Hoax-Proofing the Open Access Journals - Slashdot

" ... Harvard biologist John Bohannon wrote about his experiment in an article published by Science Magazine. He submitted his deliberately bogus paper to 304 open-access publishers, including 183 that were listed in the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ), which Bohannon calls the "Who's Who of credible open-access journals", and whose quality is supposedly vetted by the DOAJ staff. Of the 304 open-access journals targeted by the sting, 60% published the paper. I think this mainly just shows that the average quality of open-access journals may always be low, but that's not surprising since anyone in the world can set up an "open access journal". That shouldn't be relevant to the reputation of the best open-access journals. If the best open-access journals acquire a reputation for high standards and proper peer review, then that will attract high-quality papers, whose publication will reinforce the reputation of the journal, which enables it to confer prestige on the papers it publishes, which in turn will continue to attract high-quality papers. The existence of other open-access journals with crummy standards, should be irrelevant. What's more disturbing, is that of the 183 journals listed in the Directory of Open Access Journals, 45% of those published the paper -- which, according to Bohannon's article, surprised and disappointed the DOAJ founders. But perhaps if you're maintaining a database of thousands of allegedly reputable open-access journals, there's no way to make sure that they're all telling the truth about their standards and their practices. At a quick glance, all you can really say is that they would be good-quality journals if they're telling the truth about how they operate, but it's hard to tell from the outside whether they're being honest. So perhaps a different solution is that we don't really need a huge number of good open-access journals. Rather, in each field, you could get by with a small number of 'super-journals' which have a lot of reviewers on file, and which publish a high number of papers but apply uniformly high standards across all of them ..."