Science's open access challenge Page 1 of 2 | UTSanDiego.com

"Science magazine has published an exposé of low standards in open access science journals, which provide their articles free to the public. But the exposé itself lacks an obvious scientific control that undermines its conclusions.  This peer review process doesn't work well at many open access publications, according to the Science article. A bogus paper that should have been easily spotted was distributed under a pseudonym to these publications, which often accepted it with little question. 'Acceptance was the norm, not the exception,' the Science article stated. 'The paper was accepted by journals hosted by industry titans Sage and Elsevier. The paper was accepted by journals published by prestigious academic institutions such as Kobe University in Japan. It was accepted by scholarly society journals. It was even accepted by journals for which the paper's topic was utterly inappropriate, such as the Journal of Experimental & Clinical Assisted Reproduction.'I need no convincing that there is plenty of sloppiness and even fraud in many open-access journals, some of which are run by predatory publishers that put profit before quality. And Science is regarded by scientists as one of the gold standard research publications. So the article's warning needs to be taken seriously. However, the Science article didn't clearly distinguish between problems with open access and problems with peer review itself. And Science didn't perform the same test with traditional subscription-access publications, such as Science itself. In other words, it lacked a control, a standard requirement in experiments. Moreover, Science didn't address its own conflict of interest with the open-access model. This hurts the article's credibility. It doesn't live up to the high standards Science sets for itself ..."