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