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

[Peter Suber]

I'm on the editorial board of MDPI's _Publications_.
http://www.mdpi.com/journal/publications/editors

So are some other people I know and trust, including Bo-Christer
Björk, Andrée Rathemacher, and Carol Tenopir. (BTW, the entry for me on the
editorial board web page is out of date.)

I was introduced to MDPI years ago by Francis Muguet, a completely honest
and very hard-working chemist, lawyer, and activist for OA.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francis_Muguet

I've seen blog discussions on whether MDPI is (or is becoming) predatory.
I'm sensitive to these. On the one hand, I've seen no evidence to date that
MDPI is a dishonest operation. On the other hand, as soon as I do, I'm
prepared to step down.

In that sense, I welcome further discussion of MDPI's track record. Every
journal should be open to continual scrutiny. At the same time, I'm
delighted that Bjorn will guest-edit an issue of _Publications_.

     Peter S.

Peter Suber
bit.ly/petersuber



On Thu, Sep 5, 2013 at 3:49 PM, Peter Murray-Rust <pm286 at cam.ac.uk> wrote:

> 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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