Who's Afraid of Peer Review?
A spoof paper concocted by Science reveals little or no scrutiny at many open-access journals.
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.
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