...Ocorrafoo Cobange, a biologist at the Wassee Institute of Medicine in
Asmara, recently had an article about the medical properties of a
chemical extracted from a lichen accepted for publication -- by more
than half of the 304 open-access journals he submitted it to. Of course,
Cobange is not real, and neither is the Wassee Institute. They are both
inventions of John Bohannon, the Harvard University biologist and
writer who documented the study in this week’s edition of Science. “Acceptance was the norm, not the exception,” Bohannon wrote. Not only did the Journal of Natural Pharmaceuticals
see the article fit for publication, but so did journals “hosted by
industry titans ... prestigious academic institutions ... [and] journals
for which the paper’s topic was utterly inappropriate.”
The culprit -- a lack of a rigorous peer review process.
Bohannon estimates 60 percent of the accepted submissions showed “no
sign of peer review,” and that even among the journals that reviewed the
article, 70 percent accepted it anyway...
Full story at http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2013/10/04/open-access-journals-confuse-contributors-they-experiment-peer-review-models
Indeed, even when you think it IS a dog, it may not be:
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