The Rigorous Standards of Open Journals.

Already posted this on the ole blog, but thought some of you might find this interesting.



http://www.sciencemag.org/content/342/6154/60.full

Quote:

On 4 July, good news arrived in the inbox of Ocorrafoo Cobange, a biologist at the Wassee Institute of Medicine in Asmara. It was the official letter of acceptance for a paper he had submitted 2 months earlier to the Journal of Natural Pharmaceuticals, describing the anticancer properties of a chemical that Cobange had extracted from a lichen. In fact, it should have been promptly rejected. Any reviewer with more than a high-school knowledge of chemistry and the ability to understand a basic data plot should have spotted the paper's short-comings immediately. Its experiments are so hopelessly flawed that the results are meaningless. I know because I wrote the paper. Ocorrafoo Cobange does not exist, nor does the Wassee Institute of Medicine. Over the past 10 months, I have submitted 304 versions of the wonder drug paper to open-access journals. More than half of the journals accepted the paper, failing to notice its fatal flaws. Beyond that headline result, the data from this sting operation reveal the contours of an emerging Wild West in academic publishing.

And to save you the trouble of looking, yes, the only Bentham Journal queried fell for the scam.



bio0026.doc

accepted

http://www.benthamscience.com

Bentham open

http://www.benthamscience.com/open/tobcj/index.htm

The Open Bioactive Compounds Journal

via JREF Forum http://forums.randi.org/showthread.php?t=266539&goto=newpost