Re-send as a result of mail host crash on 2/20.

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From: "Bargheer, Margo Friederike" <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Wed, 20 Feb 2013 07:57:37 +0000

Hi All,

Bjoern Brembs presented his findings at the European Open Access Days
last autumn in Vienna and it created a lot of discussion. Some
attendees seemed to defend the traditional model out of reflex by
stating that the high rate of rejection was an indication for rigorous
editor's work and therefore a sign for the high quality of these
journals, ignoring the fact that these papers with their thin results
had managed to pass the peer review in the first place.

In my point of view the main reason for high rejection rate in
combination with lower reproducibility rates due to low robustness of
the data is a sad one. What Brembs and Munafò show in their data is
the fact that the highly competitive incentive system in academia
forces scholars to play "Russian Journal Roulette", e.g. higher gains
combined with higher risk like putting out attractive but not yet
robust results in the best case, deliberate fraud in the worst case
and the end of a promising career. If I remember correctly Brembs and
Munafò rest their analysis on data from fields that lack a functioning
preprint culture (a system like physicists or economists have). Does
anybody know whether there are comparable findings in physics or
economics?

In our university we run a publication fund for our scholars to cover
their article fees in Gold Open Access journals (managed by the
library, funds come from our DFG, the library and our medical school).
It turns out that more and more scholars use PLoS ONE as a means to
get out of that "journal roulette". We asked them why they put their
articles from important research projects into PLoS ONE. Roughly half
of them stated that they had tried at one other journal and then got
under time pressure to publish, almost all remaining ones stated that
they couldn't waste time in the submission process of higher ranking
journals. And at least one stated that he knew the article was good
and therefore simply wanted it as fast and reliable as possible in
front of his peers to read it, sacrificing potential reputation gain
for speed.

Best
Margo

Margo Bargheer
Leitung Elektronisches Publizieren ǀ Head of Electronic Publishing
----------------------------
Georg-August-Universität Göttingen
Niedersächsische Staats- und Universitätsbibliothek Göttingen
State and University Library Goettingen
[log in to unmask]
www.sub.uni-goettingen.de

________________________________________
From: Ken Masters <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Sun, 17 Feb 2013 16:49:43 +0400

Hi All

I wonder if people on this list have had a chance to see the article
by Brembs and Munafò at:
http://arxiv.org/pdf/1301.3748v1

Among some of the points they make in their paper deals with the
"decline effect" which leads to the state in which "higher ranking
journals are also more likely to publish fraudulent work than lower
ranking journals."  Even if not fraudulent, particularly worrying is
the low reproducibility of findings in these high impact journals.

Regards

Ken

Dr. Ken Masters
Asst. Professor: Medical Informatics
Medical Education Unit
College of Medicine & Health Sciences
Sultan Qaboos University
Sultanate of Oman
E-i-C: The Internet Journal of Medical Education