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