This posting is going to be some bad news. It is relevant due to the fact that the recent successes of the 9-11 truth movement in getting peer-reviewed studies published will be called into question after this sting conducted on Bentham publishing. We need to be prepared for this and have peremptory challenges to this accusation of credibility.This will be grabbed by opponents and used against the works of Dr Steven Jones, Ryan, Harritt, Legge, et al.

Fake paper tests peer review at open-access journal

http://www.boston.com/news/health/blog/2009/06/phony_paper_tes.html

An executive at the New England Journal of Medicine and a Cornell graduate student who submitted a nonsensical paper to an open-access journal to test its peer review policy say it was accepted without comment.

Kent Anderson, executive director of international business and product development at the New England Journal, and Philip Davis, a PhD student in scientific communications at Cornell, sent a computer-generated manuscript using pseudonyms and the phony affiliation the "Center for Research in Applied Phrenology" to The Open Information Science Journal.

The journal accepted the article, which included this passage:

"In this section, we discuss existing research into red-black trees, vacuum tubes, and courseware [10]. On a similar note, recent work by Takahashi suggests a methodology for providing robust modalities, but does not offer an implementation [9]."

Bentham Science Publishers Ltd., which publishes The Open Information Science Journal, did not respond to Globe requests for comment. The case was first reported in The Scientist, with links to The Scholarly Kitchen, where Anderson and Davis blog.

They chose that journal because its publisher had been intensively seeking submissions from authors, even outside their areas of specialty, Anderson said in an interview today.

"They were claiming peer review, and something about how aggressive they were struck us as unusual," he said. "It seemed like a worthwhile experiment."

The open-access model arose to speed publication and make scientific papers more widely available by making them accessible online at no cost. Such journals typically charge authors a fee, in contrast to subscription-only journals, including the New England Journal. The sham authors were asked to pay $800 before they retracted the article.

Davis wrote on the blog about a previous instance in which a different computer-generated article he submitted was rejected by another open-access journal as "incomprehensible."

"While one should be careful not to generalize these results to other Open Access journals using similar business models, it does raise the question of whether, at least in some cases, the producer-pays-to-publish model may unduly influence editorial decision-making," Davis concludes about the more recent case.

Anderson of the New England Journal said it's not the open-access model that's at fault, but lax oversight of the money authors are paying in a publish-or-perish atmosphere.

"A lot of institutions are creating budgets to pay author fees. Money that is not carefully managed is easy to take advantage of," he said, calling for more accountability from librarians, administrators, and companies involved in scholarly communications and not just publishers.