[GOAL] Re: Bohannon study: No damage

Sat Oct 12 20:28:47 BST 2013

The inevitable sensationalism inspired by the Bohannon Sting will soon die
down, doing no damage to science, scholarship or peer review. And insofar
as OA is concerned, it helps bring out an point about pay-to-publish junk
journals riding the growing wave of clamor for OA:

I would be surprised if there weren't subscription journals that would have
accepted the Bohannon bogus
paper<http://news.sciencemag.org/scientific-community/2013/10/live-chat-exploring-wild-west-open-access>
for
publication too.

But I would be even more surprised if as high a proportion of subscription
journals -- matched for field, age, size and impact-factor -- would have
accepted Bohannon's bogus paper as did the pay-to-publish OA journals
("Gold OA").

Subscription journals have to maintain enough of an appearance of peer
review to sustain their subscriptions. Pay-to-publish Gold OA journals just
have to maintain enough of an appearance of peer review to attract authors
(and maybe the lure of pay-to-publish is enough to attract many authors in
our publish-or-perish world without even the appearance of peer review,
especially when the journal choice is justified by the fashionable allure
-- or excuse -- of the journal's being an OA journal).

This problem would not be remedied by just lowering Gold OA journal
publication fees.

Nor is it a symptom of a general problem with peer review (though peer
review could certainly do with some upgrading in any case).

It is a specific problem of *peer review standards of pay-to-publish Gold
OA journals* at a time when there is still far too little OA and when most
journals are still subscription journals, most authors are still confused
about OA, many think that OA is synonymous with Gold OA journals, and, most
important, there are not yet enough effective mandates from research
funders and institutions that require authors to make all their papers OA
by depositing them in their institutional OA repositories ("Green OA"),
regardless of where they were published.

If it were mandatory to make all papers Green OA, all authors would simply
deposit their peer-reviewed final drafts in their institutional OA
repositories, free for all, immediately upon acceptance for publication.
They would not have to pay to publish in Gold OA journals unless they
especially wished to. Once all journal articles were being made Green OA in
this way, institutions would be able to cancel all their journal
subscriptions, which would in turn force all journals to cut costs and
convert to Gold OA publishing at a much lower fee than is being charged now
by OA journals: post-Green Fair Gold instead of today's pre-Green Fool's
Gold.

But, most important, the reason the Fair Gold fee would be much lower is
that the only remaining service that journals (all of them having become
Gold OA) would be performing then, post-Green, would be *peer review*. All
access-provision and archiving would be offloaded onto the global network
of Green OA institutional repositories -- so no more print or PDF editions
or their costs. And for just peer review, journals would no longer be
charging for publishing (which would then just amount to a tag certifying
that the article had been accepted by journal J): they would be charging
only for the peer review.

And each round of peer review (which peers do for free, by the way, so the
only real cost is the qualified editor who evaluates the submissions, picks
the referees, and adjudicates the referee reports -- plus the referee
tracking and communication software) would be paid for on a "no-fault"
basis, *per round of peer review*, whether the outcome was acceptance,
rejection, or revision and resubmission for another (paid) round of peer
review.

Unlike with today's Fool's Gold junk journals that were caught by
Bohannon's sting, not only will no-fault post-Green, Fair-Gold peer-review
remove any incentive to accept lower quality papers (and thereby reduce the
reputation of the journal) -- because the journal is paid for the peer
review service in any case -- but it will help make Fair-Gold OA costs even
lower, per round of peer review, because it will not wrap the costs of the
rejected or multiply revised and re-refereed papers into the cost of each
accepted paper, as they do now.

So post-Green Fair Gold will not only reduce costs but it will raise
peer-review standards.

None of this is possible, however, unless Green OA is effectively mandated
by all research institutions and funders worldwide, first.

Harnad, S. (2013) The Science Peer-Review "Sting": Where the Fault
Lies<http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/1059-.html>
. *Open Access Archivangelism* 1059

*________* (2010) No-Fault Peer Review Charges: The Price of Selectivity
Need Not Be Access Denied or Delayed <http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/21348/>
.* D-Lib Magazine* 16 (7/8).

*______* (2007) The Green Road to Open Access: A Leveraged
Transition<http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/13309/>.
In: Anna Gacs. *The Culture of Periodicals from the Perspective of the
Electronic Age*. L'Harmattan. 99-106.

*______* (1998) The invisible hand of peer
review<http://www.nature.com/nature/webmatters/invisible/invisible.html>
. *Nature* [online] (5 Nov. 1998), *Exploit Interactive* 5 (2000): and in
Shatz, B. (2004) (ed.) *Peer Review: A Critical Inquiry*. Rowland &
Littlefield. Pp. 235-242.

On Sat, Oct 12, 2013 at 2:51 PM, Heather Morrison <
Heather.Morrison at uottawa.ca> wrote:

> The Bohannon "study" published in Science may have consequences beyond
> what was intended. While Bohannon and Science may have meant this as an
> attack on open access, this study could easily be picked up by those who
> oppose science and scholarship.
>
> For example, the Economist article begins with a focus on the Sokal hoax;
> this was a subscription journal, not OA, so not focusing too strongly on OA
> is much appreciated. However, this means that an Economist article is
> focusing on a critique of scholarly peer review.
>
> Similarly, a CBC article focuses on the problems with peer review, rather
> than problems with a few new journals that happen to be OA:
>
> http://www.cbc.ca/thecurrent/episode/2013/10/11/why-a-harvard-scientist-wrote-a-bogus-paper-and-submitted-it-for-publication/
>
> This article illustrates what I consider to be a potential danger to all
> of scholarship / science, not just open access. Here we have a newspaper
> article quoting a study as saying that the majority of peer-reviewed
> journals will accept an article that is obviously fabricated. It is not
> hard to imagine newspaper articles like this being used as fodder for
> climate change denial types.
>
> To me, this in itself illustrates the need for careful quality control in
> scholarly communication. It is unethical for Bohannon and Science to
> publish an article that could so easily be misinterpreted in this way and
> used as arguments by opponents of science and scholarship. This is a bigger
> problem for science and scholarship than all of the predatory journals
> exposed by the Bohannon sting.
>
> best,
>
> --
> Dr. Heather Morrison
> Assistant Professor
> École des sciences de l'information / School of Information Studies
> University of Ottawa
>
> http://www.sis.uottawa.ca/faculty/hmorrison.html
> Heather.Morrison at uottawa.ca
>
>
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>
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