IOP PUBLISHING

JOURNAL OF RADIOLOGICAL PROTECTION

J. Radiol. Prot. 33 (2013) 885–886

doi:10.1088/0952-4746/33/4/M01

News and information Open access under scrutiny The idea behind open access publishing is generally good as it offers researchers worldwide the opportunity to access information they might otherwise not be able to use. Most scientific journals have consequently been considering how to incorporate open access into their business models. Now, a recent news article by John Bohannon entitled ‘Who’s afraid of peer review’ [1] not only leads to open access being put into doubt, it also dampens the morale of aspiring authors and has surely led to many authors scurrying to check the authenticity of the open access journals they had published in. It puts the practice, if not the whole concept, of peer review into question. In short, over a period of eight months Bohannon submitted various versions of a paper with poor methodological quality, based on a fictitious study and written under a fictitious name and fictitious institute, to 304 peer-reviewed open access journals. Basically the papers describe two experiments: firstly, a simple test of whether cancer cells grow more slowly in a test tube when treated with increasing concentrations of a molecule, and secondly, simulating radiotherapy by treating the cells with increasing doses of radiation. The conclusion in all papers is that ‘the molecule is a powerful inhibitor of cancer cell growth, and it increases the sensitivity of cancer cells to radiotherapy’ [1]. According to Bohannon the papers had a number of blatant flaws, the most obvious being that the caption of the first graph claimed a dose-dependent effect on cell growth which was not portrayed by the data. The methodological shortcomings included the fact that in the first experiment the control group of cells were not dissolved in the same buffer as the molecule used to treat the cancer cells. Furthermore, in the second experiment the control cells were not irradiated at all. To cap it all, in its final statement the paper claims that the author intends to prove the effectiveness of the tested molecule against cancer in animals and humans, concluding that the molecule ‘is a promising new drug for the combined-modality treatment of cancer’ [1]. Despite these flaws, more than half of the journals accepted the paper, in most cases with no sign of peer review, even though the journals concerned claim to use this approach. Given the mushrooming of new journals, it appears that some publishers are unscrupulously using open access as a vehicle to make profit without any interest in the content or quality of the matter they are publishing. Determining the authenticity of such journals seems to be very difficult. How then can good quality open access be achieved? Ten years ago the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ), the Who’s Who of credible open access journals, was set up. To be listed, a journal first has to be recommended to the DOAJ, after which it undergoes a review process based on information submitted by the publisher. The DOAJ requires that a journal has a quality control system including an editor, editorial board and/or a peer-review system. Metadata such as the name and URL of the publisher, the year the journal was founded and the topics it covers are listed in the directory. There is also a kind of blacklist available on the internet which is maintained by a library scientist at the University of Colorado, Denver. The list comprises publishers defined as 0952-4746/13/040885+02$33.00

© 2013 IOP Publishing Ltd

Printed in the UK

885

886

News and information

‘predatory’ by the compiler, Jeffrey Beall. Of the 304 journals Bohannon submitted to, 167 were from the DOAJ, 121 from Beall’s list, and 16 were listed by both. By the time he publicised the scam he had received responses from a total of 255 journals, 98 rejections and 157 acceptances, in 60% of the cases without any sign of review. Interestingly, although 36 of the reviews commented on the paper’s scientific flaws, 16 (journal) editors still went on to accept the paper. 82% of those on Beall’s and 45% of those on the DOAJ list accepted the paper. Ideally none of those on the DOAJ list should have accepted the paper. Journals that accepted the paper included some published by Elsevier, Wolters Kluwer and Sage, publishing houses with long-standing tradition in scientific publishing. The debate on open access publishing has centred on various aspects including whether its proliferation would ‘damage the peer review system and put the quality of scientific journal publishing at risk’ [2]. In their comparison of the scientific impact of open access versus subscription journals, Björk and Solomon concluded that the scientific impact and quality of open access journals indexed in Web of Science and/or Scopus was approaching that of subscription journals. This underlines the fact that not all open access journals are of poor quality. As Ginsparg, the founder of arXiv, is reported to have said, the performance of peer review is the most basic obligation of a scientific journal and the scientific community has to rise to the challenge of ensuring that journals honour their obligation [1]. In January 2013, Vitek Tracz, a pioneer of open access publishing, launched an open access journal F1000Research with a controversial review process [3]. After a cursory quality check, manuscripts are published online as soon as they are submitted. The whole review process is then carried out openly online, starting with reviewers stating their names and affiliations for all to see, followed by the communication between reviewers and authors taking place openly. It is needless to say that this approach has met with some skepticism. However, if made mandatory for all journals, open access and subscription alike, this form of review could be a viable way to curtail the spreading of poor quality scientific journals. The Bohannon ‘study’ brings new urgency to the discussion of open access and, indeed, peer review. Whether the problem is confined to open access only remains an open question: the bogus article was not mass-posted to traditional subscription-based journals, and hence also not to Journal of Radiological Protection. References [1] Bohannon J 2013 Who’s afraid of peer review? Science 342 60–5 [2] Björk B C and Solomon D 2012 Open access versus subscription journals: a comparison of scientific impact BMC Med. 10 73 [3] Rabesandratana T 2013 The Seer of Science Publishing Science 342 66–7

Florence Samkange-Zeeb and Hajo Zeeb Leibniz-Institute for Prevention Research and Epidemiology—BIPS, Bremen, Germany

Joint Position Statement on the Bonn Call-for-Action A full report on the ‘International Conference on Radiation Protection in Medicine: Setting the scene for the next decade’ held on 3–7 December 2012 in Bonn, Germany, was given in the March 2013 issue of the journal (2013 J. Radiol. Prot. 33 251–255). The final conclusions and Call-for-Action have now been published and can be found at https://rpop.iaea.org/ RPOP/RPoP/Content/Documents/Whitepapers/conference/bonn-call-for-action-statement.pdf Robert H Corbett

Copyright of Journal of Radiological Protection is the property of IOP Publishing and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use.

Open access under scrutiny.

Open access under scrutiny. - PDF Download Free
36KB Sizes 0 Downloads 0 Views