{"id":143757,"date":"2014-01-31T17:17:12","date_gmt":"2014-01-31T19:17:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/?p=143757"},"modified":"2014-01-31T17:18:18","modified_gmt":"2014-01-31T19:18:18","slug":"open-access-weak-spot","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/open-access-weak-spot\/","title":{"rendered":"Open access weak spot"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"Daniel Bueno<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

More than 150 open-access scientific journals have admitted to publishing a fake scientific article, signed by a fictitious author named Ocorrafoo Cobange with ties to a nonexistent institution. The scam was pulled off by John Bohannon, biologist and science journalist, who submitted versions of the article to 304 online journals. The paper, which described the anticancer properties of a substance extracted from lichen, was accepted by 157 periodicals \u2013 including some hosted by publishers like Sage and Elsevier \u2013 and rejected by 98. Another 49 failed to respond. \u201cAny reviewer with more than a high-school knowledge of chemistry. . .should have spotted the paper\u2019s shortcomings,\u201dwrote Bohannon in the journal Science. Of the 255 journals that accepted or rejected the paper, 60% gave no indication that the findings had been submitted to peer review. Among the 106 journals that conducted some form of evaluation, 70% accepted the article.<\/p>\n

Open-access journals, unlike their paid subscription counterparts, usually obtain their funds solely from the publication fees paid by the researchers whose papers are accepted. One periodical with offices in Brazil \u2013 Genetics and Molecular Research \u2013 said yes to the article. Francisco Moura Duarte, professor at the University of S\u00e3o Paulo\u2019s Ribeir\u00e3o Preto School of Medicine (FMRP-USP) and editor of the journal, denies that he fell into the trap. \u201cOne of our associate editors reviewed the same article in a European journal and warned us that it might be a fake,\u201d he says. He argues that the study was accepted on a preliminary basis to see if the author would consent to paying for publication. \u201cIf he agreed, we were going to denounce him,\u201d states Duarte, who sent a letter to Science demanding a retraction. \u201cGMR has no history of ever publishing a fake article, unlike Science,\u201d says Duarte, in a reference to phony papers on human cloning that were published in 2004 and 2005. Paul Peters, president of the Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association, said that Bohannon missed a chance to do an in-depth study that used traditional journals as a control group and that he erred in not choosing the publications at random: 64% of those who accepted the article were from India. A number of open-access publications did not fall for the scam. The journal Plos One, for example, rejected the paper.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Open access weak spot","protected":false},"author":475,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[155],"tags":[230,215],"coauthors":[785],"class_list":["post-143757","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-good-practices","tag-ethics","tag-scientometrics"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/143757","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/475"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=143757"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/143757\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=143757"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=143757"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=143757"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=143757"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}