Friday 4 October 2013

It's not Open Acess's fault!

Update: ...see the bottom of the post for more coverage on this "sting"

GenomeWeb has coverage of a story all of us should take a look at. A fake manuscript produced by a journalist from Science was accepted by 157 open-access publishers, a damning indictment of OA? Probably not. Damning indictment of peer review? Quite possibly.

Read Michael Eisen's blog for a pretty good discussion of the whole problem (NB: Michael Eisen is co-founder of the PLoS).

The article has obviously struck a chord with it being in Sciences top 1% of articles ranked by Altmetric.

Peer review is full of problems and all of us suffer from that. But it is the system we have so we should work hard to do it right. So I'm off to re-read that paper I reviewed last week to see if the data really does stack up...

Update: GenomeWeb pointed to a live chat organised by Science on the impact of this paper. They bill this as a "chat about the dark side of open access and the future of academic publishing"! Still not making it clear what some of the  problems were with their "study".

Zen Falukes has a nice round-up of coverage on his blog, NeuroDojo (and a great header image).

PS: We still need to fix peer-review, anyone got any good ideas?

 

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