A little learning is a dangerous thing; drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring: there shallow draughts intoxicate the brain, and drinking largely sobers us again.
Alexander Pope
An Essay on Criticism, 1709Philip G. Altbach is Monan professor of higher education and director of the Center for International Higher Education at Boston College (USA). He has just published an article on Open Access in THE (Times Higher Education) [Hidden cost of open access].
Professor Altbach complains that the problem with Open Access is the absence of peer review.
Profit, competition and excess have spawned the open-access movement. Academics, librarians and administrators think it is the answer to monopolistic journals. But there are several problems with it. Chief among them is that peer review is eliminated - all knowledge becomes equal. There is no quality control on the internet, and a Wikipedia article has the same value as an essay by a distinguished researcher....This is dead wrong, of course, and the comments on the website make it very clear that Professor Altbach has goofed.
Essentially, open access means there is no objective way of measuring research quality. If the traditional journals and their peer-review systems are no longer operating, anarchy rules. Researchers will have no accurate way of assessing quality in a scholarly publication.
I like this comment ...
Ah, sweet irony. If this article had undergone "peer review", or some other accuracy or quality checking critera, then it would never had seen the light of day...Bora Zivkovic at A Blog Around the Clock is all over it 'cause he's the Online Community Manager at PLoS-ONE (Public Library of Science) [A really, truly bad article about Open Access]. The question is ... why would a Professor of higher education at Boston University write an article about Open Access without doing a little bit of investigation to find out about it?
Ah, sweet irony. If this article had undergone "peer review", or some other accuracy or quality checking critera, then it would never had seen the light of day... -- Bora Zivkovic, Online Community Manager at PLoS-ONE
ReplyDeleteThere's definitely irony here. I am intensely suspicious of anything published in PLoS-ONE because I consider the peer-review at PLoS-ONE to be fundamentally flawed. My first thought is aways, "why didn't this appear in a journal that has serious, rigorous peer-review (like PLoS-Biology for example)?"
Here's quote from PLoS-ONE:
Unlike many journals which attempt to use the peer review process to determine whether or not an article reaches the level of 'importance' required by a given journal, PLoS ONE uses peer review to determine whether a paper is technically sound and worthy of inclusion in the published scientific record.
What does this mean, "worthy of inclusion in the published scientific record?" I'm not an expert in everything. How do I know that an article that might be interesting to me, but isn't in the core of my field, isn't completely irrelevant, or trivial, and yet is still "technically sound"? When I'm reviewing an assistant professor's tenure dossier, and they've published in PLoS-ONE, how do I evaluate that contribution to their CV?
PLoS ONE goes on to say:
Once the work is published in PLoS ONE, the broader community is then able to discuss and evaluate the significance of the article.
... but in practice, this does not happen
Crucially, it is not possible to comment anonymously, which will obviously discourage negative comments. Notice of course, that this negative comment is itself made anonymously.
Ah, the myths about PLoS ONE abound...
ReplyDeleteThe peer-review in PLoS ONE is the same as anywhere else - the manuscript is handled by an expert in the field who sends it out to other experts who do the traditional peer-review. What the reviewers are supposed NOT to say is if the paper, apart from being well-done and well-written, is also mind-boggling, earth-shaking, paradigm-shifting and media-worthy, i.e., Nature/Cell/Science/PLoS-Biology worthy. Thus, ONE can publish good incremental stuff, highly specialized stuff, as well as very exciting stuff - it does not seek glamour, but it gets a few glamorous papers every week anyway because the scientists are starting to really embrace it.
And the post-publication peer-review is an additional mechanism, in cases in which traditional review makes a mistake, for the community to say so, as well as for community to declare if the paper, apart from being correct, is also "mind-boggling, earth-shaking, paradigm-shifting and media-worthy".
Coturnix, that doesn't make me feel any better. What happens if the reviewers say, "this is really boring... we've know all this for years." Does PLoS-ONE still publish it?
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