A recent article in Science Magazine, http://www.sciencemag.org/content/342/6154/60.summary, reveals a troubling problem with peer review at some scientific journals. The author, John Bohannon, submitted a bogus, scientifically and ethically flawed paper to 304 Gold OA journals (meaning they charge a fee to publish), and so far 157 journals have accepted the article. 98 journals have rejected the paper, including PLoS One and a Hindawi journal. Publishers for journals that accepted the paper include some listed on Jeffrey Beall’s Predatory Open Access list and well-known publishers like Elsevier, Sage and Wolters Kluwer.
While this is certainly a very interesting topic, without repeating the study on toll-access journals and evaluating articles posted to institutional repositories it’s rather difficult to say if the problem is exclusive to OA journals or part of a larger problem in the scientific publishing community.
