Open Access vs. Subscription-Based Scientific Publications — Labguru Blog

" ... The open access approach is a rather modern concept (with roots planted back in the 1980s) and rests mostly on online publishing. While in part similar to subscription-based journals (authors pay for accepted articles, the content and the peer-review process is produced and conducted by the scientific community), the open access approach differs by enabling free of charge access to the scientific community and to the public (which support scientific research through tax payments). In addition, accepted manuscripts are published online much faster than their subscription-based counterparts. Yet opposition suggests that the open access approach has the potential to hasten submitted manuscript for publication at the expense of quality and scrutinized peer-review or editorial conduct. In light of the above potential conflicts of interest ("I pay, you publish"), Science magazine recently published a 'sting' operation in which a bogus manuscript was submitted to over 300 open access journals and accepted for publication in over 157 journals. The magazine took the effort to map the location of IP addresses of the publishers and their bank accounts, and found them to often be located in different countries, indicating that "most of the publishing operations cloak their true geographic location". It might sound like an excerpt from a new and sophisticated James Bond movie, yet this trend seems to be a truly distressing phenomenon in which peer-review and editorial conduct of many of the sprouting open access journals are not rigorous enough, to say the least. While Science magazine presented a first-rate investigation, it is lacking several subscription-based journals as a control and raises some thoughtful questions regarding how would these journals fare with such a bogus submission. It is but an irony (and a short-term memory lapse) that a couple of years ago, Science magazine published an article which claimed to identify the first ever micro-organism to incorporate Arsenic (AsO43-) instead of phosphorous (PO43-) in its DNA, proteins and lipids. This article quickly attracted criticism as the scientific community erupted in a blaze of heated discussion both in the scientific and non-scientific arenas.  Interestingly, the manuscript, which boasted an extraordinary claim, was accepted for publication merely a month and seven days post-submission, quite fast for a thorough peer-review, editorial discussion and comments by the authors, especially when such a prestigious journal is involved and such claims are presented. The opposition to the paper's claims didn't cease and a year and a half later two back-to-back papers (Reaves et. al. and Erb et. al.) were published in Science magazine, both refuting the claims of the original article, and setting a ladder for Science magazine to climb down from the journal's embarrassing disposition. Unlike the first paper, both refuting manuscripts were accepted for publication only six months post-submission, indicating that the people at Science magazine learned from their mistakes ..."