[GOAL] Re: Has the OA movement over-reacted to challenges on peer review?

[Heather Morrison]

The journal that Beall describes below would not meet the best practices described on the DOAJ website (a joint statement by COPE, DOAJ, OASPA and WAME):
https://doaj.org/bestpractice

The quality of scholarly communication is another important area of research (although this a different topic area), including examining problematic practices. My perspective is that quality scholarship on this topic (as any other) needs to be grounded in the broader and historical context. Richard Smith's book The Trouble with Medical Journals is a good introduction to this broader context, at least in the medical field, one I often recommend to students with an interest in this area. 

Arthur Schafer (reference below) provides an excellent illustration of the problems that can occur through misplaced faith in the traditional publishing system. The VIGOR study published in the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine launched the drug Vioxx. In Schafer's words, "if all the data from the VIGOR study had been properly disclosed and properly analyzed, the publication of the trial in NEJM would in all likelihood have dealt a death blow to the marketing and sale of Vioxx. Instead, the death blow came several years later - after tens of thousands of unnecessary deaths..." (p. 42). Some scientists noted that the original study failed to mention heart attack deaths, in patients with no history of heart disease, even though these were correctly reported to the FDA. The investigators did not correct the scientific record. NEJM editor Dr. Jeffrey Drazen "declined an opportunity to publish a letter submitted to the journal by independent scientists. The suppressed letter would have alerted readers to the misleading nature of the data originally published".

I do not condone misleading or inappropriate practices by any journal or publisher, open access or otherwise. However, I caution that overstating the ability of traditional publishing to assure quality is dangerous; in a case like the one above, arguably a contributing factor to thousands of unnecessary deaths. 

It is good to see that DOAJ, COPE (the Committee on Publication Ethics), OASPA (the Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association) and WAME (the World Association of Medical Editors) have worked together on the statement of best practices posted on the DOAJ site. This is the traditional and new (generally open access) publishing communities working together on problems that affect us all. This is as it should be. 

References

Schafer, A. (2015). Pseudo-evidence-based medicine: when biomedical research becomes an adjunct of pharmaceutical marketing. In: Elliot, P. & Hepting, D. (eds.): Free Knowledge: Confronting the Commodification of Human Discovery. Regina: University of Regina Press. Free download available from here:
http://www.uofrpress.ca/publications/Free-Knowledge

Smith, R. (2006). The trouble with medical journals. US: Oxford Press. 

best,

Heather Morrison


On 2015-05-12, at 5:17 PM, Beall, Jeffrey wrote:

> In the interest of presenting different viewpoints on this topic, I too would like to share the blog post I published today. My blog post is about a gold open-access journal that claims it has no article processing charges but, when you read the fine print, you will discover that it demands a "maintenance fee" from authors whose work is accepted for publication. 
> 
> The blog post is here: http://scholarlyoa.com/2015/05/12/low-quality-no-author-fee-oa-journal-has-hidden-charges/
> 
> Also, the journal promises to carry out peer review in 3-4 days. It's included in DOAJ, which incorrectly reports that the journal does not charge any author fees. 
> 
> The journal also boldly displays fake impact factors from six different companies. 
> 
> I believe that this journal will also be of interest to historians, anthropologists, and other social scientists.
> 
> 
> Jeffrey Beall, MA, MSLS, Associate Professor
> Auraria Library
> University of Colorado Denver
> 1100 Lawrence St.
> Denver, Colo.  80204 USA
> 
> -----Original Message-----
> From: goal-bounces at eprints.org [mailto:goal-bounces at eprints.org] On Behalf Of Heather Morrison
> Sent: Tuesday, May 12, 2015 2:39 PM
> To: Global Open Access List (Successor of AmSci)
> Subject: [GOAL] Has the OA movement over-reacted to challenges on peer review?
> 
> In the early days as many on this list will no doubt remember, open access advocates spent a lot of time defending OA from the ludicrous argument that peer review somehow was dependent on subscription-based publishing. Have we over-reacted, and are we now placing far too much emphasis on the technicalities of peer review? 
> 
> This post draws on an example of a journal that is now fully open access and peer reviewed, which emerged from a conference a few decades ago after a 5-year stint as a newsletter, and asks whether we have gone too far in separating the peer-reviewed article from the broader scholarly communication / community of which the article logically forms just one part:
> http://sustainingknowledgecommons.org/2015/05/12/from-conference-to-newsletter-to-journal-a-challenge-to-the-emphasis-on-peer-review/
> 
> I've added two sections to the Research Questions page in the Open Access Directory:
> http://oad.simmons.edu/oadwiki/Research_questions
> 
> Open access in the context of scholarly communication and community flows from the challenge to narrow emphasis on peer review described above. There are questions here that might interest historians, anthropologists, or other social scientists.
> 
> The open versus private section may engage scholars from a variety of humanities and social sciences; there are interesting theoretical and empirical questions in relation to all of the open movements. 
> 
> 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
> Sustaining the Knowledge Commons http://sustainingknowledgecommons.org/
> Heather.Morrison at uottawa.ca
> 
> 
> 
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