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

[Peter Murray-Rust]

OK,
Let's take this as an example of the pluses and minuses of journals.

I am not a supporter of the journal as container. We need to find ways of
assessing the article without the journal. In the current case I have read
the titles of the current articles and the authors. On a quick skim they
look worthy articles, honestly written. I would tend to trust the author's
judgments as to what they write and rely on referees to pick up possible
problems.

For reference I did an invited article for Serials Review (Elsevier) about
3-4 years ago - before I joined the boycott. The experience was awful. It
was an open access issue and (I believe) we were promised the articles
would always be visible. In fact they put them behind a paywall after a few
months. I spent about 100 emails trying to get the journal to accept HTML
as the submission format.  AFAICR there was no peer-review that changed the
article - it went in as submitted.

So I have an article in SR. No-one reads it. The JIF is a staggering 0.9 or
something (not that I care). More people have read it on Nature Preceedings
and DSpace @ cam than ever anyone did on Elsevier's pages (they don't gives
stats anyway).

So I have everything to gain by moving to MDPI. People will or will not
read the article because of what's in it, not because the publisher earns
billions USD / year. They might even make their decision because Bjorn is
the  editor and I am the  author.



On Thu, Sep 5, 2013 at 5:33 PM, Bjoern Brembs <b.brembs at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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
>
>


-- 
Peter Murray-Rust
Reader in Molecular Informatics
Unilever Centre, Dep. Of Chemistry
University of Cambridge
CB2 1EW, UK
+44-1223-763069
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