Author: Shane O'Mara
Neuroscientist View all posts by Shane O'Mara
Blame bad science on profit-making journals
Top Posts & Pages
- WHAT I DO
- Roles for the subiculum in spatial information processing, memory, motivation and the temporal control of behaviour.
- Electroconvulsive shock and transcranial stimulation as torture methods in George Orwell's 1984
- Depression, epilepsy and some more pop sociology: Joy Division and Ian Curtis (updated)
- Research
- Books and Writing
- Hellraiser, sadomasochism, distributed and dismembered consciousness, and the brain's experience of pain
- Public Speaking, Workshops & Seminars
- Reflections on the representations and implications of torture from medieval Siena (the Museo della Tortura) and London (the London Dungeon)
- Scientific and Technical Breakthrough of the Year: Using 3D Printing for in vivo Neurophysiology
Blogs I Follow
- West Hunter
- Rupert Stone
- Boot Camp & Military Fitness Institute
- EVOLVING ECONOMICS
- The Journal of Public Policy
- Variety
- 99U
- The Creativity Guru
- Cap and Gown
- otgtest.wordpress.com/
- Frontiers Blog
- Broadside
- Luke Writes What You Read
- Scientist Sees Squirrel
- Explorations of Style
- Savvy Writers & e-Books online
- TIME
- principlesandinterest
- Fusion
- opiniomics - has moved! www.opiniomics.org
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.