# wrote on Sep 25
th, 2013 at 10:25am:
# wrote on Sep 25
th, 2013 at 8:10pm:
# wrote on Sep 28
th, 2013 at 4:28pm:
...
When denialists discovered that their science was so poor that established peer reviewed journals would not publish their studies, they began setting up parallel peer review processes. These days, to establish the quality of a given paper, the integrity of the peer review must also be considered.
...
To cut a long story short, I'm still researching peer-review. The story is more complex than I imagined. Denialist corruption apparently began earlier this century. I can therefore compensate for that by ignoring any journal that did not begin publication before 2000.
Given the significance of the problem, it's no surprise that others are investigating.
Who's Afraid of Peer Review?
Science 4 October 2013:
Vol. 342 no. 6154 pp. 60-65
DOI: 10.1126/science.342.6154.60
John Bohannon
Quote:A spoof paper concocted by Science reveals little or no scrutiny at many open-access journals.
On 4 July, good news arrived in the inbox of Ocorrafoo Cobange, a biologist at the Wassee Institute of Medicine in Asmara. It was the official letter of acceptance for a paper he had submitted 2 months earlier to the Journal of Natural Pharmaceuticals, describing the anticancer properties of a chemical that Cobange had extracted from a lichen.
In fact, it should have been promptly rejected. Any reviewer with more than a high-school knowledge of chemistry and the ability to understand a basic data plot should have spotted the paper's short-comings immediately. Its experiments are so hopelessly flawed that the results are meaningless.
I know because I wrote the paper. Ocorrafoo Cobange does not exist, nor does the Wassee Institute of Medicine. Over the past 10 months, I have submitted 304 versions of the wonder drug paper to open-access journals. More than half of the journals accepted the paper, failing to notice its fatal flaws. Beyond that headline result, the data from this sting operation reveal the contours of an emerging Wild West in academic publishing.
Relevant, mostly in emphasising the difficulty of deciding which sources are credible.
And, just for fun:
Quote:The founding principle of the Journal of Universal Rejection (JofUR) is rejection. Universal rejection. That is to say, all submissions, regardless of quality, will be rejected.