Author: Shane O'Mara
Neuroscientist View all posts by Shane O'Mara
Blame bad science on profit-making journals
Top Posts & Pages
- Electroconvulsive shock and transcranial stimulation as torture methods in George Orwell's 1984
- WHAT I DO
- Hellraiser, sadomasochism, distributed and dismembered consciousness, and the brain's experience of pain
- Research
- The Conscious Claustrum
- Marathon Man: Hoffman, Olivier, Paranoia and Tortured Information Extraction
- Books and Writing
- Public Speaking, Workshops & Seminars
- Our latest paper: Heterogeneous spatial representation by different subpopulations of neurons in the subiculum
- Conscious spoons, really? Pushing back against panpsychism
Blogs I Follow
- INSIDE OUT
- Bits of DNA
- Approaching Significance
- Behavioural Public Policy Blog
- Paul Cairney: Politics & Public Policy
- disorderedworld
- Intel Today
- basic statistics
- Replicability-Index
- Meteuphoric
- The Hardest Science
- Biz Psycho
- West Hunter
- Rupert Stone
- Jason Collins blog
- The Journal of Public Policy
- Variety
- Adobe 99U
- The Creativity Guru
- Cap and Gown
Blogroll
- Aeon
- Arts and Letters Daily
- BishopBlog
- BrainFacts.Org
- Cultural Cognition
- Data Colada
- Discuss
- Flip Chart Fairy Tales
- Flowing Data
- Minds for Business
- Nautilus
- Neuroscience Ireland
- Neuroskeptic
- Ninth Level Ireland
- Normblog
- Occam’s Typewriter
- PLoS Blogs
- Psychological Statistics
- Research Blogs
- Science of Us
- Science-Based Medicine
- Simply Statistics
- Statistics for Experimental Biologists
- Stumbling and Mumbling
- The Browser – writing worth reading
- The Neurocritic
- The Serial Mentor
- The Unlimited Mind
- Theme Showcase
- University Ranking Watch
- Wiring The Brain
- WordPress.com News
- [citation needed]
Really? I must say that I cannot agree that open access journals provide a safeguard against the sorts of problems outlined here and attributed to subscription journals. In my experience, some quite prominent open access journals seem to have exceptionally light refereeing and are willing to publish the most scanty of ‘reviews’ – many essentially opinion pieces – as if they were proper scientific papers. I am not talking about PLOS ONE here, where the refereeing in my experience is reasonably comparable with that in many subscription journals, but there are others where it seems that you simply have to pay over your 1.5 thousand dollars, and hey-presto, you have a publication. Strangely enough, in spite of this apparent policy, some of these journals seem to manage to get reasonably high impact. But I do very much worry about the quality of refereeing for the empirical papers in these journals and in my experience, this is more of a problem in the open-access ones, than in the good subscription ones.