The Good and the Bad of Open Access Journals | A. Townsend Peterson

"A recent paper in Science reported some very disturbing results: a manuscript with major flaws that any competent reviewer should notice was accepted by the majority of journals to which it was submitted, without major criticisms. I WISH that my papers had that easy a time! Seriously, though, the paper was sent to 304 journals, and accepted by more than half, in spite of major content flaws that made it not in the least bit believable as a scientific contribution. The 'sting' operation was published in Science magazine as a critique of open-access journals, revealing (according to the author) '... little or no scrutiny at many open-access journals.' I think that this result can be taken in two ways, each with valid viewpoints and insights. On one side, it can be taken as a serious and damning view into the laziness and lack of rigor in the current peer-review process. For the journals that sent the manuscript out for independent peer review, this 'experiment' illustrates that many peer reviewers may not take a careful, detailed, and critical look at a manuscript that is sent to them. Even with ostensibly credible research reports from real, living researchers, some poor quality papers do get published. This situation is a sad condemnation of a step that is key to science. On the other side, however, this experiment points out not that open-access journals are bad, but rather that some open-access journals do not share the vision of academic journals as important modes of communication among academics (note that the manuscripts were sent only to open-access journals, so we do not know how it would have fared in non-open-access venues). Some 'publishers' have found that one can mock up what looks like a 'journal,' stick it on a web server somewhere, charge significant publication fees, and make a lot of money at it. Most frequently, these journals are located in countries in which labor is cheap, boosting profits that much more. This point is far from new--Jeffrey Beall has long maintained Beall's List, a very useful catalog of publishers with dubious records of genuine academic scholarly publishing. Also, the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) attempts a view of the positive side--journals that have good records, although weeding out the bad ones has not been easy. Quite simply, a financial opportunity exists to exploit the needs of academics searching for outlets for their research products ..."