[Open-access] special issue on publishing reform in publication'?

Thu Sep 5 16:33:42 UTC 2013

On Thursday, September 5, 2013, 5:37:57 PM, you wrote:

> The author is Dr. Chris Brierley from University College
> London. Climate is published by MDPI.

Thanks a lot for your info, Jeffrey! Due to your links I found a few other stories of quite ghastly papers in journals by this publisher.

> So, this question may be relevant: Do you want to have
> your article published by a corporation that also
> publishes questionable climate science research?

If I may generalize the question somewhat: "Do you want to have you article published by a corporation that also publishes questionable research?"

If I said 'no' to this question, I couldn't use any publisher! The GlamMagz (Science, Nature, Lancet, Cell, New England Journal of Medicine, etc.) have the highest retraction rates on the market, all of them have at some point published outrageous falsehoods (cold fusion, arsenic life,  Sodium Hydride oxidation, the relation
of the soul (sic) to mitochondria, etc.) and fallen for sometimes outrageously obvious fraud (e.g. Jan-Hendrik Schoen) or less obvious, but sustained fraud ( Diederik Stapel, Who-Suk Wang, etc.).
There is not a single indicator in the literature that points towards hi-ranking journals publishing higher quality research, but a few studies show some solid negative trends, i.e., indicating that one should not rely on the content of the high-impact journals. If I cut out all the publishers which publish the, say, top 20 journals for the reason that they "also publish questionable research", I'd be completely out of publishers.

So, as much as one might want to do that, it's impossible to shun the entire corporation because of some papers.
As Peter wrote: "ALL journals can have rogue papers."
And ALL publishers can have rogue journals (besides 'Solitons and Fractals' Elsevier also publishes the brilliant 'Homeopathy' - not a parody and, of course, the infamous fake "Australasian Journal of..." suite of journals).

That leaves looking at the journal. One should probably be wary of journals that do not have demonstrable peer-review (hard as that sometimes might be to establish - GlamMagz, e.g. only peer-review about 40% of the submitted articles and editors openly boast publishing articles against the recommendation of the reviewers) and that have too high retraction rates, both of which would indicate that the journal is attracting cranks.

Does anybody know if the journal 'publications' has any such indicators of attracting cranks?

Thanks!

Bjoern

-- 
Björn Brembs
---------------------------------------------
http://brembs.net
Neurogenetics
Universität Regensburg
Germany