Michael Eisen | jbrittholbrook

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.

This is an interesting read on the Open Access movement. Here’s the conclusion, with a quote from Michael Eisen that provides some food for thought.

In the end, his disdain isn’t directed at the publishers who hoard scientific knowledge so much as at his colleagues who let them get away with it. “One of the reasons advances in publishing don’t happen is that people are willing to live with all sorts of crap from journals in order to get the imprimatur the journal title has as a measure of the impact of their work,” Eisen says. “It’s easy to blame Elsevier, right? To think that there’s some big corporation that’s preventing scientists from doing the right thing. It’s just bullshit. Elsevier doesn’t prevent anyone from doing anything. Scientists do this themselves!”

via Steal This Research Paper! (You Already Paid for It.) | Mother Jones.