Who's Afraid of Peer Review?

"Who's Afraid of Peer Review?" is an article written by Science correspondent John Bohannon that describes his investigation of peer review among fee-charging open-access journals. Between January and August 2013, Bohannon submitted fake scientific papers to 304 journals owned by as many fee-charging open access publishers. The papers, writes Bohannon, "were designed with such grave and obvious scientific flaws that they should have been rejected immediately by editors and peer reviewers", but 60% of the journals accepted them. The article and associated data were published in the 4 October 2013 issue of Science as open access.

The first fee-charging open access scientific journals began appearing in 2000 with the creation of BioMed Central and then the Public Library of Science. Rather than deriving at least some of their revenue from subscription fees, fee-charging open access journals only charge the authors (or their funders) a publication fee. The published papers are then freely available on the internet. This business model, gold open access, is one of several solutions devised to make open access publishing sustainable. The number of articles published open access, or made freely available after some time behind a paywall (delayed open access), has grown rapidly. In 2013 more than half of the scientific papers published in 2011 were available for free.

In part because of the low barrier to entry into this market, as well as the fast and potentially large return on investment, many so-called "predatory publishers" have created low-quality journals that provide little to no peer review or editorial control, essentially publishing every submitted article as long as the publication fee is paid. Some of these publishers additionally deceive authors about publication fees, use the names of scientists as editors and reviewers without their knowledge, and/or obfuscate the true location and identity of the publishers. The prevalence of these deceptive publishers, and what the scientific community should do about them, has been hotly debated.

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