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Who's Afraid of Peer Review?

A spoof paper concocted by Science reveals little or no scrutiny at many open-access journals.

On 4 July, good news arrived in the inbox of Ocorrafoo Cobange, a biologist at the Wassee Institute of Medicine in Asmara. It was the official letter of acceptance for a paper he had submitted 2 months earlier to the Journal of Natural Pharmaceuticals, describing the anticancer properties of a chemical that Cobange had extracted from a lichen.

In fact, it should have been promptly rejected. Any reviewer with more than a high-school knowledge of chemistry and the ability to understand a basic data plot should have spotted the paper's short-comings immediately. Its experiments are so hopelessly flawed that the results are meaningless.

I know because I wrote the paper. Ocorrafoo Cobange does not exist, nor does the Wassee Institute of Medicine. Over the past 10 months, I have submitted 304 versions of the wonder drug paper to open-access journals. More than half of the journals accepted the paper, failing to notice its fatal flaws. Beyond that headline result, the data from this sting operation reveal the contours of an emerging Wild West in academic publishing.

Not that open access itself is necessarily the problem; you can still have academic rigour with this model:

The rejections tell a story of their own. Some open-access journals that have been criticized for poor quality control provided the most rigorous peer review of all. For example, the flagship journal of the Public Library of Science, PLOS ONE, was the only journal that called attention to the paper's potential ethical problems, such as its lack of documentation about the treatment of animals used to generate cells for the experiment. The journal meticulously checked with the fictional authors that this and other prerequisites of a proper scientific study were met before sending it out for review. PLOS ONE rejected the paper 2 weeks later on the basis of its scientific quality.

But this does expose the flaws in a system where the OA has been milked as a lucrative pay-to-publish model that essentially acts as a vanity press charging often exorbitant author's fees in exchange for one's name in print, preying especially on academics under pressure to publish to attain tenure, etc.

Very sad that someone apaprently felt compelled to end her own life

because of a stupid hoax that some people thought was a fun joke. Ultimately, it was her decision to do so, but it is so very sad and needless. And while the DJs are not responsible for her death, the very idea that they would call up a hospital pretending to be someone's family member (and royalty to boot) and then ellict and broadcast personal health details is deplorable.

British nurse who took prank Australian call found dead [an audio broadcast]

Australian radio DJs removed from air after nurse they fooled with Kate Middleton prank call dies

The company behind the Australian radio station that prank called the London hospital caring for the Duchess of Cambridge says its ‘deeply saddened’ by the death of the nurse who took the call.

Jacintha Saldanha, a married mother of two, appears to have taken her own life just two days after the DJs, posing as Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Charles, called the King Edward VII Hospital to inquire about Kate Middleton’s condition. The Duchess had been receiving treatment for severe morning sickness.

When the Mel Greig and Michael Christian called, Saldanha patched the hosts through to another nurse, who revealed private health details about the Duchess on the air.

Okay, I really doubt this was a quality study, but it made my little Firefox-using self smile

Internet Explorer Users Are Dumber, Study Shows

Of course, it also came from Fox News. I think a similar study would find some interesting things about their viewers compared to say, the New York Times readers, but that's just my terribly liberal opinion. :)

A company called AptiQuant, a self-proclaimed "world leader in the field of online psychometric testing," published the results of an online study that tested the IQs of users and grouped the results according to which browser respondents used.

The study found that users of Chrome, Firefox, Safari and Opera were all slightly above average in IQ test results, but Microsoft Internet Explorer users tended to be lower on the IQ scale.

IQ testing is very problematic in person, much less online, so I don't think we can really state the results as being all that great in terms of validity. But it did give me a little wakeup laugh this morning.

PS Laugh not withstanding, my doubts as to the study were indeed confirmed, as it appears to have been a hoax.

Internet Explorer story was bogus

Fox News was just one of the first media giants to jump on the story. Even the BBC and CNN got caught in it. But it still gave me a laugh, this time for two reasons. :)