From: Michael Clarke <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Wed, 16 Oct 2013 22:41:06 -0400

To categorize Bohannon's journalistic sting operation as a
demonstration of the failure of peer review in the same vein as a
journal, such as Stem Cells and Development or Science (see Michael
Eisen's blog: http://www.michaeleisen.org/blog/?p=1439) that has the
occasional retraction, is a false equivalence. It is a false
equivalence because the retracted papers were, in the case of Stem
Cells and Development and Science, peer reviewed.

I suggest that anyone interested in this story follow the link that
Phil provided below and look at the data set. According to Bohannon,
81 of the journals that accepted the paper did not even review it.
Assuming this is representative of submission to these journals and
not a one-time fluke, this is not what I call a failure of peer
review. This is what I call a fraudulent business. A journal which
accepts money in the form of APCs under the pretense that it is a peer
reviewed publication, when in fact it is no such thing, is a fraud.

Yes, it would be nice if there were a control group but I'm unclear
why the lack of one excuses what appear to be fraudulent business
practices on the part of at least 81 of these publishers.

Michael Clarke
President
Clarke & Company
[log in to unmask]


On Oct 16, 2013, at 8:34 PM, LIBLICENSE <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

> From: Kevin Smith <[log in to unmask]>
> Date: Wed, 16 Oct 2013 12:40:49 +0000
>
> Surely it is a massive and unjustified leap to go from saying that a
> journal accepted Bohannon's bogus paper to calling that entire journal
> bogus or suggesting that none of the contents of any of these journals
> could have value.
>
> I have been looking at and considering the Journal of Natural
> Pharmaceuticals.  A quick look at PubMed and PubMed Central suggest
> that neither index includes that journal, which was the one Bohannon
> focused on in the beginning of his expose.  But as I point out in this
> blog post -- http://blogs.library.duke.edu/scholcomm/2013/10/10/the-big-picture-about-peer-review/
> -- two major indexes for general academic research, one from Gale and
> one from EBSCO, do include it.   And we simply have no basis for
> concluding that every article published in that journal is compromised
> by the apparent fact that Bohannon's article was accepted.  The web
> site Retraction Watch lists a recent retraction of an article that was
> published in Stem Cells and Development, a journal published by Mary
> Ann Liebert which I am confident is indexed in PubMed and PubMed
> Central.  But surely not every article published in that journal is
> tainted by the one retraction?
>
> I am fascinated by some of the cultural assumptions at work in this
> discussion.  When the open access community gathered in Stellenbosch
> last year for the Berlin 10 Conference, one of the themes we heard
> repeatedly was that research done in Africa by Africans about African
> issues was unavailable to the people of Africa because it was
> published in Western/Northern journals that were unaffordable for
> African universities.  The new business models of open access offer
> opportunities to resolve that problem, but they clearly need to
> develop and work out their problems, just as subscription-based
> journal publishing did several centuries ago.  But instead we see
> carefully orchestrated and "cooked" sting operations like Bohannon's
> (who pretended that his article was written by an African) designed to
> undermine those journals before they can get well-established.  It is
> ironic that Bohannon controlled for the possibility that his "native
> English" might give the game away (what an assumption!) but not for
> the possibility that subscription-based journals in the developed
> world might also have accepted his paper.
>
> There is an interesting discussion to be had about what exactly
> peer-review can really tell us and how we might resolve the bias in
> current academic publishing for well-capitalized operations in the
> developed world, with their apparent desire to slay all challengers to
> their dominance.  There is lots to say.  But one thing we cannot say
> is that Bohannon's journalistic sting operation has shown that all of
> the research published in all the journals he targets is bogus.
>
> Kevin L. Smith, M.L.S., J.D.
> Director, Copyright and Scholarly Communication
> Duke University Libraries
> Durham, NC  27708
> [log in to unmask]
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
>
> From: Philip Davis <[log in to unmask]>
> Date: Tue, 15 Oct 2013 09:42:11 -0400
>
> Apologies if I missed this thread, but has a librarian taken the 158
> titles that accepted Bohannon's bogus paper and figured out whether
> they are indexed in PubMed or are archived in PubMed Central? I'm not
> concerned that vanity journals exist in the first place (they will
> always exist), but would be extremely worried if organizations, like
> the National Library of Medicine, gives these journals
> credibility--and the articles published therein authority--by being
> hosted in PMC. If they were, the NLM would need to consider whether
> delisting their journal and purging their content is appropriate.
>
> The titles that accepted (and rejected) the bogus paper are listed in
> Bohannon's supplementary data.
>
> http://www.sciencemag.org/content/342/6154/60/suppl/DC1
>
> Thank you,
> Phil Davis