Funny Stuff — but also Serious — from Michael Eisen on the Science OA Sting

This post really starts off well:

My sting exposed the seedy underside of “subscription-based” scholarly publishing, where some journals routinely lower their standards – in this case by sending the paper to reviewers they knew would be sympathetic – in order to pump up their impact factor and increase subscription revenue. Maybe there are journals out there who do subscription-based publishing right – but my experience should serve as a warning to people thinking about submitting their work to Science and other journals like it.  – See more at: http://www.michaeleisen.org/blog/?p=1439#sthash.7amnYjlK.dpuf

But I question what Eisen suggests is the take home lesson of the Science sting:

But the real story is that a fair number of journals who actually carried out peer review still accepted the paper, and the lesson people should take home from this story not that open access is bad, but that peer review is a joke. – See more at: http://www.michaeleisen.org/blog/?p=1439#sthash.7amnYjlK.dpuf

I think that message is even more dangerous than the claim that open access journals are inherently lower quality than traditional journals.

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