Do Open Access Journals Suck?
The criticism that open-access journals (OAJs) practice no oversight or quality control might have merit in some cases, but seems like an unfair generalization. It certainly seems as if a swarm of amateur and predatory open-access journals have spawned since 2008. Academic librarian and researcher at the University of Colorado Jeffrey Beall has created a methodology and rubric for finding bad OAJs. He targets those open journals that score low on his rubric due to terrible or predatory business practices and little to no quality control. Beall estimates that 5-10% of OAJs are not reputable. He does not condemn all OAJs, though, and seems to believe that the majority of OAJs are good. For example, PLOS ONE, perhaps the world's largest scientific journal, is well regarded and has a set of rigorous criteria for publication. So while some OAJs lack quality control, others practice good methods for curating substantive material. At least they claim to.
In 2013 John Bohannon published the results of a “sting” in Science, indicating that OAJs were accepting scientific papers with major flaws. More than half of the 304 OAJs targeted in the sting accepted a paper with considerable (and noticeable) scientific shortcomings. Even OAJs that claim to perform credible peer review, like the Journal of Natural Pharmaceuticals, accepted the paper. Only a small handful of OAJs caught the purposeful inaccuracies, mistakes, and ethical problems and rejected the submission; PLOS ONE is among them. Based on the findings of the sting, Bohannon concludes that OAJs in general suffer from quality control. Not everyone agrees with this conclusion.
Some critics of Bohannon’s sting believe that OAJs are not inherently flawed, but that peer review in general is the culprit. They claim that if Bohannon had submitted the same paper to academic journals, he would have observed similar results. For instance, blogger Michael Eisen conducted a similar but much smaller sting on Science itself: he submitted a flawed research paper, and Science accepted it. To Eisen, both stings indicate a problem with peer review, not OAJs. The Guardian published an article with a similar belief.
Either way, it’s important to note that the Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association (OASPA), a leading trade association for the publishers of OAJs, sanctioned three of its members as a result of Bohannon’s sting. So if the open-access journals themselves aren’t enforcing quality control, their associations can.
It’s difficult to determine whether open-access journals deserve the criticism that they lack quality control. Some certainly do. Others rise above this critique. In the end, it’s important to keep investigating all the different types of scientific journals, as well as the peer review process behind them, to ensure that only sound scientific research is being published.
