Pradeep Eranti
Fernanda Bajanca
Pradeep Eranti
Lidia Natalia Trusilewicz
What a shame ...
Publishing scientific papers has become a real business in the last years. A bunch of new open access journals were created without any control and most of them publishing papers just to get the fee, independently on the scientific quality. I have revised some papers in bad english, full of typos and that could be scientifically written by high school guys, my evaluation was very bad of course and I can't believe that other reviewers could accept them. However they were published without any correction! The editors have always the last word and in these cases they do not mind about the revision, they just mind the publication fee.
I have recently (September) reviewed a paper for IEEE, the paper was one of the worst I have received in my career and it was obviously rejected. Today (just after 40 days from that revision) I have received a google alert note stating that the same paper was published by another journal! And the authors did not care at all about my suggestions (of course following them they should write something completely different), they just resubmitted the same version and it was easily accepted and published in less than 1 month ... Stupid me that I spend years working in a paper and trying to follow the reviewer's suggestions for making it better??!!
I decided to make revisions just for high quality journals and not wasting my time just to give some nice appearance to this garbage, but the problem remains. A published paper is a published paper, and the publication gives prestige even to stupid and clerarly false statements. Without any control in the near future we will publish papers just for standing opposite to someone else papers. I think we should find a way for solving this problem since it will create much more problems in the future.
I do not know if someone had my same experience/feeling ...
Riccardo
6 Comments
I completely agree, we should do something for overpassing the number of publications as reference for "researcher's quality". I know people publishing and auto-referencing themselves for increasing their numbers and not having any quality at all. A new phenomenon that I have noticed in the last year (I guess for increasing citation number) is the increase of scientific papers spamming. I receive a bunch of emails from unknown people (the last one today ...) suggesting me to read their latest papers (mainly garbage). I check every week the main journals of my field so I do not need to be encouraged to read good papers.
I think we should create something like a "black list" and add the journals to this list once we know that they have published something which was already rejected from others or once we know that they did not care about the reviewers evaluations ...
Riccardo
Issues related to publication ethics are indeed important for all of us. Robert, I am wondering, have you perhaps considered to publish your discussion paper on your blog or some suitable “open” place on the Internet, instead of paying such large sum for publishing in the journal with no editor and no ISI ranking? You would have opportunity to make your position widely known to rebuke author's claim, that, in this case, I am finding more important than the media where it is published.
A journalist working for the Science magazine, John Bohannon, conducted a study to identify the 'junk' open access journals by submitting articles full of flaws: http://www.sciencemag.org/content/342/6154/60.full It would be nice if he had done the same job for non-open access journals, but this is what we have. His database is available online (http://www.sciencemag.org/content/342/6154/60/suppl/DC1). Apparently, there are others who keep track of 'bad' journals (in case you need to publish junk papers J ) e.g., http://scholarlyoa.com/
Devrim
Hallo Riccardo, yes, it is already a disaster out there but I am afraid that will get even worse. Up to us all to stand and maintain the highest standard according to our specific expertize, no matter what and where we decide to publish/share our own work or which work we have been asked to referee/comment. All the best, Giorgio
It is going to be an interesting chat ...
Nice to know that someone already created the "black list" we should contribute and advertise it.
This scholarlyoa website is really nice and well done.
I would give a negative impact factor and consequently a negative h-index to those journals and publications on them :-) this could be a good provocation for sensitizing the community on this issue and we could also do it through the MCAA
Yes, it will probably be even worse in the future and we should keep the highest standard independently on the "wave", but as Robert wrote, this kind of freedom could also affect our reputation and in some countries (Giorgio I guess your also italian) the number of pubs and citations is more important than quality when you wanna get a position.
Riccardo
I have recently had similar experiences: even after supplying a manuscript in Latex format - which should not require any changes - to a reputable publisher, the proof came back riddled with errors, especially in mathematical symbols and formatting. It took many hours and two sets of proofs to remove these errors. There seems to be a tremendous "dumbing down" (due to outsourcing) in the publishing industry, and the typesetters / copy editors just don't care - and this was a reputable publisher!
In another situation, the work of myself and colleagues were recently criticised in an article in a new open access journal. The journal has no editor and no ISI ranking, but still is a journal, so we submitted a discussion paper to rebuke the author's claims. The 2-page proof came back with so many errors - more than we have ever seen - that we fear the implications to our reputation if it were published; yet they expect to be paid US$700 !! We are now reconsidering our decision to bother with this journal.
Sadly I fear the problem of "junk open access journals" will continue, until we (the academic community) reassess the stupidity of merely counting publications as a benchmark measure. This can only lead to hyperinflation in publication numbers. We should pay far greater attention to quality, including journal quality, in our decisions about people.
Thanks for opening this discussion!
Robert