OASPA’s response to the recent article in Science entitled “Who’s Afraid of Peer Review?” - OASPA

"The “sting” exercise conducted by John Bohannon that was recently reported in Science provides some useful data about the scale of, and the problems associated with, this group of low-quality , which is an issue that OASPA has worked to address since the Association was first created. While we appreciate the contribution that has been made to this discussion by the recent article in Science, OASPA is concerned that the data that is presented in this article may be misinterpreted.  We will issue a fuller response to this article once we have had a chance to review the data in more detail (and we applaud the decision to make the data fully available), but for now we wish to highlight what can and cannot be concluded from the information contained within this article.

The greatest limitation of the “sting” that was described in the Science article is that “fake” articles were only sent to a group of open access journals, and these journals were not selected in an appropriately randomized way.  There was no comparative control group of subscription based journals, despite the exhortation from Dr. Marcia McNutt (the Editor-in-Chief of Science) in the accompanying Editorial that publishing models be subject to rigorous tests. In contrast, more rigorously designed studies that have been peer-reviewed prior to publication provide evidence of the rigor and benefits of open access journals relative to their subscription counterparts(http://www.biomedcentral.com/1741-7015/10/73 and http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/asi.22944/abstract).

Another limitation of the study described in Science concerns the sampling of the journals that were chosen as targets for the “sting,” which were drawn from two lists – Beall’s list of ‘predatory’ open-access journals, and the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ).  Publishers were selected from these lists after eliminating some on various grounds, including a journal’s language of publication, subject coverage, and publication fee policy.  Ultimately the “fake” articles were sent to 304 journals, out of which 157 journals appear to have accepted these articles for publication.  Given the selection criteria that were used in determining where to submit these “fake” articles, it is not possible to draw any meaningful conclusions about the pervasiveness of low-quality open access journals in the wider publishing ecosystem...."