Re: Hoax Article Accepted by OA Bentham Journal

[natsundell@yahoo.com]

You're right, but a couple of other things:

David Solomon has previously mentioned how "peer review is not 
necessarily successful in identifying methodological flaws in 
research articles" (Solomon 2007).  A recent debate of interest 
involves how many fMRI studies involve faulty statistical 
assumptions. This has been covered by The Neurocritic 
(http://neurocritic.blogspot.com/2009_04_01_archive.htm=

Occasional blogs aggregated on researchblogging.org refer to 
studies which cover problems with peer review or problems based 
on assumptions about the quality assurance which peer review is 
believed to provide (or the perception that some 'journals' have 
peer review when they don't). I'm sure everyone has followed the 
fake journal issue (Elsevier), but there's also the conflict of 
interest issue which=0A has come up recently 
(http://laikaspoetnik.wordpress.com/2009/05/16/one-third-of-the-clinical-cancer-studies-report-conflict-of-interest/).

Of course, this is a bigger discussion than emails allow and it 
seems like things get emotional. I actually wrote a paper which 
included some discussion of this, but as the peer reviewers 
accepted the paper, they called for corrections of my colloquial 
English. Since I received this response a week after my daughter 
was born, I didn't bother to follow-up. The point is that there 
are available papers discussing lack of guidance in peer review, 
how peer review can be improved through new tech (Wittenberg 2007 
about Social Networking, perhaps exemplified in the Princeton 
Stanford Working Papers in Classics pre-print repository 
discussed in Ober 2007), and how peer review fails to look at the 
deep issues (such as methodology and sometimes plagiarism). About 
OA in partiular, I have also seen statements to the effect that 
OA and commercial publication include peer review in the same 
proportion, although, now that I'm thinking about it, I haven't 
seen the numbers.

However, a proper response involves a proper lit review and I 
don't know that this is the place for it (or that I, personally, 
have the time for it). My motivation for this response is neither 
to disparage nor defend peer review, but I do think it's worth 
thinking about our assumptions when it comes to peer review -- 
such as the assumption that peer review always works (or doesn't) 
or the assumption that OA doesn't involve peer review or other 
quality control, when actually OA might point to the future of 
quality control through scholarly social networks.

--- On Wed, 6/17/09, bgsloan2@yahoo.com <bgsloan2@yahoo.com> 
wrote:

From: bgsloan2@yahoo.com <bgsloan2@yahoo.com>
Subject: Re: Hoax Article Accepted by OA Bentham Journal
To: liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu
Date: Wednesday, June 17, 2009, 1:33 PM

Xiaotian Chen said:

"This story should be more of an OA problem than a peer-review
problem...The model of author paying for OA publication may have 
contributed to this, while common sense tells us that traditional 
model (customers pay) may work better for quality control."

I may be misunderstanding Xiaotian Chen's posting, and I'm 
certainly no expert regarding author fees, but I'm kinda thinking 
that the "author pays" model is not limited to just OA 
publications? Aren't there subscription journals that also charge 
author fees or page fees?

Bernie Sloan