing countries (many in India and Pakistan), and publishing fees are often collected through banks registered in Nigeria.

However, it's not that simple, and a number of science blogs have criticized Bohannon's work. There were two reasons for this criticism. Firstly, the more strict OASPA (Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association) list should have been used as the “gold standard” [6]. Secondly, there is no control in the work - a similar procedure applied to traditional paper journals. In the absence of these controls, it is premature to say that the open access model is particularly susceptible to abuse, as many secondary commentators have argued.

A practical conclusion for Russian scientists: if you are invited to join the editorial board of a journal or are offered to publish an article in it, check the mentioned lists, see who is already on the editorial board (although you must keep in mind that sometimes scientists are added to the editorial board without their knowledge), look at what articles have already been published in this journal. It is best to publish in open access journals indexed by Web of Science or Scopus. Although even here it would be interesting to check whether any of them showed up by publishing one of Bohannon’s uprooters.

1. M. Gelfand. Korchevatel. TrV-Nauka No. 97, February 14, 2012.

2. J.Bohannon. Who’s Afraid of Peer Review. Science v. 342, p. 60-65, 04.10.2013.

3. www.doaj.org

4. http://scholarlyoa.com/publishers/

5. Who’s Afraid of Peer Review: Sting Operation of the Science: Some analysis of the metadata ( http://scholarlyoadisq.wordpress.com/2013/10/09/who-is-afraid-of-peer-review-sting-operation-of-the-science-some-analysis-of-the-metadata/ ).

6. http://oaspa.org