Science‘s John Bohannon has recently revealed the extent of poor or non-existent peer review in some journals that call themselves peer-reviewed, as we reported on here.

Now, an open-access publisher based in Rijeka, Croatia, called InTech, has cancelled its journal that was targeted and exposed by Science’s investigation. The journal was going to charge 400 euros to publish the paper by Bohannon.

The International Journal of Integrative Medicine has been “discontinued”, does “not accept submissions” and “is no longer active” states the publisher’s website.

The notice, posted just a day after Science published its piece, says:

“We regret to inform you that as of October 4th, 2013, the International Journal of Integrative Medicine is no longer active. Authors who have paid the Article Processing Charge (APC) when submitting their research paper to this journal, will be refunded in full. Articles published in the International Journal of Integrative Medicine up-to-date, will remain available online on the journal’s webpage. For any further information regarding the International Journal of Integrative Medicine, please contact us at iim@intechopen.com.

In an e-mail from InTech, which I already reported in Croatia’s Jutarnji List, InTech blames its scientific editors who operate outside the actual firm.

The journal’s double blind peer-review system failed in this instance, they say, and the work of scientific editors and peer-reviewers showed itself to “be flawed, inadequate and superficial.”

InTech accepts a big mistake made by its outside collaborators who had (it is now clear) too much independence in their work based on professional trust …. Because of this, we decided to cease publication of the journal and so protect international scientific community and our collaborators.

InTech called Science‘s sting indicative of an

overarching problem in publishing and the need for stricter supervision of work by outside science editors and peer-reviewers.

Oh?

Share this: Email

Facebook

Twitter

