4 replies to this topic

[JBForrester]

Wasn't sure where to post this but the New York Times wrote an article regarding the credibility of certain "journals" that now have come out by means of "open-access". Thus, publishing studies that are questionable. Longecity members beware of what you use as sources!

http://www.nytimes.c...wanted=all&_r=0

[niner]

Wow. Thanks for posting that, JB! I'd heard about some of this, but had no idea it had gotten this bad. Beall's List is a list of questionable journals compiled by a Science Librarian, the majority of which are bioscience oriented. Here is the amateurish website of one of them. I wouldn't be surprised if citations to some of these have made their way onto Longecity.

[Mind]

The beauty of open-access in today's world is that we have crowd-sourced peer review. I would never want to go back to the more closed-access system.

[JBForrester]

@ Mind: Yes, but the danger is that anyone can post anything with proper funds. Since reading the article, I recall many plastic surgeons doing so, which is beyond dangerous and deceitful to potential patients.

Wow. Thanks for posting that, JB! I'd heard about some of this, but had no idea it had gotten this bad. Beall's List is a list of questionable journals compiled by a Science Librarian, the majority of which are bioscience oriented. Here is the amateurish website of one of them. I wouldn't be surprised if citations to some of these have made their way onto Longecity.

You're welcome, I'm glad it could be of some use!

Edited by JBForrester, 20 May 2013 - 02:50 AM.

[niner]

The beauty of open-access in today's world is that we have crowd-sourced peer review. I would never want to go back to the more closed-access system.

I'm not sure why they are calling this "The Dark Side of Open-Access". Open Access means that the journal is freely available after it's published. It doesn't mean that there's defective peer review or that the journal should publish anything no matter how crappy. I hope that pubmed isn't indexing this drek. I guess the connection to Open Access is that a lot of open access journals have a page charge to defray the costs of publication. This has long been true for the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, but that doesn't mean it's easy to get a paper in PNAS. Far from it. The PLOS journals are high quality Open journals. Their page charges are as much as 2900 USD if the work is funded by a wealthy country, or as little as nothing if the funding country is poor. I guess 2900 bucks is a pretty juicy target for a phony journal. These things are a cancer. They're even worse than Elsevier!