From: Rebecca Kennison <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Sat, 19 Oct 2013 12:39:30 -0400

While of course the sting was a travesty, I'm not entirely sure that
the DOAJ response has been what I'd have hoped to see either. I'm most
interested in this sentence in Dom's post: "DOAJ decided that the
remaining journals would also be removed from the Directory as quickly
as possible and an email sent to each, explaining why this has been
done." What troubles me about this statement is that it seems to
indicate the lack of any kind of a review process, much less a
transparent one.

Because all journal editors make mistakes, why not first discuss with
the editors of these journals what their process for peer review might
be, undertake an audit of the work published otherwise by the journal,
and work with the journals to improve their process, rather than
simply removing them out of hand based on criteria that might not be
entirely clear to anyone other than DOAJ?

Further, because the majority of the journals that accepted the paper
were in the global South, is not the same criticism DOAJ has leveled
at Bohannon, that he implied poor-quality work comes from Africa, the
same criticism that could now be leveled at DOAJ itself -- that it
implies they feel poor-quality peer review is rampant in the global
South and thus not even worth a discussion with the editors?

What could've been a teachable moment for the OA community in
strengthening its standards instead seems to have become solely a
defensive move on the part of DOAJ. I am, to be honest, very
disappointed by that.

Rebecca Kennison


On Sat, Oct 19, 2013 at 8:58 AM, LIBLICENSE <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>
> From: Dom Mitchell <[log in to unmask]>
> Date: Fri, 18 Oct 2013 14:45:01 +0200
>
> Two weeks ago DOAJ published a brief response to the Bohannon article:
>
> http://www.doaj.org/doaj?func=news&nId=315&uiLanguage=en
>
> We promised then to come back with a second response once we had
> carried out some further analysis. We have published that response
> today:
>
> http://www.doaj.org/doaj?func=news&nId=317&uiLanguage=en
>
> In it we explain what has happened to the journals in DOAJ that
> accepted Bohannon's fake paper and we explain why we think that
> Bohannon's choice of fake author names is damaging to scholarly
> publishing.
>
> Dom Mitchell
> Community Manager, DOAJ
> Tel: +46 (0)702044095 - mob/cell
>      +44 (0)207 097 8565
> Skype: dommitchellhw