Academic Journals In Glass Houses... - Neuroskeptic

"A psychiatry journal, the Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease (JNMD), has just published a remarkable attack on another journal, Frontiers in Psychology. Here’s the piece: it’s by the JNMD’s own Statistics Editor. In it, he writes that: To be perfectly candid, the reader needs to be informed that the journal that published the Lakens (2013) article, Frontiers in Psychology, is one of an increasing number of journals that charge exorbitant publication fees in exchange for free open access to published articles. Some of the author costs are used to pay reviewers, causing one to question whether the process is always unbiased, as is the desideratum. For further information, the reader is referred to the following Web site: http://www.frontiersin.org/Psychology/fees. The back-story here is that a group of researchers wrote a letter to JNMD alleging several errors in a 2014 paper about psychotherapy for psychosis. One of the authors of the letter was psychologist Daniël Lakens, and these authors cited one of Lakens’ papers from 2013, which appeared in Frontiers in Psychology. Now the Statistics Editor of the JNMD seems to be implying that Lakens effectively bought off the peer reviewers, and that this is why his paper was accepted. In fact, he questions the peer review standards of not only Frontiers, but all Open Access journals ..."