From: Neil Christensen <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Mon, 7 Mar 2016 12:40:24 -0800

Hi Michael,

I know we disagree healthily and constructively on this, but I suspect your
thinking is a bit too deductive. I'm not diminishing the issue with this
article, but the evolution of journal models is complex and littered with
problems. I don't believe we can conclude the sustainability of
mega-journals based on this. If one applied similar criteria to non-mega
journals, surely one would surface mistakes on a similar scale without
declaring that model dead in the face of its very existence?

Neil Blair Christensen
University of California Press

Director, Digital Business Development

On Thu, Mar 3, 2016 at 3:46 PM, LIBLICENSE <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

> From: Michael Magoulias <[log in to unmask]>
> Date: Thu, 3 Mar 2016 16:31:52 +0000
>
> Readers of this list will be interested in the recent case of a Chicago
> biology professor who was asked by PLoS One to review his own paper.
>
> This professor also highlighted the following sentence in an abstract to a
> separate, published PLoS One article entitled “Biomechanical
> Characteristics of Hand Coordination in Grasping Activities of Daily
> Living.”
> http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0146193
>
> “The explicit functional link indicates that the biomechanical
> characteristic of tendinous connective architecture between muscles and
> articulations is the proper design by the Creator to perform a multitude of
> daily tasks in a comfortable way.”
>
>
> Can I get an amen?
>
> This is simply the most recent example of what many researchers view as
> the standard m.o. of these megajournals. I was on a panel a few weeks ago
> with another biologist who had previously been a PLoS editor. He left on
> the grounds that the site was, and I quote, “a dumping ground for crappy
> articles.”
>
> If this is increasingly becoming the view of members of the academic
> community – and granted, the key word here is “if” – then there is a
> widening gap between researchers and those who believe that OA on an even
> more massive scale will be not only the solution to the problem of library
> budgets, but a boon to the future welfare of humanity.
>
> Looking at the timeline of this article, it is also worth noting that the
> period from acceptance to publication was 13 months, which is hardly
> speedier than what most STM publishers are doing. Clearly, whatever work
> was going into the article, it wasn’t peer review at its most rigorous. It
> wasn’t even manuscript editing.
>
> So if we add to these factors the recent dramatic increase in the APC, one
> has to ask whether this form of publishing really is any meaningful sense
> superior to the system it is meant to replace or “disrupt.” It’s also a
> question whether there can be long-term sustainability to a method of
> publication that places such a low premium on intellectual quality.
>
>
> Michael Magoulias
> University of Chicago Press
> Director, Journals
>