tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-59195176538923788102024-03-08T04:00:11.278+00:00JournalologyScience publishing trends, ethics, peer review, and open accessMatt Hodgkinsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02376788922895957748noreply@blogger.comBlogger109125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5919517653892378810.post-29287810185215547322015-08-12T08:00:00.000+00:002015-08-13T14:15:05.029+00:00iMed Publishing fell for Bohannon's chocolate hoax, but that's not the worst thing about them<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">The first introduction to iMed Publishing (<a href="http://imed.pub/">iMed.pub</a>) for most people was not a good one.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">In October 2013, John Bohannon —</span><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;"> a self-styled 'gonzo journalist' </span><span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">— </span><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">announced that he had pulled off a sting of dodgy open access journal publishers by submitting a made-up article and seeing which took the bait </span><span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">—</span><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;"> and many did. This triggered </span><a href="http://www.jlsc-pub.org/jlsc/vol2/iss1/7/" style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">a debate</a><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;"> about OA, peer review, and publishing ethics, as well as Bohannon's tactics.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">On 26 March 2015, <i>International Archives of Medicine</i> published a small German clinical trial showing that eating dark chocolate can help in losing weight (article <a href="http://imed.pub/ojs/index.php/iam/article/view/1087">now removed</a> but <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Chocolate_with_high_Cocoa_content_as_a_weight-loss_accelerator.pdf">archived</a>). Not that many people noticed: a few people <a href="https://twitter.com/search?f=tweets&vertical=default&q=imed.pub%2Fojs%2Findex.php%2Fiam%2Farticle%2Fview%2F1087&src=typd">tweeted the link</a>, and the story was covered by some low-quality science and health news sites that are effectively mirrors of press releases and a handful of tabloid newspapers — </span><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">most notably the British </span><i style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">Daily Mail</i><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">, </span><i style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">Express</i><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">, and </span><i style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">Daily Star</i><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">, and the German gossipmonger </span><i style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">Bild</i><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;"> (<a href="https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=(intitle%3Acocoa+OR+intitle%3Achocolate+OR+intitle%3Aschokolade)+(diat+OR+diet+OR+weight)+(bohannon+OR+%22institute+of+diet+and+health%22+OR+mainz+OR+german)&safe=off&es_sm=93&biw=1366&bih=677&source=lnt&tbs=cdr%3A1%2Ccd_min%3A26%2F03%2F2015%2Ccd_max%3A26%2F05%2F2015&tbm=nws">Google News search</a>; <a href="https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=%28intitle%3Acocoa+OR+intitle%3Achocolate+OR+intitle%3Aschokolade%29+%28diat+OR+diet+OR+weight%29+%28bohannon+OR+%22institute+of+diet+and+health%22+OR+mainz+OR+german%29&safe=off&es_sm=93&biw=1366&bih=677&source=lnt&tbs=cdr%3A1%2Ccd_min%3A26%2F03%2F2015%2Ccd_max%3A26%2F05%2F2015&tbm=">Google search</a>).</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">Bohannon had struck again.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">This time, <a href="http://www.albatrossworldsales.com/catalog/politics/the-chocolate-diet">with two German documentary makers</a>, he'd had an even more audacious plan: to hoodwink lazy journalists — </span><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">churnalists </span><span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">— </span><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">by running a real clinical trial, fiddling the stats, and publishing it in an apparently peer-reviewed journal. As 'Johannes Bohannon' of the '<a href="http://instituteofdiet.com/">Institute of Diet and Health</a>' in Mainz he submitted his study to 20 journals; of those that took the bait he selected the </span><i style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">International Archives of Medicine</i><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">, who had agreed to publish without peer review, and he then <a href="http://instituteofdiet.com/2015/03/29/international-press-release-slim-by-chocolate/">press released it</a>.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">On 27 May 2015, Bohannon did the </span><a href="http://io9.com/i-fooled-millions-into-thinking-chocolate-helps-weight-1707251800" style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">big reveal</a> <span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">of his </span><a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/chocolatehoax?f=tweets&vertical=default&src=hash" style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">#chocolatehoax</a><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;"> on the news site io9. </span><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">Many got the impression that Bohannon had indeed fooled millions into believing a clever lie; </span><i style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">Bild</i><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;"> published <a href="http://www.bild.de/ratgeber/gesundheit/schokolade/wer-schokolade-isst-bleibt-schlank-studie-diaet-jojo-effekt-40332104.bild.html">a retraction notice</a>, and </span><i style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">Mother Nature Network</i><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;"> <a href="http://www.mnn.com/health/fitness-well-being/stories/can-eating-chocolate-help-you-lose-weight">confessed</a> “Well, this is embarrassing. Turns out this 'study' was a stunt to see who was paying attention </span><span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">— </span><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">and we weren't.” The focus in the science communication world largely turned to whether the trial and the reporting of it by Bohannon </span><a href="http://blogs.plos.org/absolutely-maybe/2015/05/31/tricked-the-ethical-slipperiness-of-hoaxes/" style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">was unethical</a><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">The publisher of the journal, iMed.pub, tried some rather desperate damage control; iMed.pub <a href="https://twitter.com/iMedPub/status/603990160049569793">told me on Twitter</a> “That article has never been published” and said in <a href="http://www.publishopenaccess.com/journals/list-of-journals/disclaimers/">a disclaimer on their website</a> that the paper “accidentally appeared online for some days. Indeed that manuscript was finally rejected and never published as such.” They <a href="https://twitter.com/iMedPub/status/603996908546367490">accused Bohannon of lying</a>: “what the pseudo-author was claiming is false”. The article was available until 27 May; is two months “some days”? Nobody was convinced and the blog Retraction Watch <a href="http://retractionwatch.com/2015/05/28/chocolate-diet-study-publisher-claims-paper-was-actually-rejected-only-live-for-some-hours-email-however-says/">took this claim to task</a>. Few asked: “Who are the <i>International Archives of Medicine</i> and iMed Publishing, anyway?”, but I was intrigued as I had heard of iMed.pub and their journals before —</span><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;"> what was going on?</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">***</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">So who are iMed.pub? <i><a href="http://www.intarchmed.com/">International Archives of Medicine</a></i> (<i>IAM</i>) was <a href="http://www.biomedcentral.com/1755-7682/">formerly published</a> by BioMed Central (BMC) from April 2008 to December 2014, <a href="http://archive.biomedcentral.com/1755-7682/1/1">under the Editor-in-Chief Manuel Menendez-Gonzalez</a> of Universidad Oviedo. For the avoidance of doubt, BMC (my former employer) had nothing to do with the Bohannon paper. For on 31 December 2014 the <i>International Archives of Medicine</i> was sold to iMed.pub, and in February 2015 <a href="http://brainblogger.com/2015/02/17/relaunching-a-mega-journal-international-archives-of-medicine/">a relaunch was announced</a>. Within months, <i>IAM</i> and iMed.pub would have its first major scandal: publishing the Bohannon chocolate hoax.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">iMed Publishing (Internet Medical Publishing or iMed.pub) would like to be known as “<a href="https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=1147321958616547&set=pb.100000162609219.-2207520000.1439150219">the fastest growing publishing house on the net</a>”, an open access publisher based in London, UK, publishing seven journals and affiliated to the Fundación de Neurociencias and the Internet Medical Society. iMedPub Limited is a company registered in the United Kingdom (<a href="https://www.thegazette.co.uk/London/issue/824967/supplement/866/data.pdf">company number 08776635</a>, though <a href="https://www.companiesintheuk.co.uk/ltd/imedpub">2,215 companies also use</a> the same address as iMed.pub, likely a mail forwarding service). iMed.pub and their associated organizations seem to trace back to two </span><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">Spanish clinical researchers:</span><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;"> CEO </span><a href="https://www.facebook.com/imedpub" style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">Carlos Vázquez</a><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;"> and the director of iMed.pub and the Editor-in-Chief of </span><i style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">IAM,</i><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;"> </span><a href="http://grupos.uniovi.es/web/menendezgmanuelu" style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">Manuel Menendez-Gonzalez</a><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">Publishing Bohannon's hoax is not the only suspect act made by iMed.pub.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;"><b>A tangled web</b></span></h3>
<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">The founders of iMed.pub have been busy. Alongside the journal publishing wing — including the <i><a href="http://ojmedicine.com/">Open Journal of Medicine</a></i> (publishing only 10 papers since 2011 and none this year) —</span><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;"> there are:</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;"><a href="http://publishopenaccess.com/">publishopenaccess.com</a> - a mirror site for iMed.pub</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;"><a href="http://peereviewers.com/">peereviewers.com</a></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;"><a href="http://www.medbrary.com/">Medbrary</a></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;"><a href="http://fneurociencias.org/">Fundaciónde Neurociencias</a></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;"><a href="http://ims.org.es/">Internet Medical Society</a></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;"><a href="http://medicalia.org/">Medicalia.org</a></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;"><a href="http://aemir.org/">Asociación Española de Médicos Internos Residentes</a> (AEMIR)</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">A <a href="https://www.blogger.com/profile/09266699098392968330">tonne of blogs</a>, and <a href="https://www.blogger.com/profile/11780025909669555942">some more</a></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">Various traces and abandoned sites around the web, including <a href="https://drive.google.com/folderview?id=1esV4N3sWwTAOMn3XbBA3G1G6O1nwou0I05WkirO9Ngk3Ae7BsqoGlU2N&usp=drive_web">some old Twitter archives</a></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">The connections are not always openly declared. For example, Carlos Vázquez announced on Facebook that “We have partnered with peereviewers.com so we have an extra database of reviewers available to find suitable reviewers for manuscripts submitted to International Archives of Medicine http://www.peereviewers.com”. The relaunch of <i>IAM</i> also gave the impression of independence. Two of their sites (and only those sites) are awarded their own '<a href="http://internetmedicalsociety.weebly.com/ehealthq.html">eHealthQ seal</a>'.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">They are perhaps not so keen to maintain this empire </span><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">— </span><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">they </span><a href="https://flippa.com/3275331-social-network-for-doctors-biomedical-researchers-by-internet-medical-society" style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">tried to sell their social network Medicalia</a><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;"> in 2014, and they offloaded a number of their journals at about the same time. More on that below...</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;"><b>Paper mill</b></span></h3>
<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">In <i>IAM</i>, one author</span><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;"> </span><span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">Luiz Carlos de Abreu </span><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">has published a stunning 48 articles in just 2015 </span><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">— </span><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">a feat I have never seen from a single author in a single journal in a single year, and we're only eight months in.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;"><b>Copying other publishers</b></span></h3>
<span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">My old BMC colleague Tom Mowlam, now at the open access publisher Ubiquity Press, </span><a href="https://twitter.com/tommowlam/status/619666285488664577" style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">tweeted</a><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">: “http://iMed.pub copy @ubiquitypress model; forget to update name!”.</span><br />
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhHw_oa5DiM8nAh1BqlvceLKvsndU2_5E0JXSgRtL9bK-9PiO21dLAomKIhS3XhFsB77_gJLJ9kxLC4QJrtFsvyNx1RRGyrFOM8Wnc4HoBlr5LSfby8_NuSx9RUZ4o3WAX7aDIfeBb44A6R/s1600/2015_07_19_19_04_08_can_provide_your_institution_with_a_fully_featured_Google_Search.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="183" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhHw_oa5DiM8nAh1BqlvceLKvsndU2_5E0JXSgRtL9bK-9PiO21dLAomKIhS3XhFsB77_gJLJ9kxLC4QJrtFsvyNx1RRGyrFOM8Wnc4HoBlr5LSfby8_NuSx9RUZ4o3WAX7aDIfeBb44A6R/s320/2015_07_19_19_04_08_can_provide_your_institution_with_a_fully_featured_Google_Search.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif; font-size: small;">Oops</span></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
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<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">And compare iMed.pub's <a href="http://www.publishopenaccess.com/about-us/">about page</a>: “Vision: As a service to doctors and biomedical scientists, iMed.pub is driven by clinicians and researchers for themselves, while serving the interests of the general public. iMed.pub disseminates research in a tiered system, beginning with our specialty books and journals and then working upwards. The grand vision of iMed.pub is a world where all medical researchers and health professionals have an equal opportunity to seek, share and create knowledge.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">Mission: iMed.pub aims to address the needs of authors and foster a rapid, convenient, unbiased, and comprehensive publishing environment, which not only guarantees the highest quality constructive peer-review process, but also provides an evaluation system that involves the entire research community. To fulfill this mission, iMed.pub applies the most advanced Internet technologies to bring scholarly publishing into a new generation.”</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">to <a href="http://www.frontiersin.org/Journal/AboutFrontiers.aspx">that of the OA publisher Frontiers</a>: “The Frontiers journal series are a new approach to scientific publishing. As a service to scientists, it is driven by researchers for researchers, while serving the interests of the general public. Frontiers disseminates research in a tiered system, beginning with our specialty journals and working upwards. Our research evaluation system is democratic and objective, and based on the reading activity of not only scientific communities, but that of the general public. It drives the most outstanding and relevant research up to the next tier, the field journals.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">VISION: The grand vision of Frontiers is a world where all people have an equal opportunity to seek, share and create knowledge. To help actualize our grand vision, Frontiers provides open and free access to all of its publications.”</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">The dubious aim to </span><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">“</span><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">aid pharmaceutical companies in reinforcing their brand messages, and to produce customized content to integrate with global and local communication plans” is <a href="http://www.primeawards.com.au/companies/springer-healthcare-ltd">taken from Springer Healthcare</a>. </span><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">iMed.pub's “</span><a href="http://www.publishopenaccess.com/journals/info-for-authors/before-you-submit/" style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">Before you submit</a><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">”</span><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;"> is taken from Springer's </span><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">“</span><a href="http://www.springer.com/gp/authors-editors/journal-author/journal-author-helpdesk/before-you-start" style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">Before you start</a><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">”</span><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">. The </span><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">“</span><a href="http://www.publishopenaccess.com/journals/info-for-editors/code-of-conduct/" style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">Statement of Human and Animal Rights and Informed Consent</a><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">”</span><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;"> is taken from the </span><a href="http://ceemjournal.org/authors/ethics.php" style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">Korean journal <i>CEEM</i></a><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">, leaving </span><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">“</span><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">CEEM</span><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">”</span><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;"> in the text.</span><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;"> The Article Processing Charge page is taken from BMC. And so on.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">They have also <a href="https://sites.google.com/a/imedpub.com/imedpub/pipeline-imedpub-upcoming-publications/worldhealthreport2012nohealthwithoutresearch">ripped off</a> the <i>PLOS Medicine</i> collection “<a href="http://www.ploscollections.org/article/browse/issue/info:doi/10.1371/issue.pcol.v01.i09">No Health Without Research</a>” and <a href="https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=mW7bAgAAQBAJ">rebranded it without attributing the source</a> </span><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">— </span><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">a breach of the Creative Commons License. They are even selling it on Amazon for $10 </span><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">— </span><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">shades of </span><a href="http://www.chrisrand.com/blog/2010/02/odd-tale-alphascript-publishing-betascript-publishing/" style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">VDM's practice</a><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;"> of ripping off Wikipedia articles to sell as books. Other PLOS collections have also been copied.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">[EDIT: In April, it was <a href="https://twitter.com/MsPhelps/status/592301409304993792">noted on Twitter</a> that peereviewers.com had copied wording from the peer review service Rubriq]</span><br />
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<h3>
<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;"><b>Keeping poor company</b></span></h3>
<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">iMed.pub is easily confused with Insight Medical Publishing or <a href="http://imedpub.com/">imedpub.com</a>, an imprint of the <a href="http://news.sciencemag.org/2013/05/u.s.-government-accuses-open-access-publisher-trademark-infringement">notorious publisher OMICS</a>, whose website even uses some of the same wording as iMed.pub (and who Aries are <a href="http://www.editorialmanager.com/imedpub/default.aspx">letting use the journal management platform Editorial Manager</a>). An indication that this may be more than OMICS simply ripping off iMed.pub is that on <a href="https://sites.google.com/a/imedpub.com/imedpub/home">iMed.pub's old website</a> they list <i>Archives of Medicine, Journal of Universal Surgery, Journal of Neurology and Neuroscience, Translational Biomedicine, Archives of Clinical Microbiology, Health Systems and Policy Research, Archives in Cancer Research, </i>and <i>Journal of Biomedical Sciences —</i></span><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;"> which are all now among OMICS/imedpub.com's own </span><a href="http://www.imedpub.com/journals.php" style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">list of 75 journals</a><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">iMedpub.com was <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20071214091856/http://imedpub.com/">once run by the Spanish researchers</a>, published in Spanish and owned by Fundación de Neurociencias. The website went through <a href="https://sites.google.com/a/imedpub.com/imedpub/home">a number of changes</a> of <a href="http://imedpub.esnuestraweb.com/">style and logo</a>, then between <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20141028122258/http://imedpub.com/">28 October 2014</a> and <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20141208220525/http://imedpub.com/">8 December 2014</a> OMICS took over, moving the website to Hyderabad. The journal websites similarly transformed: <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20140517013320/http://archivesofmedicine.com/">before</a> and <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20141216194117/http://archivesofmedicine.com/">after</a>. However, Carlos may have regretted this, <a href="https://www.facebook.com/insightmedpub/posts/799806583430929">posting</a> “Please, do not mistook this publisher with iMed.pub, International Medical Publisher, the publisher of International Archives of Medicine among others” on Insight Medical Publishing's Facebook page in April 2015.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">Carlos/Carvaper (a username of Carlos Vázquez) popped up in the comments of <a href="http://scholarlyoa.com/2014/07/10/is-omics-publishing-group-sneakily-trying-to-buy-its-way-into-pubmed/">a post by Jeffrey Beall on OMICS</a> for </span><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">“</span><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">buying their way onto PubMed</span><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">”, criticising</span><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;"> Beall. How... coincidental.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;"><b>Losing track(ing)</b></span></h3>
<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">iMed.pub celebrate <i>IAM </i>being <a href="http://journals.indexcopernicus.com/International+Archives+of+Medicine,p7931,3.html">indexed by the murky Index Copernicus</a>, a common resort of disreputable publishers. But even this is untrue — </span><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">they've not had an 'IC Rating' since 2011. They claim </span><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">“IAM </span><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">is included in the JournalGuide whitelist of reputable titles”, <a href="https://www.journalguide.com/journals/international-archives-of-medicine">but the entry says</a> “This journal is not yet included in the JournalGuide whitelist of reputable titles.” They claim to be archived in the <a href="http://thekeepers.org/">Keepers register</a>, but this has not continued beyond the acquisition from BMC. They claim </span><i style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">IAM </i><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">is in Q1 for Medicine in Scopus; <a href="http://www.scimagojr.com/journalsearch.php?q=19700166519&tip=sid">it's in Q2</a>.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;"><b>False identities?</b></span></h3>
<span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">Like </span><a href="http://journalology.blogspot.co.uk/2012/09/lambert-academic-publishing-or-how-not.html" style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">Lambert Academic Press before them</a><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">, the people associated with iMed.pub are more than meets the eye. The </span><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=dp_byline_sr_ebooks_1?ie=UTF8&field-author=Samuel+Barrack&search-alias=digital-text&text=Samuel+Barrack&sort=relevancerank" style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">author of the iMed.pub books</a><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;"> is listed on Amazon as a 'Samuel Barrack'. Samuel Barrack also appears as an editorial board member of the OMICS/imedpub.com journal, </span><i style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">Journal of Neurology and Neuroscience</i><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">, with the affiliation 'Southamptom'[sic]. Almost the only other trace of 'Samuel Barrack' is </span><a href="http://scholar.google.com/scholar?start=10&q=author:%22Samuel+Barrack%22&hl=en&as_sdt=0,5" style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">on Google Scholar</a><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;"> as a lone author or co-author with Manuel Menendez of iMed.pub on articles posted to </span><a href="http://jneurology.wordpress.com/" style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">jneurology.wordpress.com</a><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">, an old iMed.pub site. Samuel also has a </span><a href="https://plus.google.com/118301176376719759860/about" style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">Google Plus profile</a><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">, which uses the stock photo “</span><a href="http://www.corbisimages.com/stock-photo/royalty-free/CB106289/doctor-smiling-in-his-clinic" style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">Doctor smiling in his clinic</a><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">” aka CB106289.jpg.</span><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg27ic8H5Co7EvwL4TBS6FwHw9_dkRetBFivr4l9RL7isVd13sqOo6NQaBMZ26aZQZ4gQuelyVhUzrHzIrwvBXOZczHd3kBnIA5zb8xDQ7B7bO4f8axgei8G36jXM2E8tHroMRV3rb-BOxZ/s1600/samuel+barrack+profile.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg27ic8H5Co7EvwL4TBS6FwHw9_dkRetBFivr4l9RL7isVd13sqOo6NQaBMZ26aZQZ4gQuelyVhUzrHzIrwvBXOZczHd3kBnIA5zb8xDQ7B7bO4f8axgei8G36jXM2E8tHroMRV3rb-BOxZ/s1600/samuel+barrack+profile.png" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">Samuel is not the only apparent sockpuppet in iMed.pub's drawer. Medicalia includes a profile for InternetMedicalPublishing, but this is not </span><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">Vázquez </span><span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">or Menendez — this is someone else <a href="http://medicaliaorg.ning.com/profile/InternetMedicalPublishing">called Dr David Ryan</a>. David's association with the site goes all the way <a href="http://medicaliaorg.ning.com/profiles/blogs/internet-medical-society">back to November 2005</a>, when the Internet Medical Society was founded. He is apparently the <a href="http://internetmedicalsociety.weebly.com/management.html">web admin</a> and <a href="https://sites.google.com/a/imedpub.com/ims/our-people">former co-chair</a>, and is <a href="http://internetmedicalsociety.weebly.com/ehealthq.html">based at KCL</a>: “Dr David Ryan, Public Health, Kings[sic] College London, UK”. I can find two David Ryans who attended KCL: one did Classics in 1964, the other History in 1985. The <a href="http://api.ning.com/files/AWTqIJiv17vojvAIXY6oNguc0PzRt*2iARL2VYt8eupzK3BXDNWv2depGfWy8WDf5EAwlfL1IWOTd-hYAUQfQRl-hQU7Ls0j/1032750712.jpeg?xgip=52%3A0%3A183%3A183%3B%3B&width=184&height=184&crop=1%3A1">profile pic</a> for 'David Ryan' on Medicalia was also used as “<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-ihWFUBESnxw/TtOzZtJf_4I/AAAAAAAAB4k/ts6nHpVliBY/s300/denia_telemedicina_portada.jpg">denia telemedicina portada</a>” on <a href="http://neurocien.blogspot.com/">neurocien.blogspot.com</a>, the Spanish language blog of Fundación de Neurociencias (run by Menendez) to illustrate “Consulta Médica Online” </span><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">— </span><span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">this was itself taken from <a href="http://m1.paperblog.com/i/25/255365/el-departamento-salud-denia-pone-marcha-telem-L-1.jpeg">an image</a> (<a href="http://marinasana.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/MarinaSalud-4-600x400.jpg">also here</a>) from Hospital Marina Salud de Dénia. Strangely, his <a href="https://plus.google.com/+DavidRyanIMS/posts">Google Plus profile</a> says he is at UCL, not KCL. He also lives in 'Londres, Reino Unido' — how odd that an English doctor would put that in Spanish. On Google Plus David uses the <a href="https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-c570pC7vmYc/VU3ktOf9huI/AAAAAAAAAFA/AxC4-cljsZs/s630-fcrop64=1,00002244ffffe35a/doctors%2B2.JPG">same image of a group of doctors</a> as on his <a href="https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCRcF2mzBJAmzNrrvqXWig4Q/about">YouTube profile</a>. These doctors are in fact <a href="http://www.umassmed.edu/derm/">dermatologists at UMass medical school</a> (bonus points for spotting the doctor</span><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;"> UMass themselves photoshopped in).</span><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhtgPaHOUYwoxVxDEW5pK4O-AQ8zRqNJrsLIiqSn99LMQZdS6s_kWZGdUz_XOstSHkXzJuyXsAsDeri4rag5BByV74YPyBF7g7IO8kDQrZm5sT4q0xpqI0mf5udAF5nDkq5TzfzgfHaDImV/s1600/david+ryan+profile.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="220" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhtgPaHOUYwoxVxDEW5pK4O-AQ8zRqNJrsLIiqSn99LMQZdS6s_kWZGdUz_XOstSHkXzJuyXsAsDeri4rag5BByV74YPyBF7g7IO8kDQrZm5sT4q0xpqI0mf5udAF5nDkq5TzfzgfHaDImV/s320/david+ryan+profile.png" width="320" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">The Spanish language version of their website Medicalia is apparently hosted by '<a href="http://medicalia.ning.com/profile/InternetMedicalPublishing">Sandra Toledo</a>', but her profile picture is also a <a href="https://www.privatosec.com/sites/default/files/styles/_top/public/sb9.jpg">stock photo</a>.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;"><a href="http://medicaliaorg.ning.com/profile/iMedPub">David Garcia</a>, whose Medicalia profile URL contains 'iMedPub', uses another <a href="http://doknet.ru/system/photos/18/big/1.jpg?1347736481">stock photo</a>. And he <a href="http://medicaliaorg.ning.com/group/ims/forum/topics/recruiting-members-for-the-new-management-committee?commentId=3345116%3AComment%3A28972&groupId=3345116%3AGroup%3A27915">replied to a post</a> in December 2012 as though he was Carlos Vázquez Perez.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">By now I am even doubting that the CEO of iMed.pub Carlos Vázquez aka </span><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">Carlos Vázquez Perez</span><span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;"> exists. His Facebook profile pictures are stock photos and there is little detail available about his background, just 'Clínica Virgen del Carmen, Zaragoza, Spain' (or '<a href="https://sites.google.com/a/imedpub.com/ims/our-people">Clínica del Carmen</a>'). He has no publication record that I can find — just two articles on iMed.pub, <a href="http://imed.pub/ojs/index.php/mms/article/view/783">one of which</a> also appears <a href="http://imed.pub/ojs/index.php/ojmedicine/article/view/821">under the names</a> of Indian and Pakistani researchers. <a href="https://www.facebook.com/carlos.vazquezperez?fref=nf">Another Facebook profile</a> for him has the same stock photo as used by David Garcia on Medicalia. Carlos' <a href="https://plus.google.com/+CarlosV%C3%A1zqueziMedPub">Google Plus</a> profile <a href="https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-jbWhOwcE-24/AAAAAAAAAAI/AAAAAAAAAAA/r7Vp_PFSKcU/s120-c/photo.jpg">picture</a> and <a href="http://fneurociencias.academia.edu/CarlosVazquezPerez">Academia picture</a> is actually the picture of <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/matthewroche">a Microsoft employee</a> (and Carlos has <a href="https://plus.google.com/+CarlosV%C3%A1zquez2/">two</a> <a href="https://plus.google.com/107456670494656384977/">more</a> Google Plus profiles, one of which claims he attended UCL). His email address carvaper@gmail.com was once used for <a href="http://urbantrekkingworldwide.blogspot.com/">a blog on Urban Trekking</a> that was based in Oviedo </span><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">— where </span><span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">Manuel Menendez-Gonzalez is based. The <a href="https://es.linkedin.com/in/isabelmiguel">Managing Editor of iMed.pub Isabel Miguel</a> might be real, but otherwise could this all be a one-man band run by the <a href="http://directors.findthecompany.co.uk/l/8978697/Manuel-Menendez-Gonzalez">only registered company director</a> of iMedPub Ltd, <a href="http://manuelmenendez.com/">Manuel Menendez-Gonzalez</a> of the University of Oviedo and Hospital Alvarez-Buylla</span><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">?</span><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgE9QZqyv7w4BDe3ByezwbsN1NqNZKDH8I3wW_xkWZXqOKjQOvKrH68EDw77u7KQ_9qAKE5HAHgDG3onM8RlGSQbarePS_DyFXptc92ro_DusrcN0Bxwk0tPCA3NYVPXAFDdswLL-D8YbZ5/s1600/carlos+vazquez+profile.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgE9QZqyv7w4BDe3ByezwbsN1NqNZKDH8I3wW_xkWZXqOKjQOvKrH68EDw77u7KQ_9qAKE5HAHgDG3onM8RlGSQbarePS_DyFXptc92ro_DusrcN0Bxwk0tPCA3NYVPXAFDdswLL-D8YbZ5/s1600/carlos+vazquez+profile.png" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">***</span></div>
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<h3>
<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">iMed Publishing were not just Bohannon's dupes</span></h3>
<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">They have repeatedly copied other OA publishers, churned out papers, associated with another disreputable publisher, given the impression of independence of their different organizations, misreported the tracking of their journals, and apparently invented several false identities. Editors on their boards, prospective authors, other publishers who may be <a href="http://imedicalsociety.org/iomc-2015/">associating with them</a> — </span><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;"><strike>PeerJ</strike>*, <a href="http://www.cureus.com/channels/ims">Cureus</a>** </span><span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">— </span><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">should give iMed.pub and its sister organizations a wide berth.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">[EDIT:</span><br />
<span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">* imedicalsociety.org said </span><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">“</span><span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">All abstracts will be published only as preprints in the journal PeerJ</span><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">”</span><span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">;</span><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;"> PeerJ <a href="https://twitter.com/thePeerJ/status/631401375654641665">told me</a> </span><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">“</span><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">PeerJ has never communicated w iMed & has no partnership to publish w them. We’re investigating.</span><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">”</span><br />
<span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">** <a href="https://twitter.com/CureusInc/status/631504601305362432">Cureus says</a> </span><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">“</span><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">To echo PeerJ, Cureus has no business relationship with iMed</span><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">”</span><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">, </span><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">but iMed.pub's Internet Medical Society <a href="http://www.cureus.com/channels/ims">has a channel</a> and is promoting Cureus' inclusion in PubMed on social media</span><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">]</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">***</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">p.s. An ethical aspect of Bohannon's 'chocolate hoax' that was less commented on was that it muddies the water for legitimate research. “Eating chocolate is good for you!” is great clickbait, which is why Bohannon chose it, but there is legitimate work that suggests, as summarised in systematic reviews, that cocoa may have benefits on <a href="http://m.ajcn.nutrition.org/content/92/1/218.long">lowering cholesterol</a> and <a href="http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/14651858.CD008893.pub2/abstract">blood pressure</a>.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">p.p.s. Some readers might be experiencing déjà vu, and indeed this story has played out before with another ex-BMC journal. In July 2012, the journal <i>Head and Neck Oncology</i> was discontinued by BMC after an investigation into its editorial practices. The Editor-in-Chief promptly founded an open access publisher based in London, imaginatively titled OA Publishing London, and a raft of associated organizations. The <a href="http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/neuroskeptic/2014/08/25/strange-rise-fall-medical-journal/">blogger Neuroskeptic had the scoop on their operations</a>, so I need not repeat them here. The similarities between iMed.pub and OAPL are striking, and it seems to come down to a common factor </span><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">— </span><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">the hubris of the academics running these publishing operations.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">p.p.p.s. I have archived snapshots of the websites involved in case they mysteriously disappear, which I can send to anyone who is interested.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">p.p.p.p.s. Competing interests: I am a staff editor at <i>PLOS ONE</i>, but this post is written in a personal capacity. All opinions expressed in this post are mine and not those of PLOS.</span>Matt Hodgkinsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02376788922895957748noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5919517653892378810.post-68238037183884371172012-09-10T21:43:00.000+00:002014-04-23T16:50:06.788+00:00Lambert Academic Publishing (or How Not to Publish Your Thesis)<div style="text-align: center;">
<i><span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif; font-size: x-small;">[Updated March 2014, see update below]</span></i></div>
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<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">Lambert Academic Publishing (LAP) is an imprint of Verlag Dr Muller (VDM), a publisher infamous for <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VDM_Publishing#Wikipedia_content_duplication">selling cobbled-together "books" made up of Wikipedia articles</a> mainly un</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">der their Alphascript Publishing imprint. LAP, on the other hand, specialize in "publishing" academic theses [update: they also use the names Scholars' Press and Editorial Académica Española (EAE)]. Below, I summarize what's known about LAP's operations (and my opinion of "publishing" a thesis with such an organization), but consider this first:</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;"><a href="http://www.facebook.com/lappublishing">Lambert Academic Publishing on Facebook</a> have an Acquisition Editor called "<a href="http://www.facebook.com/kwoodmann">Kevin Woodmann</a>". </span><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">This is a <i>little </i>curious as Kevin is not a common German name, though apparently it was popular in East Germany in the 1990s.</span><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;"> Here's his profile:</span><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhei2AkNcq6rTT4UjEzRImsX0N06tGGHZcSG9CF9732zidiyl951AB627fCv9l9wFVEpcz5zHb6FJOdZYRDUodAmOQ3zV6uZie05Pk8tAgm3M8CgXiAT-hA-fiYI1vPnd0I1PD71qEv58ZG/s1600/Kevin+Woodman+Facebook+profile.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhei2AkNcq6rTT4UjEzRImsX0N06tGGHZcSG9CF9732zidiyl951AB627fCv9l9wFVEpcz5zHb6FJOdZYRDUodAmOQ3zV6uZie05Pk8tAgm3M8CgXiAT-hA-fiYI1vPnd0I1PD71qEv58ZG/s320/Kevin+Woodman+Facebook+profile.jpg" height="238" width="320" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">He's a handsome guy with salt-and-pepper hair; there's a touch of George Clooney to him. There's a catch though - Kevin's photo is actually a stock photo of a "<a href="http://www.agefotostock.com/en/Stock-Images/Low-Budget-Royalty-Free/ESY-000767798">Confident middle aged man sitting and smiling against white background</a>" by <a href="http://arcurs.com/">Yuri Archurs</a>: </span><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjroKm3qov0gUhWRUPHHt6PLTYacWJz6O40PG8f9tWfhw_F7esv-IlGvw2zOuHKxGqCE81c3EJvoNpHHMnM8JHs4w3vuy9FmF7-F-MSsMRLX6gbP65dwsrXSQsVM7NjjlwyCy772nzvFfj5/s1600/Kevin+Woodman+stock+photo+comparison.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjroKm3qov0gUhWRUPHHt6PLTYacWJz6O40PG8f9tWfhw_F7esv-IlGvw2zOuHKxGqCE81c3EJvoNpHHMnM8JHs4w3vuy9FmF7-F-MSsMRLX6gbP65dwsrXSQsVM7NjjlwyCy772nzvFfj5/s320/Kevin+Woodman+stock+photo+comparison.jpg" height="225" width="320" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;"><a href="http://www.facebook.com/ywatson1987">Yasmine Watson</a>, another Acquisition Editor, is actually a "<a href="http://www.istockphoto.com/stock-photo-9641429-smiling-business-woman-with-colleagues-at-the-back.php">Smiling business woman with colleagues at the back</a>"; </span><a href="http://www.facebook.com/sophie.campbell.14" style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">Sophia Campbell</a><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;"> is a "</span><a href="http://www.fotolia.com/id/20567377" style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">Young business woman laughing over a thought</a><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">"; </span><a href="http://www.facebook.com/thompsonli" style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">Lisa Thompson</a><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;"> is a "</span><a href="http://www.123rf.com/photo_4934985_happy-casual-business-woman-holding-her-coat-over-shoulder-at-her-workplace.html" style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">Happy casual business woman holding her coat over shoulder at her workplace</a><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">".</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">And so on. Legitimate publishing businesses do not create false profiles on social media sites.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">What else is known about VDM/LAP (and the many other names used by this company)?</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">- They find authors largely by bulk-emailing students who have recently published theses;</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">- They have no selectivity - anyone who submits their "book" will have it "published";</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">- They do not conduct peer review;</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">- They do not edit the "book", and they "publish" exactly what is submitted - and apparently they charge for any changes made by the author after submission;</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">- Authors will almost certainly never receive any royalties (<a href="http://antonietamercado.blogspot.co.uk/2011/12/academic-publishing-scams.html">a blogger notes</a> that "I have yet to found the testimony of anybody who has received royalties"</span><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">);</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">- They do not market the "books";</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">- The "books" do not count in many research assessment processes.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">For example, see <a href="http://www.acu.edu.au/about_acu/research/staff/research_achievements/herdc/important_information_about_vdm_publishing/">this summary</a> of the business practice of VDM/LAP from an Australian university:</span><br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq" style="text-align: justify;">
<i><span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">"LAP Lambert does not conduct a peer review/editorial process. Manuscripts are published exactly as they are submitted to the publisher."</span> </i></blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq" style="text-align: justify;">
<i><span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;"></span><span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">"Where royalties average less than 50 Euro a month, the author is given book vouchers for other LAP Lambert stock. An author’s share is usually always under this because at the average rate of 80 Euro a book, it means they would have to sell 11 copies a month to exceed the 50 Euro threshold, which is difficult since the company does not undertake any marketing on behalf of the author."</span> </i></blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq" style="text-align: justify;">
<i><span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;"></span><span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">"This could adversely affect the opportunity to have your work accepted in a reputed peer-reviewed journal."</span></i></blockquote>
<span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">Also see </span><a href="http://www.writingnetwork.edu.au/content/email-lap-offering-publish-my-masters-thesis" style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">this experience</a><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;"> of "publishing" with LAP:</span><br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq" style="text-align: justify;">
<i><span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">"I should point out that once you’ve submitted your publication-ready document to LAP’s online system, that’s it. If you’ve made a mistake and left off one-third of your reference list (as I almost did) they impose a hefty fee for having to intervene to make corrections."</span> </i></blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq" style="text-align: justify;">
<i><span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;"></span><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">"My personal copy arrived last week. Looks just like my thesis (but with less expensive paper, a smaller font and packaged as a paperback!)"</span> </i></blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq" style="text-align: justify;">
<i><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;"></span><span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">"When I checked my author's account at Lambert Academic Publishing at the end of the last financial year (after my beautifully paperbacked master's thesis had been on sale via Amazon for 12 months) not only had no royalties accrued to me, but zero copies of the book had been sold."</span></i></blockquote>
<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">Is the publication of these "books" solely the responsibility of Lambert Academic Publishing and their ilk? (author mills, vanity presses, call them what you will) Are these authors all unwitting victims? I think the answer is no. Many new authors starting out on an academic career are desperate to get published, but "publishing" an unaltered thesis with a print-on-demand publisher without making clear that the "book" is a copy of the thesis is, in my opinion, an attempt to gain unearned academic credit for no additional work. I do not think that charging people $97 on Amazon to read a repackaged thesis is reasonable. I believe that many who buy these books will think that they are buying a published book and not an unedited thesis, and they will be </span><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">misled and angry.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">If you only want your thesis to be made available to more readers, there </span><span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">are many acceptable self-publishing and/or open access options. If you want to get academic credit beyond the qualification gained from </span><span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">publishing the thesis then there is no short cut: you need to publish with peer-reviewed journals </span><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">or book publishers. See for example Resta et al. </span><a href="http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2874663/" style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">Publishing a Master’s Thesis: A Guide for Novice Authors</a><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">. </span><i style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">J Genet Couns.</i><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;"> 2010 June; 19(3): 217–227 (free to access).</span><br />
<span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">Find a reputable publisher and do not simply copy your thesis </span><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">word-for-word - otherwise, don't be surprised to see your own academic reputation </span><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">suffer.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">---</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;"><br />Update, March 2014:</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">Lambert Academic Press continue to offer their "services" under a number of different names - Scholars' Press, Omniscriptum, GlobeEdit, the Spanish-language Editorial Académica Española (EAE) and Publicia, the Italian-language Edizioni Accademiche Italiane (EAI), the German-language Akademikerverlag, Südwestdeutscher Verlag für Hochschulschriften, and Saarbrücker Verlag für Rechtswissenschaften, the French-language Éditions Universitaires Européennes and Presses Académiques Francophones, Palmarium Academic Publishing, the Polish-language Wydawnictwo Bezkresy Wiedzy - and unwary authors continue to "publish" with them, but this blog post and others like it at least serve to warn some academics of the nature of their business. One of the latest is the delightfully titled "<a href="http://easternblot.net/2013/09/06/please-do-not-publish-my-thesis/">Please do not publish my thesis</a>" by Eva Amsen, aka easternblot.<br />
<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">I was interviewed earlier this year by a journalist, <a href="http://josephstromberg.com/">Joseph Stromberg</a>, based on this post.</span><span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif; font-size: x-small;"><br /></span>
</span><br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">"plenty of people consider the company’s strategy predatory—and in his research, Hodgkinson uncovered a curious pattern that lends credence to this" </span></span></blockquote>
<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">
<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">As well as interviewing me and Thorsten Ohm, the CEO of VDM, Joseph 'took one for the team' and "published" his own thesis with LAP, discovering in the process that LAP do a hard sell on their new authors to try to make them purchase copies, something I believe is a new angle on their business model.</span><span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
</span><br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">"LAP Lambert’s real plan finally became clear: They make money not by selling arcane tomes to readers, but by selling the books back to their authors after they’ve already signed away the rights."</span></span></blockquote>
<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">
<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">His fascinating piece, "</span><a href="http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/future_tense/2014/03/lap_lambert_academic_publishing_my_trip_to_a_print_content_farm.html" style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">I Sold My Undergraduate Thesis to a Print Content Farm</a><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">", was published by Slate.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">p.s. I noticed that Betascript, an imprint VDM uses to sell their collections of Wikipedia articles, uses the name "Lambert M. Surhone" for one of their fake editors. Someone at VDM obviously likes the name "Lambert".</span></span>Matt Hodgkinsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02376788922895957748noreply@blogger.com20tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5919517653892378810.post-46998764826197382692012-09-09T21:04:00.000+00:002012-09-09T21:04:16.460+00:00Will the real Wulfenia journal please stand up?<br />
<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">In mid-August, the <a href="http://www.authoraid.info/">AuthorAID</a> mailing list came up with an intriguing case. An author asked "Can you help me? Is this journal is true or fake: "WULFENIA" http://www.wulfeniajournal.at/editorial.html".</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">The response on the list was clear: "I searched an article from their archive entitled 'Decision making-- Eastern and western style: A way to synthesize the best of each' by Felix Kaufmann. This is a real article but it was published in 1970 in Business Horizons, vol. 13, issue 6, pages 81-86. It looks like they pinch stuff from elsewhere to seem legitimate." </span><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">The journal purported to be run by "Editor in Chief: Prof. Dr. Vienna S. Franz" at </span><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">Landesmuseum Kärnten, Austria</span><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">, but - though the institution was genuine - nobody by that name could be found. </span><i style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">PLOS ONE</i><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;"> Academic Editor </span><a href="https://twitter.com/gilbertjacka/status/235809658047197184" style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">Jack Gilbert</a><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;"> also gave reason to be certain that this journal was fake: "Wulfenia - a fake journal using myself and others as 'editorial board members' that makes you pay for all 'articles'".</span><br />
<span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">The author who queried the validity of wulfeniajournal.at let wulfeniajournal.com know, and this site posted a warning:</span><br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">"To all scientists about www.wulfeniajournal.at : </span></blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">Wulfenia journal has not a website, and it is published as hard copy. </span><span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">Wulfenia journal does not publish online and www.wulfeniajournal.at is a fake site. </span><span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">All http://sciencesarchive.com , www.sciencerecord.com and www.wulfeniajournal.at are for one person that he/she is a hustler. </span><span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">If you check 2009-2011 issues of this journals, You know that all published papers are for another journals which he/she used them for your trust and fraud. </span><span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">Wulfenia just publish as hard copy and just publish Biology science articles NOT ALL SCIENCE AND ENGINEERING. www.wulfeniajournal.com is made just for informing you about this fraud and does not accept any papers for reviewing."</span></blockquote>
<span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">I emailed the Landesmuseum Kärnten to let them know that "Your museum's name is being used by a fake journal", <a href="https://twitter.com/mattjhodgkinson/status/237937587120115712">tweeted about it</a>, and thought that would be the last of it. Yet one commenter on the AuthorAID list noted that: "Even the more legitimate journal is a bit suspicious".</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">He was right.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">Roland K. Eberwein, Editor-in-Chief of Wulfenia Journal emailed me last week to say that "The site www.wulfeniajournal.com is a criminal site too!". Wulfenia, as it turns out, is an annual print journal in botany. </span><span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">As <a href="http://www.landesmuseum.ktn.gv.at/210226w_DE.htm?seite=15">the <i>real </i>Wulfenia</a> notes on its website:</span><br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">"The websites http://www.wulfeniajournal.at and http://www.wulfeniajournal.com ARE NOT the official websites of the journal "Wulfenia: Mitteilungen des Kärntner Botanikzentrums" published by the Regional Museum of Carinthia. Both websites criminally usurp the identity of the official journal. They fraudulently use false informations, a false editorial board and false publication requirements to encourage authors to submit articles and to transfer page fees to a bank account in Yerevan (Armenia). The Regional Museum of Carinthia is not liable for any offence undergone by potential authors who would have submitted articles via the websites mentioned above. Download of articles from these websites which were published in the official journal Wulfenia is illegal."</span></blockquote>
<span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">He let me know that "You can find 'Wulfenia' at http://www.landesmuseum.ktn.gv.at/210226w_DE.htm?seite=15".</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">I asked about issues with indexing of the journal, and he replied that "I got an e-mail from Thomson Reuters. They told me that they are only indexing the printed journal."</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">The journal is treating this as a criminal case: "We have a meeting at the police to involve the Austrian Agency against Cyber Criminality. We want to close the website www.wulfeniajournal.at. It seems that this is possible. The site www.wulfeniajournal.com is not hosted in Austria - in this case, we have no chance".</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">http://www.wulfeniajournal.com is currently down, while the fake http://www.wulfeniajournal.at/index.html is still accessible.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">Jeffrey Beall <a href="http://scholarlyoa.com/2012/09/05/two-print-journals-completely-hijacked-by-online-hoodlums/">has also written about this</a> and he notes that print journal <i>Archives des Sciences</i> has also been hijacked.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">My advice - before sending money to any journal, be sure who you are dealing with. Watch for poor spelling, editors with no academic record, claims to be based in one country but requesting money to be sent to another. And other print journals without an online presence should get one before they get their identity stolen too.</span><br />
Matt Hodgkinsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02376788922895957748noreply@blogger.com9tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5919517653892378810.post-34011990782278999792011-01-31T22:23:00.003+00:002011-01-31T23:07:14.259+00:00Who are WebmedCentral?<div style="text-align: center; font-family: trebuchet ms;"><blockquote style="font-style: italic;">"It is our effort to instill more rapidity, accountability, and transparency into biomedical publishing". WebmedCentral</blockquote></div><br /><div style="text-align: justify; font-family: trebuchet ms;">It is essential in biomedical publishing to be <a href="http://www.nature.com/nature/peerreview/debate/op3.html">transparent and accountable</a>. Indeed, this is something with which the publishers of WebmedCentral agree. However, on their website they <a href="http://www.webmedcentral.com/Frequently_Asked_Questions">only say</a> that "We are a group of medical and management professionals with no affiliation to any major biomedical publishing group." As <a href="http://www.youtube.com/comment?lc=c3bU6_8MqhzNuvZMFpfQQeVmefBk5sBUnjHf6Sph6MQ">posted</a> on their YouTube video by <a href="http://www.medpedia.com/users/110">Larry Weisenthal</a>, <div style="text-align: center;"><blockquote style="font-style: italic;">"Transparency begins at home. This is one of the most opaque, allegedly scientific web sites I've ever seen. Can you imagine submitting a serious scientific paper to a black hole, where it's impossible to learn the names of the publisher, editors, contributing editors, etc.?"</blockquote></div> We know <a href="http://journalology.blogspot.com/2011/01/what-is-webmedcentral.html"><span style="font-style: italic;">what</span> WebmedCentral is</a>, but <span style="font-style: italic;">who are they</span>?<br /><br />Their address is Suite 250, 162-168 Regent Street, London W1B 5TD, UK, but this is a P.O. Box set up by completeformations.co.uk. The <a href="http://whois.domaintools.com/webmedcentral.com">whois details</a> reveal nothing because the domain was registered by Luxembourgian company PrivacyProtect.org. More searching reveals their <a href="http://whois.domaintools.com/67.227.236.94">IP address</a>, hosted by Liquid Web Inc. in Lansing, Michigan. WebmedCentral are <a href="http://twitter.com/#%21/WebmedCentral">on Twitter</a>, but have only tweeted twice and give no more details. <a href="https://groups.google.com/group/sci.med.dentistry/browse_thread/thread/b461152b358eea89/e6d6010eae571991?hl=en&ie=UTF-8&oe=utf-8&q=webmedcentral#e6d6010eae571991">Messages</a> were posted to newsgroups on behalf of WebmedCentral in August 2010 by a <a href="http://profiles.yahoo.com/webmed%2Ecentral">Michael Carr</a> and a <a href="http://groups.google.com/groups/profile?hl=en&enc_user=sANEzxoAAABshfYBBYjP1SnIDMfCamhQfVkDoaoMBC1ZX5YCLbSZfw">John Williams</a>, but no contact details are given and searching for people by those names does not turn up any leads.<br /><br />WebmedCentral <a href="http://www.elance.com/e/webmedcentral/">advertised for freelancers</a> on Elance, where they revealed in June 2009 that "We are a group of doctors based in Newcastle upon tyne." A small lead, but we can do better. Companies in the UK are registered with Companies House, and WebmedCentral is no exception. Their operating name is WEBMED LIMITED, aka WEBMED PVT LTD. and they have the registered number 07436770. This company gives the same address as given on the website, confirming that it is the correct organisation. Companies need to file certificates of incorporation and to name directors. Indeed, Webmed Ltd. was <a href="http://ukdata.com/company/07436770/WEBMED-LIMITED">incorporated</a> on 10 November 2010.<br /><br />In the interest of transparency and accountability, I can reveal the names of the directors of Webmed Limited. These directors also run WebmedCentral, as confirmed by the contents of test manuscripts visible via Google. They are three NHS hospital doctors and a management consultant based in the North of England:<br /></div><ul style="text-align: justify; font-family: trebuchet ms;"><li><a href="http://uk.linkedin.com/pub/kamal-mahawar/5/824/8b">Kamal Mahawar</a>, 36, Specialist Registrar, Sunderland Royal Hospital<br /></li><li><a href="http://uk.linkedin.com/pub/ajay-malviya/4/329/676">Ajay Malviya</a>, 37, Specialist Registrar in Orthopaedic Surgery, Wansbeck General Hospital, Ashington<br /></li><li><a href="http://uk.linkedin.com/pub/deepak-kejariwal/16/539/8a1">Deepak Kejariwal</a>, 37, Specialist Registrar, Department of Gastroenterology, University Hospital of North Durham (<a href="http://www.bmihealthcare.co.uk/consultant/consultantdetails?p_name=Deepak-Kejariwal&p_id=48476">BMI Healthcare page</a>, <a href="http://www.cddft.nhs.uk/clinical-staff/consultants/dr-deepak-kejariwal.aspx">NHS page</a>)</li><li>Manish Jain, 39, manager (probably <a href="http://uk.linkedin.com/pub/manish-jain/0/425/686">this Manish Jain</a>)</li></ul><div style="text-align: justify; font-family: trebuchet ms;">Publications and comments like Kumar G, Mahawar KK. The number of authors in articles published in three general medical journals. <span style="font-style: italic;">National Medical Journal of India</span> 2007 Mar-Apr; 20(2): 101-2, <a href="http://www.e-asianjournalsurgery.com/article/S1015-9584%2809%2960401-2/abstract">Peer Review Practices in Biomedical Literature: A Time for Change?</a>, <a href="http://www.e-asianjournalsurgery.com/article/S1015-9584%2809%2960073-7/abstract">Who publishes in leading general surgical journals? The divide between the developed and developing worlds</a>, <a href="http://pmj.bmj.com/content/82/969/462.abstract/reply#postgradmedj_el_490">this reply</a> to an article, and <a href="http://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736%2803%2913055-3/fulltext">a letter</a> to the <span style="font-style: italic;">Lancet </span>show that they've obviously put a lot of thought into how to reform peer review and publishing.<br /><br />Drs Mahawar, Malviya, Kejariwal, Mr Jain, you should be proud of launching a site that aims to reform biomedical publishing. Why hide away?</div>Matt Hodgkinsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02376788922895957748noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5919517653892378810.post-49080436964809376082011-01-31T00:24:00.027+00:002012-12-19T12:31:16.436+00:00What is WebmedCentral?<blockquote style="font-family: trebuchet ms; font-style: italic;">
<span style="font-size: 100%;"><br /></span>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 100%;">Loosely following the style of <a href="http://charleston.publisher.ingentaconnect.com/content/charleston/chadv/2010/00000011/00000004/art00005">Jeffrey Beall's assessment in The Charleston Advisor</a> of various OA startups, here is an assessment of WebmedCentral, a new post-publication review biomedical journal.</span></div>
</blockquote>
<div style="font-family: trebuchet ms; text-align: justify;">
<br />
<span style="font-size: 100%; font-weight: bold;">DESCRIPTION</span><br />
<span style="font-size: 100%;"><a href="http://www.webmedcentral.com/">WebmedCentral</a> is a post-publication review biomedical web portal launched in July 2010. It aims to "eliminate bias, increase transparency, empower authors, improve speed and accountability, and encourage free exchange of ideas." There is no pre-publication screening, although the instructions for authors imply some oversight for issues such as patient consent. Authors may submit revised versions. Articles can be read for free on the website, where they may be reviewed both by reviewers solicited by the authors and by readers. There is a list of "Scholarly Reviewers" on the site. Readers may also rate articles. Biomedical videos are also published. The journal has ISSN 2046-1690, but articles do not appear to have DOIs. It is not indexed in PubMed, but the articles are indexed <a href="http://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&q=site%3Awebmedcentral.com&btnG=Search&as_sdt=0%2C5&as_ylo=&as_vis=0">on Google Scholar</a>. The site <a href="http://www.webmedcentral.com/journals/transfer_journal_information">aims to host</a> other open access, open peer reviewed journals.</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-weight: bold;">SUMMARY</span><br />
<span style="font-size: 100%; font-weight: bold;">Content:</span><span style="font-size: 100%;"> Primary scientific research, case reports, and reviews make up the bulk of the articles, alongside opinion, hypotheses, and outright fringe science. None have been peer reviewed before publication.</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: 100%; font-weight: bold;">Usability:</span><span style="font-size: 100%;"> The site has a category listing, browse by date, featured articles, popular articles, most reviewed articles, RSS feeds, basic and advanced search, latest reviews. The PDF is only available via a Javascript link.</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: 100%; font-weight: bold;">Cost:</span><span style="font-size: 100%;"> Free to read and publish, unless the author pays the US$50 Premium Upload fee.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: 100%; font-weight: bold;">Licensing:</span><span style="font-size: 100%;"> Authors retain copyright. Personal non-commercial use, digital archiving and self-archiving are allowed, though no standard license is used and details are confusing</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: 100%; font-weight: bold;">Contact:</span><br />
<div style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-size: 100%;">Address: Suite 250, 162-168 Regent Street, London W1B 5TD, United Kingdom</span><br />
<span style="font-size: 100%;">Phone: None given</span><br />
<span style="font-size: 100%;">Fax: None given</span><br />
<span style="font-size: 100%;">Email: contact@webmedcentral.com or http://www.webmedcentral.com/Contact_Us</span><br />
<span style="font-size: 100%;">URL: http://www.webmedcentral.com</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 100%; font-weight: bold;">COST</span><br />
<span style="font-size: 100%;">Free to read and publish, the journal aims to receive income from advertising and sponsorship. They offer a "<a href="http://www.webmedcentral.com/premium/Premium_Service_Info">premium upload service</a>" for $50 per article that allows authors to simply email their submission to the journal. <a href="http://www.webmedcentral.com/Reviewers">Scholarly Reviewers</a> who post three reviews can obtain a free "premium upload".</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: 100%; font-weight: bold;">LICENSE</span><br />
<span style="font-size: 100%;">The <a href="http://www.webmedcentral.com/Frequently_Asked_Questions">simplest formulation</a> is that "Authors keep copyright to the article but our readers will be freely able to read, copy, save, print and privately circulate the article." However, the details are less clear. At <a href="http://www.webmedcentral.com/about_us/Our_Philosophy">one point</a> they say authors "are free to publish it elsewhere" but also say <a href="http://www.webmedcentral.com/Copyright_Policy">elsewhere</a> that "we require ... an exclusive license". They also say that users have a "free, irrevocable, worldwide, perpetual right of access for personal non-commercial use, subject to proper attribution of authorship and ownership of rights" but then say users may "view or download a single copy of the material on this website solely for your personal, non-commercial use". But they allow self-archiving: "WebmedCentral allows the final version of all published research articles to be placed in any digital archive immediately on publication. Authors are free to archive articles themselves." The precise freedom all this gives to users to reproduce the text is unclear, but calling WebmedCentral "open access" would be misleading.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: 100%; font-weight: bold;">EVALUATION</span><br />
<span style="font-size: 100%;">The approach of WebmedCentral is reminiscent of Google Knol, which is where<span style="font-style: italic;"> PLoS Currents</span> is hosted, or of a preprint server, except there is an active post-publication peer review system.</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: 100%;"><a href="http://journalology.blogspot.com/2007/06/open-peer-review-community-peer-review.html">Open peer review and community peer review</a> are not new ideas. A similar approach to that of WebmedCentral was tried by <a href="http://journalology.blogspot.com/2007/03/tags-track-growth-in-open-access-and.html" style="font-style: italic;">Philica</a> in recent years without great success; the site rapidly filled with crank publications. Another was 'E-Biomed', which was stifled and instead became PubMed Central. Although <a href="http://yi.com/home/EysenbachGunther/publications/2000/eysenbach2000e_curropimmunol_preprint.pdf">anticipated</a> a decade ago, biomedical publishing has been wary of preprints and other proposals to remove or reduce pre-publication peer review. BioMed Central's </span><span style="font-size: 100%; font-style: italic;">Genome Biology</span><span style="font-size: 100%;"> <a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20060204010430/http://genomebiology.com/preprintabout.asp">had a preprint server</a>, but it closed in January 2006. A humanities institute is <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/24/arts/24peer.html?_r=2&scp=1&sq=peer%20review&st=cse">experimenting</a> with community review on </span><span style="font-size: 100%; font-style: italic;">Shakespeare Quarterly</span><span style="font-size: 100%;">, though they are using a hybrid model rather than abandoning invited pre-publication review. More generally, MediaCommons argue for community peer review in their book "<a href="http://mediacommons.futureofthebook.org/mcpress/plannedobsolescence/">Planned Obsolescence</a>". They are far from naïve, noting that </span><br />
<blockquote style="font-family: trebuchet ms; font-style: italic;">
<span style="font-size: 100%;">'Too many digital publishing experiments, like Philica, have lagged due to an assumption that might be summed up as "if you build it, they will come."' </span></blockquote>
<span style="font-size: 100%; font-weight: bold;">Ethics:</span><br />
<span style="font-size: 100%;">The journal requires appropriate ethical approval for human and animal studies and will remove studies if they find that they fail to meet ethical standards. Articles may also be removed in cases of scientific misconduct or plagiarism. They suggest that authors use statistical advice, and ask authors to adhere to reporting standards such as CONSORT. They ask authors of clinical trials to adhere to the Good Publication Practice guidelines, but do not specifically mention trial registration. They endorse the ICMJE criteria for authorship and the use of medical writers should be declared. Funding and competing interests should be declared, though there is no definition of a competing interest. They ask authors to suggest at least three reviewers and to not only pick "friendly reviewers", and say they may invite further reviewers. How <a href="http://www.webmedcentral.com/Information_for_Authors/Instructions_for_authors">these policies</a> are enforced and who enforces them is not clear.</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: 100%; font-weight: bold;">Technical issues:</span><br />
<span style="font-size: 100%;">Previous versions of an article should be linked to, but this <a href="http://www.webmedcentral.com/article_view/501">fails</a>. The journal allows digital archiving and digital preservation by LOCKSS members. Some test articles can be found as Word documents that are not visible via the search, which raises questions about site security. The presentations of figures is in a sidebar and sometimes without even a thumbnail, though the pop-up view is user friendly. The referencing could be improved, with clearer formatting and hyperlinks down to the references. Some of the formatting of the reviews is poor, with changes in font and font size, and several reviews are double posted.</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: 100%; font-weight: bold;">Publication volume:</span><span style="font-size: 100%;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiU38rZEm8zS4U2NFrQnZuiFmX8famCeoUUE5Zs7ajMNpJTi9FVjvvU0DB4N9AuQczgDqIb9BTK7NA3bBxbOiESxgogJuOYiyhMbx3fqrIWgUaoVhlktjdlXShCsWkp1HBngBWo8-vkGQrz/s1600/Graph+2.jpg" onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5568143844818028786" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiU38rZEm8zS4U2NFrQnZuiFmX8famCeoUUE5Zs7ajMNpJTi9FVjvvU0DB4N9AuQczgDqIb9BTK7NA3bBxbOiESxgogJuOYiyhMbx3fqrIWgUaoVhlktjdlXShCsWkp1HBngBWo8-vkGQrz/s320/Graph+2.jpg" style="cursor: pointer; float: right; height: 216px; margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px; width: 239px;" /></a></span><br />
<span style="font-size: 100%;">There are 366 <a href="http://www.webmedcentral.com/view_all_articles">published articles</a> as of 30/01/2011. Submission rates appear to have peaked following publicity in August, and have since declined (see figure).</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: 100%; font-weight: bold;">Content:</span><br />
<span style="font-size: 100%;"> There is currently no indication on the articles that they have received no pre-publication review. As might be expected given the lack of pre-publication review, some of the articles are fringe science: aliens, homeopathy, prayer, and telepathy are all represented. There is <a href="http://www.webmedcentral.com/article_view/1001">an account</a> of chiropractic care of a patient with fibromyalgia, an <a href="http://www.webmedcentral.com/article_view/1126">opinion article</a> on the evidence for homeopathy in acute upper respiratory tract infections by Peter Fisher and colleagues, <a href="http://www.webmedcentral.com/article_view/1164">a study</a> linking 'emotional quotient' and telepathy that has the obligatory mention of quantum theory, <a href="http://www.webmedcentral.com/article_view/1283">an article</a> on the hunt for alien life that takes in the Higgs Boson, the Bermuda Triangle, and alien implants , a virtually <a href="http://www.webmedcentral.com/article_view/1285">content-free account</a><span style="font-family: trebuchet ms;"> of acupuncture in rats, and an </span><a href="http://www.webmedcentral.com/article_view/691">intercessory prayer study</a><span style="font-family: trebuchet ms;">. The latter is, thankfully, a deliberate satire.</span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: 100%;">When you get this kind of opportunity of publishing without a filter, sex always seem to come to the fore: step forward, <a href="http://www.webmedcentral.com/article_view/903">a hypothesis</a> on why women don't sleep with the first man they see when they ovulate, two <a href="http://www.webmedcentral.com/article_view/1295">case</a> <a href="http://www.webmedcentral.com/article_view/676">reports</a> of priapism, an <a href="http://www.webmedcentral.com/article_view/1279">institutional review</a> of Peyronie's disease, and a <a href="http://www.webmedcentral.com/article_view/1281">case report</a> of penile fracture. As pointed out by two reviewers, it contained the unfortunate typo in the title of the corpus <span style="font-style: italic;">callosum </span>(in the brain) rather than the corpus <span style="font-style: italic;">cavernosum</span>, hence it was <a href="http://www.webmedcentral.com/article_view/1346">republished</a> (demonstrating that the article version system is not working).</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: 100%;">Many of the articles are unpublishable in any biomedical journal: <a href="http://www.webmedcentral.com/article_view/511">a rant</a> about academic exploitation; <a href="http://www.webmedcentral.com/article_view/606">a review</a> of the biological activities of a herb that the author seems to have forgotten to write; <a href="http://www.webmedcentral.com/article_view/456">an account</a> of a trauma registry that is confused and sketchy; <a href="http://www.webmedcentral.com/article_view/468">a review</a> of oral health and inequality for which the recommendations section appears to be <a href="http://scholar.google.co.uk/scholar?hl=en&safe=off&client=firefox-a&hs=a7w&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&q=%22Promotion%20of%20equitable%20access%20to%20education%20and%20healthcare%20is%20the%20responsibility%20of%20the%20whole%20profession%22&um=1&ie=UTF-8&sa=N&tab=ws">lifted verbatim</a> from <a href="http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1600-0579.2007.00478.x/full">Nunn et al. 2008</a>, who are not cited. How many more of the articles will contain plagiarism would be interesting to see.</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: 100%;">On the more positive side, there are a series of interesting articles by three authors: Leonid Perlovsky has published a series of mainly hypothetical papers, e.g. on <a href="http://www.webmedcentral.com/article_view/994">language and cognition</a>; William Maloney, a New York dentist, has published a series of overviews and historical accounts, e.g. the <a href="http://www.webmedcentral.com/article_view/1487">medical legacy</a> of Babe Ruth; Uner Tan has published a series of articles of his observations and theories of quadrapedal locomotion in humans, e.g. these <a href="http://www.webmedcentral.com/article_view/645">two cases</a>.</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: 100%;">Other interesting reads are <a href="http://www.webmedcentral.com/article_view/1181">a survey</a> of the role of hairdressers and bartenders as informal emotional support following the 9/11 attacks and their responses to this role, <a href="http://www.webmedcentral.com/article_view/581">a study</a> by Robert Dellavelle on how journals don't require ethics approval for meeting abstracts, and <a href="http://www.webmedcentral.com/article_view/673">a series</a> of witty anecdotes by an Israeli psychiatrist of cases of "curing demons" in his patients.</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: 100%;">Around a quarter of the articles are case reports. The insatiable demand of hospital doctors to publish case reports has clashed with a reluctance of medical journals to publish what are often "me too" publications offering little generalisable insights, and which are often poorly presented and incomplete. The recent trend of open access case report journals - <a href="http://casereports.bmj.com/"><span style="font-style: italic;">BMJ Case Reports</span></a>, <a href="http://casesjournal.com/"><span style="font-style: italic;">Cases Journal</span></a>, <a href="http://jmedicalcasereports.com/"><span style="font-style: italic;">Journal of Medical Case Reports</span></a>, <a href="http://www.la-press.com/clinical-medicine-insights-case-reports-journal-j91"><span style="font-style: italic;">Clinical medicine insights. Case reports</span></a>, <a href="http://content.karger.com/ProdukteDB/produkte.asp?Aktion=JournalIndex&Anfang=C&ProduktNr=0#ji_C,"><span style="font-style: italic;">Case Reports in Ophthalmology</span></a> etc. from Karger, <a href="http://www.hindawi.com/journals/crim/"><span style="font-style: italic;">Case reports in Medicine</span></a> from Hindawi and the <a href="http://www.amjcaserep.com/"><span style="font-style: italic;">American Journal of Case Reports</span></a> (free, not OA) - doesn't appear to be matching demand.</span><br />
<br />
There are also 58 reviews, 31 opinion articles, and at least 15 of the "original articles" are not research articles; less than half of the articles on WebmedCentral are primary research.<br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: 100%; font-weight: bold;">Reviews:</span><br />
<span style="font-size: 100%;">Some of the reviewers are published researchers, but they usually have only a handful of publications and they would be unlikely to be selected as peer reviewers by a mainstream biomedical journal editor – this could be seen as a positive or a negative. There are pages listing reviewer details, but the reviews by a single reviewer are not listed.</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: 100%;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhazD8aI2lVD7j3n0z-hw0xMKLenrnTiKw49Zx_SBbSYrJIWCiEUbCXRjZoUZuOa4HhwhOP4-T-KHRuW4hQe6PXF18P5ppvFheqNqVkt7pfAXlUwDAVReMw-zV5PO7Y_MIcqPDFJW22yn9N/s1600/Graphs.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5568147734597687458" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhazD8aI2lVD7j3n0z-hw0xMKLenrnTiKw49Zx_SBbSYrJIWCiEUbCXRjZoUZuOa4HhwhOP4-T-KHRuW4hQe6PXF18P5ppvFheqNqVkt7pfAXlUwDAVReMw-zV5PO7Y_MIcqPDFJW22yn9N/s320/Graphs.jpg" style="cursor: pointer; float: right; height: 146px; margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px; width: 320px;" /></a>Relatively few articles have received an insightful review or comment. Around 55% (201 articles) have received a review of some kind, and the most any article has received is six reviews (see right hand panel of the figure). 138 reviews were unsolicited and 211 were solicited by the authors. The quality of the reviews is usually low. Just over half of both solicited and unsolicited reviews contain critical analysis, i.e. at least some mention of improvements the authors could make to their article, meaning that probably less than 25% of all articles receive any degree of critical analysis. Many reviews are sycophantic, for example one case report is said to be "the best ever article publishe[sic] so far". Many merely state what the articles is about - one author-invited reviewer spends 358 words reiterating what the article says and telling us that it is a "must read" - or give the views of the reviewer on the subject rather than the article - another reviewer devotes a mere 23 words of a 430 word review to even mentioning the paper. Most reviews are very short: the average is only ~115 words for both author-suggested and unsolicited reviewers; <a href="http://www.webmedcentral.com/Article_Review_View/162">the longest</a> is just over 1500 words (see left hand panel of the figure for the length distribution). Comments with critical analysis are much longer (~175 words) than those without (~50 words). If I were to see reviews like most of those on WebmedCentral during standard peer review, I would never use that reviewer again.<br /><br />Some of the reviews include comments such as "this is suitable for publication" or "I hope it is accepted", which indicate a lack of awareness of the publishing model. </span><span style="font-size: 100%;">One author has even <a href="http://www.webmedcentral.com/Article_Review_View/400">reviewed his own paper</a>. An article I consider unpublishable received the <a href="http://www.webmedcentral.com/Article_Review_View/65">reviews</a>, and I quote them in full, "good" and "No comment".</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: 100%;">There are some examples where robust review has taken place. The concerns raised by the reviewers on <a href="http://www.webmedcentral.com/article_view/1030">this paper</a>, including a lack of mention of ethics or consent, would lead most editors to reject such a paper – but WebmedCentral has no routine mechanism for doing this.</span><span style="font-size: 100%;"> Authors responded to reviews only on a handful of papers. A lively debate developed around a physician's <a href="http://www.webmedcentral.com/article_view/1433">self-case report</a>, but this was a rare exception. I found <a href="http://www.webmedcentral.com/Article_Review_View/223">one example</a> of what appears to be functional peer review, with the authors revising their work and the reviewer stating that they are happy with the revisions.</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: 100%;">In <span style="font-style: italic;">Bambi</span>, Thumper's parents <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0034492/quotes?qt0455230">taught him</a> that "If you can't say something nice... don't say nothing at all", but I think that the opposite applies in peer review. If you can't come up with critical comments about a paper, you're probably missing something: every paper has something wrong with it. The sycophantic nature of many of the reviews in WebmedCentral might be inherent to open (named) peer review, but in my experience and according to <a href="http://www.bmj.com/content/341/bmj.c6424.full">published studies</a>, open peer review increases the length of reviews and makes them more polite, but has no effect on review quality. Another factor may be that many of the authors and reviewers of WebmedCentral are from India: <a href="http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2010/05/26/indias_research_culture.php">R. A. Mashelkar argued</a> in <span style="font-style: italic;">Science </span>that "India must free itself from a traditional attitude that condemns irreverence", and <a href="http://www.ias.ac.in/currsci/25dec2010/1638.pdf">Nikhil Kumar and Shirish Ranade</a> argued in <span style="font-style: italic;">Current Science</span> that "it is a preponderance of obsequious reverence and sycophancy that has placed the science in the country on a downhill slope." Are we seeing this unwillingness to criticise in action?</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: 100%;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">Overall assessment:</span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: 100%;">This is an interesting experiment in post-publication peer review, which both indicates the possibilities – instant publication, open community review – and the perils – unsound science, unbalanced opinion, and substandard writing being presented as part of the scientific literature.</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: 100%;">Building a functioning publishing platform from scratch is no easy matter, and several hundred publications in seven months is an impressive figure. There has been a noticeable engagement from the community, with over 365 submissions and a total of nearly 350 reviews in seven months, 40% of them by reviewers not suggested by the authors. However, the submission rate is declining and the coverage and quality of reviews is not nearly high enough to functionally replace pre-publication review.</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: 100%;">The onus is on the authors to obtain reviews: the journal states that it will obtain reviews, but this is not in evidence - just under half of the papers have no reviews, and 30% have only one review. More effort needs to be put into gaining reviews from qualified experts.</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: 100%;">Reviews are essentially worthless if nobody pays any attention to them, be that an editor, the authors or the readers. Pre-publication peer review is not merely a filter, but it also acts to improve articles. On WebmedCentral there is no pressure for articles to be revised in accordance with any critical reviews, perhaps other than author embarrassment. As reviewers see a lack of response to their comments, they may lose enthusiasm.</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: 100%;">Without a clear indication that reviewers have criticised an article and no indication that the articles are not peer reviewed, readers may view the work uncritically. If reviewers state for instance that the work is not sound, this should be clearly flagged up to readers near the top of the page, and articles should be sortable based on the answers given in the review from and the rating given by reviewers and readers. Another layer should be added, allowing articles to be promoted by agreement from their 'Scholarly Reviewers' to a "publication standard" level, giving authors an incentive to revise their work. "<a href="http://www.webmedcentral.com/featured_articles">Featured articles</a>" do exist, but the criteria used are not revealed.</span> WebmedCentral are forming an "<a href="http://www.webmedcentral.com/advisory/advisory_board_info">Advisory Board</a>" of "eminent scientists"; perhaps this board will increase the rigour of the site.<br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: 100%;">Without the oversight of an editor choosing diverse reviewers and because most scientists are unaware of the site, it may become a closed community of the same authors positively reviewing each others' work – the precise opposite of the aim of the journal. Unless the process is reformed, WebmedCentral is likely to remain a "<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cargo_cult_science">Cargo Cult science</a>" journal, which in the main publishes articles that only superficially resemble the peer-reviewed literature, and that are reviewed in a manner that is only a pale imitation of pre-publication peer review.</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: trebuchet ms; font-size: 100%;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">Other commentary on WebmedCentral:</span></span></div>
<span style="font-family: trebuchet ms; font-size: 100%;"><a href="http://pleion.blogspot.com/2010/09/webmedcentral-and-ginger-pee.html">WebmedCentral and ginger pee on Pleion</a>, <a href="http://friendfeed.com/ramyaziz/ec999543/here-we-go-expect-flood-of-such-manuscript">a discussion on Ramy Aziz's FriendFeed</a>, <a href="http://reviewsoffavoritesoftware.blogspot.com/2010/09/future-of-scientific-publishing.html">a blog review</a>, <a href="http://blogs.helsinki.fi/egru-blog/2010/09/03/can-publishing-get-any-better-than-this/">a response to receiving an email from them</a>, </span><a href="http://kencamargo.posterous.com/new-web-stuff-on-the-scientific-front" style="font-family: trebuchet ms;">a brief welcome</a><span style="font-family: trebuchet ms;">, </span><a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/discussion/comment-permalink/7584474" style="font-family: trebuchet ms;">a mention by Jenny Rohn in a Guardian comment thread</a><span style="font-family: trebuchet ms;">, </span><span style="font-family: trebuchet ms; font-size: 100%;"><a href="http://shortmem.com/Short%20Term%20Memory.nsf/dx/12102010073059AMEGTGPB.htm">a comment by an author</a>, <a href="http://www.sportsci.org/2010/wghif.pdf">an assessment in a sports science magazine</a>, <a href="http://www.lab-times.org/labtimes/issues/lt2010/lt06/lt_2010_06_6_13.pdf">a mention in Lab Times</a>, </span><span style="font-family: trebuchet ms; font-size: 100%;"><a href="http://pyjamasinbananas.blogspot.com/2011/01/is-low-dose-citalopram-as-effective-as.html">a critical appraisal of an article by PJ of Pyjamas in Bananas</a>, <a href="http://www.h2mw.eu/redactionmedicale/2010/08/webmedcentral-innovation-ou-mauvais-business.html">a blog reaction in French</a>, and <a href="http://twitter.com/#%21/finiteattention/status/24034726004">a few</a> <a href="http://twitter.com/#%21/EagerEyes/status/25076585026">Twitter</a> <a href="http://twitter.com/#%21/fnielsen/status/25775888869">comments</a>.</span><br />
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: trebuchet ms; font-size: 100%;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">But who runs this site?</span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: trebuchet ms; font-size: 100%;">"We are a group of medical and management professionals with no affiliation to any major biomedical publishing group" is <a href="http://www.webmedcentral.com/Frequently_Asked_Questions">all they say</a>, but who runs the site shall be revealed in my next post: "<a href="http://journalology.blogspot.com/2011/01/who-are-webmedcentral.html">Who are WebmedCentral?</a>".</span></div>
Matt Hodgkinsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02376788922895957748noreply@blogger.com8tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5919517653892378810.post-83585253093108432042010-10-04T21:10:00.003+00:002010-10-04T21:43:08.839+00:00Editing Wikipedia - for scientists<span style="font-size:100%;"><span style="font-family: verdana;"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page">Wikipedia</a> is now one of the most visited websites, and is probably the biggest source of <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libre_knowledge">fully free information</a>. Wikipedia and <a href="http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Home">Wikimedia</a> in general fits well in the "open movement" alongside open source, open access, and open data. Many people, including scientists, find Wikipedia to be invaluable and read it on a daily basis, and some have even <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_as_an_academic_source">used it as a source</a>, but you may find that the coverage is wrong or scanty. You can shrug and move on, or you can <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Be_bold">fix it yourself</a> - and leave it better for the next reader.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family: verdana;">If you're not contributing to Wikipedia already, as a scientist you're very well placed to do so as two of the main rules <span style="font-style: italic;">should </span>be second nature - citing your sources and presenting the work of others neutrally. I could go into much more detail, but </span><a style="font-family: verdana;" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Rockpocket">Darren Logan</a><span style="font-family: verdana;"> and his Cambridge colleagues have already written a </span><a style="font-family: verdana;" href="http://www.ploscompbiol.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pcbi.1000941">brilliant guide</a><span style="font-family: verdana;"> in </span><span style="font-style: italic; font-family: verdana;">PLoS Computational Biology</span><span style="font-family: verdana;"> that is recommended reading for those who are as yet unfamiliar with the ins-and-outs of becoming a Wikipedian.</span></span>Matt Hodgkinsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02376788922895957748noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5919517653892378810.post-63351416745138876522010-10-04T19:01:00.003+00:002010-10-04T19:51:30.356+00:00Joining PLoS ONE<span style="font-size:100%;"><span style="font-family: trebuchet ms;">I'm </span></span>excited to say I've just started as an Associate Editor with <a href="http://www.plosone.org/home.action"><span style="font-style: italic;">PLoS ONE</span></a> at the Public Library of Science, after freelancing with them since the beginning of the year.<br /><br />It's interesting timing in the wake of a surge in submissions post-<a href="http://www.the-scientist.com/blog/display/57500/">Impact Factor</a> and the recent brickbats hurled at the journal by <a href="http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2010/09/inventing_excuses_for_a_bible.php">PZ Myers</a> and <a href="http://scienceblogs.com/insolence/2010/09/more_acupuncture_quackademic_medicine_in.php">David Gorski</a>, but I'm looking forward to helping the journal go from strength to strength.Matt Hodgkinsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02376788922895957748noreply@blogger.com8tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5919517653892378810.post-40647981136516017202010-09-17T18:43:00.003+00:002010-09-17T18:50:11.182+00:00Open access: the saviour for Chinese journals?<span style="font-family: trebuchet ms;">Discussing the announcement that the Chinese government is going to crack down on poor quality journals, a </span><a style="font-family: trebuchet ms;" href="http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v467/n7313/full/467252a.html"><span style="font-style: italic;">Nature</span> editorial</a><span style="font-family: trebuchet ms;"> puts forward the welcome view that moving towards open access might be the best approach for Chinese publishers:</span><br /><br /><blockquote style="font-family: trebuchet ms;">"The best opportunity to revive Chinese publishing, whether in Chinese or English, probably lies in an open-access platform — increasingly popular in Western journals. Many Chinese journals already charge authors a publication fee, so should be able to make a smooth transition to the open-access model, in which they are supported by fees rather than by subscription revenues."</blockquote>Matt Hodgkinsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02376788922895957748noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5919517653892378810.post-22712531450854342952010-09-05T11:39:00.002+00:002014-03-31T20:02:31.066+00:00What is the scientific paper? 4: Access<span style="font-style: italic;">This is a guest post by <a href="http://joe.dunckley.me.uk/">Joe Dunckley</a></span><br />
<span style="font-style: italic;">Completing the series exploring the question "what is the scientific paper?", reposted from my old blog, and originally written following Science Online 2009. </span><span style="font-style: italic;">As I reminded people at the time, these were just my own half-thought through ideas, not the policy or manifesto of anyone or anything I'm affiliated with.</span><br />
A friend of mine once told me how much she hated "the proliferation of these bioinformatics papers." All these simulations and models of what happens in real life. All of it utterly useless -- since when was the stuff that comes out of a computer worth anything? None of it even remotely reflects anything that happens in real life. And the methodology papers -- the endless methodology papers. They're making yet another neural network and modifying a bayesian something-or-other, when they haven't even found where they left the markov models yet! How can you have so many of these methodology papers? Clearly they can be no more than incremental advances. (Of course, BLAST is an exception -- it's old enough to have been around and heard of when we were undergrads, and is therefore a perfectly legitimate and mainstream molecular biology tool.)<br />
Similarly, some people still voice their skepticism about the need for open access. Access isn't really a problem, is it? These open access advocates are just making <i>facile</i> arguments about the how the people who pay for scientific research should have some kind of say regarding its dissemination.<a href="http://dx.doi.org/10.3354/esep00096"><small><sup></sup></small></a><small><sup><a class="top_ref" href="https://www.blogger.com/null" name="_ref_1">[1]</a></sup></small> Come on, really, show me, <i>who</i> is in want of access? Everyone (everyone who <i>matters</i>) already has subscriptions, right? Access isn't a problem. And the open access "movement" isn't an ideology. It's <i>just another business model</i>.<br />
And then, yesterday afternoon m'colleague shouted for advice handling an author of a scientific manuscript who was questioning the need to deposit her not inextensive collection of genomes in a database. I don't blame the author for wanting to get out of the chore—she had a <i>lot</i> of data, and depositing it will be a dull repetitive task. M'colleage was trying to write a letter and struggling to put into words the reason why we mandate deposition of sequence data, and why merely including them as supplementary MS Word files isn't good enough.<br />
These attitudes, you will have noticed, have one particular thing in common: they all completely miss the fact that the biomedical sciences have moved on in the past quarter century. In almost every field (lets not wake the poor taxonomists) the science being done and the science being published today are not quite like that of 25 years ago. Even if the science of today <i>were</i> like that of 25 years ago the case for open data sharing would be strong enough; as it is, it's simply absurd to think that open sharing of data isn't worth doing.<br />
--<br />
Individual scientific papers -- the basic units of scientific research -- are rarely exciting; rarely even interesting. Where nerds get excited about science, it's where science offers a beautiful explanation for how the world works. And scientific papers don't do that. They offer some speculative interpretations of data on obscure problems in obscure systems. It is the literature as a whole -- hundreds of dull papers put together -- which tells a complete and exciting story. The sum is more than the parts -- the theory is more than the data.<br />
In the field I know best -- cancer cell biology -- 99 in 100 papers published are tedious details, discovered with a science-by-numbers formula. <i>The (anti-)proliferative effect of one abbreviation interacting with another abbreviation in three-letter-acronym-and-a-number cells</i>, concluding with a suggestion that the authors' work might have implications for cancer treatment and a note that further work is necessary. Or even better, the complete lack of anything interesting at all happening when the first abbreviation interacts with the second. The abbreviations and their effects have been studied, in combination with others, in all of the most widely used three-letter-acronym-and-a-number cell-types, and somebody is scraping the barrel.<br />
But the tedious details put together add up to an understanding of how the cell works and how it goes wrong. The details could be put together by a human, going through the thousands of papers on the topic, assembling the facts and finding the trends. Or, more plausibly, given the amount of tedious details out there, they could be assembled by a computer, with a database and a clever algorithm. Except that four in every five of those tedious details, discovered at great expense to taxpayers, will be inaccessible to that clever algorithm. They will be locked away in the basements of university libraries, hidden in human-readable prose that humans will never read. The results of billions of pounds of work searching for an understanding of cancer and a better chance at defeating it will be worthless, because they will never be amongst the parts that add up to the greater whole.<br />
So I told m'colleague to explain to her author that unless she deposits her genome sequences, the last three years of her professional life will ultimately have been wasted. An average paper in a high-volume mid-tier journal that will be glanced at by a few colleagues when published. Another bullet point on a CV. They will never further science beyond that. They won't contribute any important discovery or real advance to the field. They will be forgotten. Nobody will seek them out when the time comes to make the leap forward.<br />
That's just where biology is at these days: lots of tiny fragments of data, spread thin through the literature. The most interesting and important unanswered questions will require the synthesis of that work. The most interesting and important questions can't be answered without the heap of data that has already been produced, but which is locked away.<br />
On machine readable data, Mike Ellis <a class="external" href="http://blogs.openaccesscentral.com/blogs/pmcblog/entry/why_machine_readable_data_should" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">says</a>, "at some point in the future, you'll want to do "something else" with your content. Right now you have no idea whatsoever what that something else might be." This is especially true in science: at some point in the future, tedious data obtained at great expensive, as part of the bigger picture, will finally be important and valuable. Right now, you can have no idea <i>how</i> important.<br />
Publishers are allowed to get away with keeping science closed, holding it back, and <i>wasting public money</i> because there are still sufficient numbers of scientists who let them -- who have themselves failed to grasp that the world and science have changed.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5919517653892378810.post-39358609646125547902010-09-02T20:09:00.004+00:002014-03-31T20:03:05.525+00:00What is the scientific paper? 3: The metric<span style="font-style: italic;">This is a guest post by <a href="http://joe.dunckley.me.uk/">Joe Dunckley</a></span><br />
<span style="font-style: italic;">Continuing the series exploring the question "what is the scientific paper?", reposted from my old blog, and originally written following Science Online 2009. The topic of this post was originally discussed on FriendFeed, <a href="http://friendfeed.com/cameronneylon/04d4a5c4/what-is-scientific-paper-3-metric">here</a>.</span><br />
On my recent post, <a href="http://journalology.blogspot.com/2010/08/what-is-scientific-paper-2-whats-wrong.html"><i></i></a><i><a class="internal" href="https://www.blogger.com/null">what is wrong with the scientific paper?</a></i>, Steve Hitchcock said that the most important problem with the paper is access, and that when we solve the problem with access, everything else will follow. I agree that access is hugely important, I recognise that we haven't won everyone over yet, and I know we do have to continue working away at the access problem, so I will devote a future post to reviewing that topic. But having thought about it a little longer, I am more convinced than ever that it is not access that is <i>the</i> big problem which is holding back the paper and journal, and open access is not <i>the</i> solution from which all others follow and fall into place.<br />
There <i>is</i> one big problem, a single great big problem from which all others follow. The great ultimate cause is <i>not</i>, as I said last week, the <i>journal</i>. It is more basic than that. It is the <i>impact factor</i>. The journal is the problem with disseminating science, but the reason it has become the problem, the reason people <i>let the problem continue</i> is the impact factor. The impact factor is a greater problem than the access problem, because the former stands in the way of solving the latter. The impact factor is a great big competition killer; by far the greatest barrier to innovation and development in the dissemination of science.<br />
Scientists can look at all of the problems with disseminating science, and they can look at us proposing all of these creative and extravagant solutions. They might agree entirely with our assessment of the state of the scientific paper and of the journal, and they can get as excited as us at the possibilities the flow from new technologies. But blogs and wikis are mere hobbies, to be abandoned when real work starts piling up; databases a dull chore, hoops to jump through when preparing a paper. So long as academics can get credit for little else besides publishing in a journal — a journal with an impact factor — any solution to publishing science outside of the journal will never be anything more than a gimmick, a hobby that takes precious time away from career development.<br />
In a worse position than blogs and wikis, where cheap easy products are openly available, are the wonderful but complicated ideas that would benefit from financial backing to implement — the databases, and open lab notebooks, and the like — but which are currently artificially rendered unviable because no scientist could ever afford to waste time and money on a product that isn't a journal with an impact factor. No scientist can try something new; no business can offer anything new. Even such an obviously good idea and such a tame and simple advance as open access to the scientific paper has taken over a decade to get as far as it has in part because it takes so long for start-up publishers with a novel business model to develop a portfolio of new journals with attractive impact factors.<br />
I am not a research scientist. I don't have to play the publish-or-perish game. So I have no personal grudge; no career destroyed or grant lost by rejection from a top-tier journal. It doesn't bother <i>me</i> how much agony, absurdity, and arbitrary hoop-jumping research scientists have to go through in their assessments and applications. But it bothers me greatly that, by putting such weight on the publication record — not actual quantity and quality of science done, but a specific proprietary measure of the average impact of the journals (and journals alone) that it's published in — <i>public</i> institutions across the world are distorting markets, propping up big established publishers, and destroying innovation in the dissemination of science. End the malignant metric and everything else will follow.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5919517653892378810.post-73534456285282259472010-08-30T21:19:00.002+00:002014-03-31T20:03:30.499+00:00What is the scientific paper? 2: What's wrong?<span style="font-style: italic;">This is a guest post by <a href="http://joe.dunckley.me.uk/">Joe Dunckley</a></span><br />
<span style="font-style: italic;">Once again, this is a re-post of something I wrote on my old blog a year ago after the Science Online conference, looking at the future of the scientific paper. As I reminded people at the time, these were just my own half-thought through ideas, not the policy or manifesto of anyone or anything I'm affiliated with.</span><br />
<span style="font-style: italic;"></span>So in response to the Science Online conference, we've been thinking about the question, "what is the scientific paper?" I <span class="internal">already gave my answer to that</span> a couple of weeks ago, but promised to have a go at answering the more interesting question, "what is <i>wrong</i> with the scientific paper?"<br />
I've been thinking through how to sum up the answer all week, and I'm afraid the simple answer is, "the journal". The journal is what's wrong with the scientific paper. Or rather, the journal is what is holding back the development of efficient modern methods of disseminating science. So I thought I'd spend this second post making some observations on what the scientific journal traditionally is and does; what I think the modern journal shouldn't be doing; and a couple of case studies of alternative technologies that disseminate certain kinds of scientific communications better than a journal ever could.<br />
<h5>
What is the (traditional) scientific journal?</h5>
<ul>
<li> The journal is a collection of scientific papers limited to some kind of theme coherent enough to make it worth <s>reading</s> buying.</li>
<li> The journal is led by a charismatic editor-in-chief and editorial board who attract people to publish in the journal.</li>
<li> The journal is printed on pages. It can do text, still pictures, graphs, and small tables.</li>
<li> The journal publishes a sufficiently large number of papers to make it worth printing several issues each year, but a sufficiently small number of papers to make each issue manageable.</li>
<li> The purpose of the journal is to be read and cited by other scientists.</li>
<li> The purpose of the journal is to be purchased by university libraries.</li>
<li> The journal provides a peer-review, copy-editing, marketing and media relations service to their scientists.</li>
<li> Publishing in a journal provides a way for scientists to be cited and credited for their work, based on the reputation of that journal.</li>
<li> The journal decentralises scientific publishing, allowing individual pockets of innovation within the publishing world, but making change overall very slow.</li>
</ul>
<h5>
What should the modern journal (not) be doing?</h5>
It is perhaps rather foolish for somebody who works for a publisher of journals -- who works developing technologies for a publisher of journals -- to say that the problem with publishing science is the journal. It would be even more foolish for me to say that publishers perhaps <i>shouldn't</i> be trying to fix the problem with technology. Here are a couple of interesting technological advances that the more forward thinking journals have come up with lately.<br />
<ul>
<li> At Sci Online, Theo Bloom demonstrated <i><a class="external" href="http://www.sgc.ox.ac.uk/iSee/" rel="nofollow">iSee</a></i>, a structural biology visualisation applet for your "supplementary information". In the same category is <a class="external" href="http://jcb-dataviewer.rupress.org/" rel="nofollow">J. Cell Biol's DataViewer</a>, which is presented to us as a device for visualising raw microscopy data. Did you know that the results that come out of modern microscopes are not just pretty static pictures, but vast datasets full of hidden information? The JCB DataViewer unlocks that hidden information, by providing it and an interface to it as "supplementary information" with a paper.</li>
<li> <a class="external" href="http://knol.google.com/k/-/-/28qm4w0q65e4w/1#" rel="nofollow">PLoS Currents</a>: all the constraints and benefits of a traditional journal, but without the peer-review. Solves the problem of delays in publication. Publishes items that look just like the traditional paper.</li>
</ul>
Should publishers and journals be doing these things? When you look more closely at JCB's DataViewer, you find that, useful though it may be, most of its power and potential is currently wasted. The DataViewer is presented to us as a device for visualising the supplementary information of a paper; in fact, it is a potentially important database of microscopy datasets with a handy graphical interface attached. Restricted to a single journal, the database functionality lays unused.<br />
<i>PLoS Currents</i>? This is supposed to be a solution to the problem of delays in publishing special types of science deemed to be important and timely enough to need rapid communication to peers in the field. What have PLoS done? What makes <i>PLoS Currents</i> unique? How does it speed up intra-field communication of those important results? It drops one single aspect of the paper: peer review. In all other respects, <i>PLoS Currents</i> does all it can to make its papers look like the scientific paper, and its "journal" look like the scientific journal. Scientists are still asked to spend hours writing up these important timely results, with an abstract, introduction, methods, results, conclusions and references, with select figures and graphs and tables. Nobody has the imagination to go beyond the paper-journal-publisher model. We would sooner give up peer review than publish science in anything that doesn't look like papers have looked for a century.<br />
Or how about <i>Journal of Visualised Experiments</i>? JOVE is, for some inexplicable reason, held up as a brilliant example of innovation in publishing science -- of making the most of the new technology provided by the web. Those who point out that, well, it's not really a "journal", is it?, are chastised for their own lack of imagination. But surely it's those who can't conceive of a publishing format branded as anything other than the "<i>Journal of ...</i>" who are lacking the imagination.<br />
Final example: while thinking about this post, <i>PLoS Computational Biology</i> kindly came up with <a class="external" href="http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2009/08/publishing-and-opening-science-software.html" rel="nofollow">the absurd idea of being a software repository</a>. NO! Software repositories already make perfectly good software repositories, and there are plenty of them. Trying to turn a journal into a software repository is a suboptimal solution to a problem that disappeared long ago -- long before scientific publishers could have imagined that the problem even existed.<br />
<h5>
Breaking out of the journal</h5>
The web makes all sorts of new methods of publishing, communicating, disseminating science possible. It also comes with all sorts of well developed and widely used solutions to the problems of disseminating science. The big old publishers haven't even realised the web has happened, let alone thought about what to do with it. The hip young publishers know what's possible, and they want to be the ones to realise the possibilities. Good on the hip young publishers. But with each new possibility, scientists should be asking whether publishers, even the hip young ones, are really right for the job. Sometimes they are. Sometimes not.<br />
GenBank, the database of gene sequences and genome projects, had to happen. Journals simply can't publish the raw results from a whole genome sequencing project. (Thought I don't suppose they gave up without trying.) And GenBank comes with dozens of benefits that papers, when spread across a decentralised system of journals, just can't have. Yes, I <i>know</i> that databases aren't the optimal solution for <i>every</i> variety of data, but they are suitable -- <i>desirable</i>; even <i>required</i> -- for more of them than you might think. The microscopy data in <i>JCB</i> dataviewer (or the structural data in iSee) would, I suspect, be of much greater value were it branded as a standalone public database with a fancy front-end, than as a fancy visualisation applet for some scattered and hidden supplementary files, restricted to a single journal.<br />
Like it or not, science increasingly depends on data being published in public machine readable formats. Those who spend their days looking one-at-a-time at the elements of a single cell signalling pathway in every tumour cell line available to them are wasting <i>our</i> money if they bury their data in a fragmented and closed publication record. Nobody reads those papers, and the individual fragments of data don't tell us anything. Journal publishers think they can ensure that data is correctly published, but so far their only great successes are with the likes of GenBank and MIAME, where journals have ensured that data be deposited in public databases <i>outside of the journal format</i>.<br />
ArXiV. Does this need any explanation? What does <i>PLoS Currents</i> offer that isn't already solved <i>better</i> by pre-print servers? Just a brand name that makes it look as though it's a journal. If you require rapid dissemination of important timely results and you want to go to the effort of writing a full traditional scientific paper, put it on a pre-print server while it's going through peer review in a real journal. Don't just abandon peer review while making it look like you've just published a real paper in a real journal.<br />
Better yet, don't write a proper traditional paper. If you need rapid communication of important timely results, why waste time with all of the irrelevant trimmings of a scientific paper? The in-depth background and discussion and that list of a hundred references. Put these critical results on a blog with a few lines of explanation, and later submit the full paper for peer review in a real journal.<br />
<h5>
Credit where it's due</h5>
All the real scientists reading -- the ones looking for jobs and grants and promotion and tenure -- have spotted the one great big flaw in all these suggestions: credit. At least a paper in <i>PLoS Currents</i> can be listed in a CV. Nobody even <i>reads</i> blogs, let alone cites them. How can you get a grant on the back of a blog post? Am I suggesting you <i>should</i> be able to get a grant on the back of a blog post?<br />
Maybe. I don't know. I don't think so. At the moment, publishing papers in journals is pretty much all a researcher can get any credit for. Asking researchers to go beyond the paper-in-journal format is going to create problems of assigning credit, and I don't know exactly what the solution to that problem might be. Simply, I haven't put much effort into considering solutions. I'm a consumer rather than creator of science, so that particular problem doesn't keep me awake at night. But there surely <i>are</i> solutions -- plenty of them.<br />
Fact is, it's quite obvious to anyone in or observing science that the current method of ensuring that scientists are credited for their hard work is really quite broken. Trying to cram every new kind of "stuff" into that broken system is hardly helping.<br />
<h5>
Business models</h5>
Meanwhile, the publishers will be asking how we see the business models for these non-journal based methods of publishing working. Frankly, I'm not really interested. But then, JOVE is hardly the beacon of business success anyway. If publishers want science publishing to be a business, <i>they</i> need to find the new business models that work <i>without strangling science</i>. Otherwise, they're liable to find out that, on the web, some institutions and individual scientists can do a better job of disseminating science than the professionals can, and out of their own pocket.<br />
<h5>
The paper of the future</h5>
I don't necessarily think that anybody should stop writing papers -- perhaps not even the ones that nobody reads. The paper solves several problems better than any other proposed solution. A peer reviewed scientific paper, in a journal if you like, is as good a way as any to provide a permanent record of a unit of science done, and of a research group's interpretation of the significance of that unit of science. And it needn't change all that much. Making them shorter and a lot less waffley would be to my taste -- there's no need to put <i>that</i> much effort into words that won't be read. And give them semantic markup, animations, and comment threads, if you like. But don't pretend that those things are anything more than incremental advances. The real revolutions in the dissemination of science can only occur beyond the shackles of the traditional paper and journal. Every new <i>Journal of Stuff</i> is another step back.<br />
<span style="font-weight: bold;">Updates for 2010</span><br />
Peter Murray Rust has been <a href="http://wwmm.ch.cam.ac.uk/blogs/murrayrust/">saying interesting things</a> about domain-specific data repositories, which I am sure are worth paying more attention to than I have yet had time to.<br />
When I originally posted this, I was challenged for not mentioning the problem of closed-access journals at all; that problem is addressed in the subsequent posts.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5919517653892378810.post-34708392729056302802010-08-17T22:57:00.004+00:002014-03-31T20:03:45.573+00:00What is the scientific paper? 1: Observations<span style="font-style: italic;">This is a guest post by <a href="http://joe.dunckley.me.uk/">Joe Dunckley</a></span><br />
<span style="font-style: italic;">Last year, after Science Online, I wrote a series of posts inspired by Ian Mulvany's question, </span>what is the scientific paper? <span style="font-style: italic;">Those were originally posted on my old blog; now, with SoLo approaching once again, seems like a good time to revisit them, while migrating them over to </span>Journalology.<br />
Science Online charged us with answering the question, <i>what is the scientific paper?</i> Here is the answer. It comes from the perspective of somebody who has been middle author on just two, but who has spent a little bit of time working with them and with people who think a lot about them.<br />
What does the scientific paper <i>look like</i>?<br />
<ul>
<li> It's a few thousand words -- probably between 4 and 15 pages long (but can be <1 >100 pages).</li>
<li> It's mostly prose text, with a little bit of graphs, tables, and pictures.</li>
<li> It has a set matter-of-fact style and structure.</li>
<li>It's written in (American) English.<sup>1</sup></li>
</ul>
What is <i>in</i> the scientific paper?<br />
<ul>
<li> Who did the science.</li>
<li> Why the science was done.</li>
<li> How the science was done.</li>
<li> Data!</li>
<li> The authors' interpretation of what was achieved by doing the science.</li>
<li> Pointers to the other bits of science mentioned.</li>
</ul>
<i>Where</i> is the scientific paper?<br />
<ul>
<li> It is in a journal, available in one or both of:</li>
<ul>
<li> printed on 4-15 sheets of dead trees, between a pair of glossy (or not so glossy) covers in the basement of a library.</li>
<li> a journal website, possibly with technology deliberately designed to make it difficult and expensive to get to, probably only available in a clunky and poorly designed PDF file.</li>
</ul>
<li> It might also be in-part or in-full in a searchable database, like PubMed.</li>
<li> If you're really lucky, it is available as HTML and XML.</li>
</ul>
What is the scientific paper <i>for</i>?<br />
<ul>
<li> It aims to be a complete, objective, reliable, and permanent record of a unit of science done.</li>
<li> It's a way of telling your field what you've done.</li>
<li> It's a way of telling your field what you've found.</li>
<li> It's a way of giving data and resources to your field.</li>
<li> It's a (<i>the?</i>) way of proving to your (potential) employer/funder that you have done something worthwhile.</li>
<li>It's a way of making money for publishers</li>
</ul>
How is the scientific paper <i>made</i>?<br />
<ul>
<li>The authors are given some money and lab space on the condition that they use it to do some science and write a paper about it.<sup>2</sup></li>
<li>The authors do some science and write a paper about it.</li>
<li> They give it to a journal. The journal thinks about it.</li>
<li> Peer review! Months of scrutiny, discussion, and revisions.</li>
<li> Production! The words are turned into PDFs and printed pages.</li>
</ul>
What is the scientific paper <i>not</i>?<br />
<ul>
<li> Part of a conversation.</li>
<li> Quick and efficient.</li>
<li> Diverse and flexible.</li>
<li> Possible to edit after acceptance by the journal (except in extreme circumstances, and via slow and unsatisfactory mechanisms).</li>
<li> Possible to edit by anybody except "the authors".</li>
<li> A way of making your data and resources reusable.</li>
<li> A way of telling the layperson what you've done and found.</li>
</ul>
Wait, that wasn't <i>really</i> what the question meant, you say? Well, indeed. But before we get to the real questions -- "what's <i>wrong</i> with the scientific paper?" and "what do you suppose we do about that?" -- it's good to define some terms and lay out the basics. Do you think I've got any of my observations wrong, or think I've overlooked some important property of the scientific paper? Do say -- it would be good to try to agree on what the paper <i>is</i> before going any further.<br />
<span style="font-weight: bold;">Footnotes</span><br />
<ol>
<li>Thanks to Hannah who added this point in the comments on the old blog</li>
<li>Thanks to Cameron Neylon, ditto</li>
</ol>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5919517653892378810.post-48714154367122946072010-08-17T21:06:00.004+00:002014-03-31T20:04:02.707+00:00Incentivising academic fraud<span style="font-style: italic;">This is a guest post by </span><a href="http://joe.dunckley.me.uk/" style="font-style: italic;">Joe Dunckley</a><br />
Catching up with the newsfeeds after a week working in Beijing (where citizens are saved from reading such subversive content as <span style="font-style: italic;">Journalology</span> -- as they are all Blogspot blogs), I notice the <span style="font-style: italic;">Economist</span> <a href="http://www.economist.com/blogs/asiaview/2010/07/academic_fraud_china">discussing academic fraud in China</a>.<br />
<br />
Being the <span style="font-style: italic;">Economist</span>, it attempts to explain China's fraud epidemic focus on incentives:<br />
<blockquote>
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
China may be susceptible, suggests Dr Cong Cao, a specialist on the sociology of science in China at the State University of New York, because academics expect to advance according to the number, not the quality, of their published works. Thus reward can come without academic rigour. Nor do senior scientists, who are rarely punished for fraud, set a decent example to their juniors.</blockquote>
<blockquote>
</blockquote>
The trouble with this explanation is that these same incentives apply in many -- most -- other countries also. Science everywhere is plagued by the publish-or-perish game and the incentives it generates. Academic careers stand and fall on the basis of publication counts. Some countries at least <span style="font-style: italic;">try</span> to judge quality of output in addition to quantity, but most methods are no more sophisticated than that used by China -- and every method has its incentives for fraud.<br />
<br />
Nor does a lack of disincentives in China explain why they stand out. Fraud is rarely satisfactorily punished anywhere. If it is even discovered at all, the photoshopped figures and made-up numbers become an <span style="font-style: italic;">accident</span>; the original data was <span style="font-style: italic;">lost</span> sometime after that project was completed; the grad student who handled that particular experiment has <span style="font-style: italic;">moved on</span>, and can no longer be contacted. A researcher getting fired for fraud is big news, not because fraud is rare, but because failing to weasel out of an allegation is rare.<br />
<br />
It is my fear that China is perceived as having a higher rate of fraud compared to other countries not because it does, but because Chinese researchers aren't very good at it yet. Their fiddled figures are crude and easily spotted; their fictitious facts are amateur inventions that can not be believed. The worrying thing about these rough and unrefined fabrications is not that they themselves, easily found out and struck from the record, exist. The worrying fact is that they must be the tip of a great iceberg; 99% of the fakes are unseen, produced by forgers skilled enough to mask their work in convincing disguises and cover their tracks perfectly. As science in China matures, and the student to supervisor ratio falls and natural selection picks the cleverest conmen, the epidemic of clumsy and primitive fraud will end. That's when China joins the ranks of countries experiencing advanced and undetectable fraud epidemics.<br />
<br />
Discussing fraud as a symptom of a<span style="font-style: italic;"> Chinese</span> problem -- of a failure of Chinese academic administration or a flaw in the Chinese culture and psyche -- is a nice distraction from the uncomfortable fact that fraud is a symptom of a <span style="font-style: italic;">global</span> problem -- of failing academic administration everywhere. The Chinese copied the publish-or-perish game from the west. Soon they'll get good at it.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5919517653892378810.post-75989964991509125252010-08-10T11:35:00.004+00:002010-08-10T11:42:00.710+00:00New word - evoluating<span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;">"Evoluating". It's probably an attempt to use the French "évoluer" in English, I think it means "evolving".</span>Matt Hodgkinsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02376788922895957748noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5919517653892378810.post-90799863254947103342010-08-06T11:46:00.005+00:002010-08-06T12:18:39.790+00:00The Scientist has an attack of CNS disease<div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-style: italic;font-family:trebuchet ms;" >The Scientist</span><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;"> this week tells us that</span><br /><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;"></span><blockquote><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;">"Peer review isn’t perfect [</span><span style="font-style: italic;font-family:trebuchet ms;" >who knew?</span><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;">]— meet 5 high-impact papers that should have ended up in bigger journals."</span></blockquote><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;">Wait, what? These high-impact papers got those citations <span style="font-style: italic;">despite </span>ending up in "second tier" journals, so I doubt the authors have been crying into their beer about this "injustice". This is an example of </span><a style="font-family: trebuchet ms;" href="http://journalology.blogspot.com/2007/02/cns-disease-or-ney-cher-sahy-uhns-uhnd.html">CNS Disease</a><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;">, a term coined by Harold Varmus to characterise the obsession with </span><span style="font-style: italic;font-family:trebuchet ms;" >Cell</span><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;">, </span><span style="font-style: italic;font-family:trebuchet ms;" >Nature </span><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;">and </span><span style="font-style: italic;font-family:trebuchet ms;" >Science</span><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;">. Not all high-impact papers must published in one of these journals, and not all papers published in these journals will be high impact. Biomedical publishing is not just a game in which editors sort articles by predicted future impact - at least, I hope it's not.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;">Authors chose their publication venue for all sorts of reasons, and it's hard to predict which new work will set the world on fire. Take </span><a style="font-family: trebuchet ms;" href="http://www.nature.com/scitable/topicpage/basic-local-alignment-search-tool-blast-29096">BLAST</a><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;"> - it was a "quick and dirty" algorithm that gave similar results to the Smith and Waterman algorithm only much faster, and the gain in speed came at a loss of accuracy. Only use by scientists in practice could decide whether this was a good approach. Focussing on the umpteen thousand citations to BLAST is missing the point: the important thing about BLAST is the millions or billions of hours of computer time saved by using it. As Joe, the other denizen of Journalology Towers, </span><a style="font-family: trebuchet ms;" href="http://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2010/07/14/post-publication-review/#comment-17308">said recently: </a><blockquote style="font-family: trebuchet ms;">"Lord protect us from the idea that an academic publication might have any value beyond its ability to accumulate citations."</blockquote></div>Matt Hodgkinsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02376788922895957748noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5919517653892378810.post-19782973071984567572010-07-31T14:46:00.005+00:002014-03-31T20:04:16.043+00:00The stuff we didn't have time to blog about in July<span style="font-style: italic;">This is a guest post by </span><a href="http://joe.dunckley.me.uk/" style="font-style: italic;">Joe Dunckley</a><br />
Some old fashioned publishers are <span style="font-style: italic;">still</span> <a href="http://www.nextgov.com/nextgov/ng_20100730_1806.php?oref=topnews">claiming</a> that open-access mandates -- by forcing the publishers to acknowledge that the internet has happened and that this event makes the status quo business model that they cling to wasteful and unsustainable -- will "stifle innovation". In other news, war has been found to be peace and it was discovered that freedom is slavery.<br />
<br />
An unexpected and not entirely welcome <a href="http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?sectioncode=26&storycode=412475&c=2">development</a> in open science: the Information Commissioner -- charged with enforcing the UK's freedom of information act -- has ruled that data collected by a Queen's University Belfast researcher falls under the remit of the act, and the data must now be released. This seems to be something of an accidental victory for open science, though rather unfortunate that it should come about as the result of a stunt by a climate change denier, and not as part of a planned, consensual, and multilateral shift in academic culture. I've yet to see much written on the repercussions of the decision (though I am a little behind on reading).<br />
<br />
WikiReviews? A potentially interesting project for collaborating on "living" review articles, initially on cancer, <a href="http://www.medpagetoday.com/Columns/21107">introduced</a> by George Lundberg.<br />
<br />
Scientists who end up in industry could inadvertently find themselves in trouble when the natural tendency of the scientist to share information for the benefit of mankind conflicts with the natural tendency of big companies to jealously and zealously guard everything they have. In the US, researchers innocently publishing a scientific paper can <a href="http://www.nature.com/news/2010/100728/full/466542b.html">face</a> (at least, the threat of) decades in prison for industrial espionage if they're not very careful.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5919517653892378810.post-81803499440993445272010-07-05T16:28:00.007+00:002010-07-05T17:39:40.195+00:00Elsevier experiments with peer review<span style="font-size:100%;"><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;">Well I never. I've been advocating the adoption of </span><a style="font-family: trebuchet ms;" href="http://journalology.blogspot.com/2007/06/open-peer-review-community-peer-review.html">open peer review and community peer review</a><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;"> for a while now; I didn't expect one of the pioneers of community peer review to be Elsevier, but they've surprised me.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;">On 21 June, they announced a three-month trial of what they are calling </span><a style="font-family: trebuchet ms;" href="http://www.elsevier.com/wps/find/P04.cws_home/peerchoice">PeerChoice</a><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;"> on </span><span style="font-style: italic;font-family:trebuchet ms;" ><a href="http://www.elsevier.com/wps/find/journaldescription.cws_home/505707/description#description">Chemical Physics Letters</a>, </span><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;">which allows potential reviewers to volunteer to review papers. </span><a style="font-family: trebuchet ms;" href="http://openbiomed.info/?p=597">As Ida Sim points out</a><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;">, this doesn't open up peer review in the sense of making it more transparent, but it should help speed up peer review and it might avoid the bias caused by editors selecting from a limited pool of the same 'usual suspect' reviewers.<br /><br />The devil is in the details: who gets to be in the pool of potential reviewers; how will you motivate reviewers to volunteer, when getting reviewers to agree when directly inviting them can be hard enough; will volunteers be vetted for suitability for that article; is this alongside or instead of editorial selection? These question aside, let's hope it's a success.<br /><br />---<br />Edit: There's some answers on the <a href="http://www.elsevier.com/wps/find/P04.cws_home/peerchoice">hidden-away page</a> about PeerChoice - PeerChoice is supplementary to editor-invited reviewers. Registered reviewers will see titles and abstracts and be allowed to download the manuscript if they agree to provide a "timely review." There doesn't appear to be a vetting/vetoing system, but the editor still makes the decision. The trial is on nanostructures and materials; the results might not be applicable outside that very narrow field as scholars in different fields react in very different ways to variations in the peer review process.<br /></span></span>Matt Hodgkinsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02376788922895957748noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5919517653892378810.post-40983500647781317812010-06-09T15:07:00.006+00:002014-03-31T20:04:29.667+00:00Green is no goal<span style="font-style: italic;">This is a guest post by </span><a href="http://joe.dunckley.me.uk/" style="font-style: italic;">Joe Dunckley</a><br />
To achieve a sufficiently large but distant win, it is worth sacrificing a much smaller but nearer win if it stands in the way or distracts and delays the larger achievement. To achieve a small but near win, it is <i>not</i> worth sacrificing a much larger but more distant win. But the difference in magnitude must be sufficiently large, and the difference in distance sufficiently small, to make delaying the gratification really pay off. Speculation and argument over the sizes and distances and relative probabilities of success and incompatibilities of the competing achievements fuel many a political argument.<br />
Like "green" open access.<br />
Green open access is simple: for every scientific journal paper, at least one of the authors must take action to ensure that the paper is freely available to the world online, somehow. They can deposit the text in PubMed central, or put a crude PDF of a draft version on their website. The increasingly preferred method for many advocates of green OA, though, is the institutional repository: each university library manages its own database of affiliated researchers' papers. This will solve <i>the</i> problem: the inability of people to read a paper that they want to read.<br />
A heresy for you: access is not an interesting problem. The stubborn toll access publishers are correct when they say that most people can read most of the papers that they want to read. Yes, it takes emails to the authors, piracy amongst friends, and borrowed passwords, and yes it is a real problem, and no, the toll access publishers do not have any excuse to do nothing about it. But it's not an <i>interesting</i> problem any more. Letting us read a paper for free, without having to log-in or pester the author, once the paper reaches twelve months old, is not a revolution.<br />
There are other similarly dull problems in science and publishing that green OA doesn't address. Like how to save university libraries from the parasitic subscription access publishers that are slowly killing their helpless hosts. Green OA tells parasitic publishers that they can continue draining libraries of their budgets with subscription bundles to poor quality journals that few people want to read, so long as they open access to the papers after twelve months. Now, as libraries face their greatest budget squeezes of the recession, is the perfect time for them to get some guts, speak up, say 'no', and shake off these parasites once and for all, before somebody comes along and hides them behind a bigger and stickier sticking plaster. Students should be rioting at the news that they are expected to do without textbooks and computers because their library has chosen instead to spend the several tens of thousands of pounds on a package of obscure and substandard journals. Instead, we're distracted by green OA, told that it is the one thing that academia desperately needs.<br />
More interesting than these little problems are the opportunities that are currently presented to us: the real revolutions. Open, structured, reusable data has already demonstrated its revolutionary credentials in the field of genomics. Genome data that can be searched and mined by powerful computers and clever algorithms has enabled cheap and easy high-throughput hypothesis testing, and even hypothesis generation: it has led to countless discoveries that weren't on anybody's mind when they set out to collect the data, because the database as a whole is worth far more than the sum of the individual data gathering experiments. There are vast quantities of data in the literature: from microscopy to biogeography, epidemiological trends to drug toxicity. There are great and important discoveries waiting to be made in that data. But they're not being made, because unlike with genomics, no organisation has made the effort to build the database; no campaign group has achieved a mandate that the data be made open and reusable. Instead, the data, where it is available at all, is locked away in non-standard tables within unstructured PDF files, distributed across largely subscription access journals that reserve all rights to reuse.<i>Gold</i> open-access at least, by making literature mining possible, doesn't stifle these new open data opportunities, even if it's not the full solution; green open-access, by focussing on the need for access to <i>human readable literature</i>, distracts us from these possibilities entirely.<br />
Or open notebook science: a model that, by getting scientists to discuss their ideas and publish their experiments in the open in real time, would force a revolution in the way that scientists work, the way that groups compete and collaborate, and the way that careers are evaluated and achievement rewarded; a revolution to the whole rhythm and pace of scientific discovery and the individual scientist's working life. A revolution that rather makes the whole issue of access to journal papers go away altogether.<br />
Green OA advocates argue that open science, open data, and ONS are vague and fantastical distractions from the pressing matter of human access to journal articles; the we shouldn't waste time thinking about the former until we have solved the latter. I believe that green OA is a mundane and increasingly irrelevant distraction from the real problems and opportunities that are available for science to solve and grasp, but for a limited time only. The long-term achievements are too big to risk for the sake of such a small one. <br />
Why spend time designing a better horse shoe when you could be inventing the railway train?<br />
<br />
(Apologies for the unpolished post - this was made from my phone on the side of a Welsh mountain.)Unknownnoreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5919517653892378810.post-61897941299716905692010-06-01T20:48:00.003+00:002014-03-31T20:04:56.932+00:00Literature hacks: PubMed searches by RSS<span style="font-style: italic;">This is a guest post by </span><a href="http://joe.dunckley.me.uk/" style="font-style: italic;">Joe Dunckley</a><br />
There are all sorts of ways you could find out about new articles that you might want to read. There's that big room across campus that's full of old writings on paper, but that's too far away and they have some silly rule about not eating your lunch near their writings on paper, and anyway you're not sure you still have the card that lets you in. You can't trust your colleagues to point out an article that isn't crushingly mediocre, unless it's because it concerns a species or a disease whose name sounds mildly amusingly puerile, but those ones are never actually remotely related to your work. You subscribe to electronic tables of contents, but these days everyone's publishing in PLoS ONE, and you're not wading through <span style="font-style: italic;">their</span> contents every week in the hope of finding the occasional thing that's relevant. You <span style="font-style: italic;">could</span> regularly search PubMed, but that means typing in keywords over and over, and wading through the results asking yourself, "have I seen this paper already, or do I just <span style="font-style: italic;">feel</span> like I've seen this paper already?"<br />
<br />
So you <span style="font-style: italic;">could</span> subscribe to email alerts for your PubMed searches, but my <span style="font-style: italic;">god</span>, man, what the <span style="font-style: italic;">hell</span> do you think you're <span style="font-style: italic;">doing</span>? What, you haven't got enough email already? Make you feel special, having your phone stop you every five minutes with unimportant impersonal notifications? If it's not private, not time-critical, and does not require a reply, it should not be pestering you with an email. That article has taken ten years to get from concept to publication, it can wait a little longer for you to read it -- not that you even <span style="font-style: italic;">read</span> more than one in every twenty of the articles you're alerted to.<br />
<br />
Which is why it should be obvious to any of our readers why they should be using <s><a href="http://www.hubmed.org/">HubMed's</a></s> RSS feeds of PubMed searches, with their <a href="http://www.google.co.uk/reader">Google Reader</a>, to keep up with the literature. New articles will accumulate and be available to scroll through in the sophisticated and cleanly laid out environs of the Google Reader, when it's convenient for you to read them. Reader will tick off items that you've seen and present to you items that you haven't yet seen, without ever screaming "look at me, look at me right now!"<br />
<br />
<span style="font-weight: bold;">Update:</span> Since I originally wrote this, PubMed released their major update, introducing their own implementation of RSS saved searches, which looks at least as good as that of HubMed, and takes less effort to set up -- just click the RSS button next to the search box on the search results page.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5919517653892378810.post-61855695957612462432010-05-19T14:20:00.009+00:002010-05-19T15:58:31.764+00:00"Predatory" open access publishers<span style=";font-family:trebuchet ms;font-size:100%;" >The<span style="font-style: italic;"> Charleston Adviser </span>has published an interesting analysis of some of the recent open access 'upstarts', titled "<a href="http://charleston.publisher.ingentaconnect.com/content/charleston/chadv/2010/00000011/00000004/art00005">“Predatory” Open-Access Scholarly Publishers</a>". They include some that I've noted before such as <a href="http://journalology.blogspot.com/2008/08/short-post-about-bentham-open.html">Bentham Open</a> and <a href="http://journalology.blogspot.com/2008/08/my-view-of-scientific-journals.html">Scientific Journals International</a>.<br /><br />As I would have expected, Libertas Academica and its sister publisher Dove Press do better than the others included in this review, but they are still far from passing with flying colours. The reviewer, Jeffrey Beall of Auraria Library, University of Colorado Denver, places a very clear "author beware" sign on:<br /></span><ul style="font-family:trebuchet ms;"><li><span style="font-size:100%;">Academic Journals</span></li><li><span style="font-size:100%;">Academic Journals</span></li><li><span style="font-size:100%;">ANSINetswork</span></li><li><span style="font-size:100%;">Bentham Open<br /></span></li><li><span style="font-size:100%;">Insight Knowledge</span></li><li><span style="font-size:100%;">Knowledgia Review</span></li><li><span style="font-size:100%;">Science Publications</span></li><li><span style="font-size:100%;">Scientific Journals International</span></li></ul><span style=";font-family:trebuchet ms;font-size:100%;" >Beall's summary is worth repeating:</span><br /><div style="text-align: justify; font-style: italic;"><blockquote style="font-family:trebuchet ms;"><span style="font-size:100%;">"These publishers are predatory because their mission is not to promote, preserve, and make available scholarship; instead, their mission is to exploit the author-pays, Open-Access model for their own profit.<br />They work by spamming scholarly e-mail lists, with calls for papers and invitations to serve on nominal editorial boards. If you subscribe to any professional e-mail lists, you likely have received some of these solicitations. Also, these publishers typically provide little or no peer-review. In fact, in most cases, their peer review process is a façade.<br />None of these publishers mentions digital preservation. Indeed, any of these publishers could disappear at a moment’s notice, resulting in the loss of its content."</span></blockquote></div><span style=";font-family:trebuchet ms;font-size:100%;" >I'd not touch any of them with a bargepole.</span>Matt Hodgkinsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02376788922895957748noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5919517653892378810.post-20942429028278463202010-05-13T15:47:00.003+00:002014-03-31T20:05:17.177+00:00Why you can't copy abstracts into Wikipedia<span style="font-style: italic;">This is a guest post by <a href="http://joe.dunckley.me.uk/">Joe Dunckley</a></span><br />
<span style="font-style: italic;">This is an archival repost of something first published elsewhere a year ago.</span><br />
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I am not a lawyer, but I do have six years experience of Wikipedia, was once a very prolific Wikipedian, and, despite my lack of activity there in more recent years, am apparently still an "admin" on the English language Wikipedia. This, coupled with working for an open-access publisher, means that I have also picked up a little knowledge of (mostly US & UK) copyright over the years. Since I can't boil all that down to just 250 characters (or whatever the limit is), this post serves to answer this question, <a href="http://friendfeed.com/e/4950d465-2b8c-4570-b2aa-85c5317c8952/Does-an-article-in-pubmed-belong-to-the-legal/">raised at FriendFeed</a>: 'Does an article in pubmed belong to the "legal public domain", can I copy and paste it in wikipedia?'<br />
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The answer is 'no'. I don't endorse this position, and I'm not trying to be a killjoy, but it is the correct answer nonetheless. Since there appears to be some confusion over <i>why</i> the answer is 'no', let me explain. First I'll define some terms, then the copyright status of journal abstracts, and finally why the policy of Wikipedia must be to exclude abstracts.<br />
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<b>First the definitions</b>. Don't quote me on these. Like I say, IANAL. These are all just definitions that I have picked up over the years in the context of Wikipedia and open-access. In order of increasing protection of rights:<br />
<ul>
<li>Public domain: completely exempt from all rights given by copyright law. Anyone can reprint it, remix it, and make money selling it, with no obligations.</li>
<li>Public/copyleft licensed, e.g. GFDL, CC-BY: the producer of the work has asserted their ownership and claim their rights, but have voluntarily given everyone in the world permission to do certain things with the work without having to ask first. There are actually several tiers of these licenses.</li>
<li>Copyright: you're not allowed to do anything with the work, unless the copyright owner has said you can.</li>
</ul>
Public domain is not a synonym for "publicly available". Something is not "in the public domain" just because it is on the internet -- indeed, most of the internet is <i>not</i> public domain, it falls in that third category. There is no presumption that you are allowed copy and paste material all over the internets. Perhaps there are corners of the internet where that is de facto the case, and perhaps it would be great if everything <i>was</i> public domain or copyleft, but it's not. Napster was a place where music was de facto public domain, before the recording industry reminded them that the law doesn't work that way. However, there is a fourth area to copyright: fair use.<br />
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Fair use is not a fourth <span style="font-style: italic;">category</span>, like the categories above. Fair use is just a set of exemptions to copyright protections. It allows you to make use of copyrighted material without the owner's permission to do so. However, it is very limited: you may only use a limited amount of the copyright material, and you can only do a limited range of things with it. If you want to use something copyrighted and say that you are doing so under fair use provisions, you have to make the case for your specific creation being fair use of the material. Getting away with claiming fair use for an abstract in PubMed does not mean that you will get away with it for Wikipedia, or some other creation. And the copyright owner is always within their rights to object to your fair use claim.<br />
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<b>The copyright status of journal abstracts</b>. Copyright to most journal abstracts will be owned by the journal's publisher (or society). Copyright to others will be owned by the authors. For open-access papers, the copyright is usually owned by the authors, but the journal has made sure that they have released it under a copyleft license, allowing you to do lots of things with their work. Papers written by employees of US federal agencies in the course of their employment will be public domain, as will very old papers.<br />
<br />
It is true that there is a culture amongst scientists of free movement of published ideas. Copyright is worthless to a scientist, who actively wants his ideas to spread, so long as he is cited and acknowledged. Scientists freely share and reprint things like abstracts.<br />
<br />
Scientists assume that publishers feel the same about all use of "their" material. Note the fierce and desperate opposition some of the traditional publishers raise against the open-access movement, though. Ideas mean different things to a scientist and to a (traditional) publisher. You shouldn't presume that publishers will react in the same laid-back way as scientists do when the words that "belong" to them are used in novel ways.<br />
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Note that PubMed carefully argues the case that its use of abstracts falls under fair use provisions. It doesn't just say "yeah, whatever, everyone freely reproduces abstracts, no one cares."<br />
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<b>Why you can't turn abstracts into Wikipedia articles.</b> Wikipedia can't be laid back about copyright any more than PubMed can. Wikipedia is now, what, a top-ten website by most metrics? People notice things that are put on Wikipedia. If you start putting abstracts on it, somewhere a publisher will notice, not like it, and have the material removed. You <i>could</i> claim fair use, but (and remember, IANAL), I very much doubt you would be successful: an encyclopedia is very different to an index, and in Wikipedia you are remixing the material. Well, whatever. One page gets deleted. No lasting harm done. End of story?<br />
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Not exactly. Wikipedia is GFDL. What you put on Wikipedia gets copied to hundreds of mirrors and put in paper versions. People use it for whatever commercial purposes they want, and it gets remixed to death. It's difficult to undo what goes into Wikipedia. That is why, when you write in Wikipedia, you <i>must</i> declare either that the words are your own, or that they are already released under a compatible copyleft license. You are not just giving permission for your words to be used on Wikipedia, you are giving permission for your words to be reused and remixed for virtually any purpose. This is why Wikipedia has to be pretty careful not to let copyright violations through.<br />
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This is also why Wikipedia does not actually allow any text to be contributed as fair use (except when marked as quotations): the permissions granted by Wikipedia are just too great for the fair use claim to be defensible.<br />
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But can't Wikipedia make an exception for abstracts? Theoretically, perhaps it could be done, but sadly, the reality is 'no'. Wikipedia is too big, too old, too well known, too <i>bureaucratic</i>. Wikipedia's policy on copyrights is well established; it must be generalist, covering all fields and all nations, and it can't afford to be lax. To come up with exceptions to the policy would be too difficult for such a generalist site with such a tiny legal team. The Wikipedians would have to establish beyond doubt that publishers were happy for their abstracts to be used not just on the encyclopedia, but by anyone, anywhere, for virtually any purpose, reprinted and remixed. And that sounds like the open-access movement to me.<br />
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<b>Conclusions</b>. You can't put (non-open access) abstracts on Wikipedia. It would be nice if the gentlemen's agreement whereby publishers overlooked reuse of their material by scientists extended to all spheres, but that ain't necessarily so. Of course, it would great if it were so, and the story is just one of thousands which emphasise the need for a more rational and restricted copyright system.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5919517653892378810.post-64625493605790997822010-05-13T11:10:00.003+00:002010-05-13T11:12:47.933+00:00Amusing typo of the day<span style="font-family: trebuchet ms;">The authors of a manuscript say their work has been approved by an "intuitional review board". I suppose it </span><span style="font-style: italic; font-family: trebuchet ms;">just knows</span><span style="font-family: trebuchet ms;"> when a study is ethical.</span>Matt Hodgkinsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02376788922895957748noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5919517653892378810.post-11417884363766452542010-05-12T17:00:00.003+00:002010-05-12T17:20:31.263+00:00Medical Hypotheses' editor is sacked<span style="font-size:100%;"><span style="font-family: trebuchet ms;">So Bruce Charlton's editorship at </span><span style="font-style: italic; font-family: trebuchet ms;">Medical Hypotheses</span><span style="font-family: trebuchet ms;"> <a href="http://medicalhypotheses.blogspot.com/2010/05/rip-medical-hypotheses.html">comes to an end</a>, and I must raise a small cheer. Schadenfreude is an ugly thing, but this journal was a boon to fringe 'scientists' everywhere, giving them the apparent legitimacy of publishing in a 'proper journal' (owned by Elsevier, indexed in PubMed) without the pesky hurdle of peer review. It was no surprise that it favoured kooks, having been set up by David Horrobin, a pusher of evening primose oil.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family: trebuchet ms;">The final straw was allowing </span><a style="font-family: trebuchet ms;" href="http://www.nature.com/news/2010/100504/full/news.2010.210.html">AIDS denialists</a><span style="font-family: trebuchet ms;"> a platform, and the subsequent outcry from scientists and Charlton's </span><a style="font-family: trebuchet ms;" href="http://www.nature.com/news/2010/100318/full/news.2010.132.html">inability to see what he did wrong</a><span style="font-family: trebuchet ms;"> led Elsevier to pull the plug. Charlton thinks that as an editor he has a perfect right to publish whatever papers he wishes, but unaccountable editorial control is no way to run a journal. Poor editorial decisions should have consequences, and the lack of any peer review or other quality control on </span><span style="font-style: italic; font-family: trebuchet ms;">Medical Hypotheses </span><span style="font-family: trebuchet ms;">(the only criterion being that a paper was 'interesting') always doomed it to be derided by serious scientists and medics.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family: trebuchet ms;">Will the new (and improved?) </span><span style="font-style: italic; font-family: trebuchet ms;">Medical Hypotheses</span><span style="font-family: trebuchet ms;"> see any more gems like </span><a style="font-family: trebuchet ms;" href="http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/articleshow/5483812.cms">too much sex causing RSI, </a><a style="font-family: trebuchet ms;" href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/howaboutthat/6471483/Kissing-was-developed-to-spread-germs.html">kissing evolving to spread germs</a><span style="font-family: trebuchet ms;">, </span><a style="font-family: trebuchet ms;" href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2007/oct/16/highereducation.research1">cancer being caused by stopping smoking</a><span style="font-family: trebuchet ms;">, </span><a style="font-family: trebuchet ms;" href="http://www.topnews.in/masturbation-may-be-best-treatment-nasal-congestion-2145941">masturbation being good for relieving a bunged up nose</a><span style="font-family: trebuchet ms;">, or </span><a style="font-family: trebuchet ms;" href="http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,504067,00.html">the origin of belly button fluff</a><span style="font-family: trebuchet ms;">?</span></span>Matt Hodgkinsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02376788922895957748noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5919517653892378810.post-23083424793894223302010-03-18T22:02:00.002+00:002014-03-31T20:05:38.792+00:00Peer review in the dock<span style="font-style: italic;">This is a guest post by </span><a href="http://joe.dunckley.me.uk/" style="font-style: italic;">Joe Dunckley</a><br />
Academic publishing, and peer review in particular, was headline news in February -- from stem cell researchers <a href="http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn18466-are-stem-cell-scientists-sabotaging-rivals-work.html">claiming </a>that their work was being sabotaged by reviewers with conflicts of interest, to mainstream news <a href="http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/8490481.stm">noticing </a>the absurdity of the impact factor situation. BBC Radio 4 must have decided that now was a good time to air an unedited repeat of 2008's documentary <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00ctk01"><span style="font-style: italic;">Peer Review in the Dock</span></a>. So now certainly seems like a good time to post an unedited repeat of my comments from the time.<br />
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--<br />
<br />
A few thoughts on <span style="font-style: italic;">Peer Review In The Dock</span> (this evening, Radio 4).<br />
<br />
<ol>
<li>Nobody has ever questioned whether peer review is really needed: wrong. A lot of people have questioned this, and many experiments have been tried. The most prominent recent example is probably <span style="font-style: italic;">PLoS ONE</span> (no reference to this in the programme). They very rapidly discovered that, yes, a minimum standard is peer review is required when running a journal. But perhaps moving to a non-review model is like communism: you need to have <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_revolution">world revolution</a> for it to have any chance of working; going it alone will just lead to your own collapse.</li>
<li>Peer-reviewers aren't trained: somewhat misleading. Reviewers, at least in the publishing model that I am familiar with, are actively publishing research scientists of at least medium seniority. Most will, while pursuing their doctorates, have participated in "journal clubs" (where the grad students get together to shred a published paper), and many will also have co-reviewed manuscripts alongside their supervisors (not strictly allowed, but very widespread). What all students certainly are trained to do, even at undergraduate level, is not to take the truth of published work for granted, and to watch for potential flaws. To teach science is to teach scepticism. Which brings me on to the next point...</li>
<li>Reviewers aren't all that great at spotting errors: so what? Academics and publishers know this. The system is <span style="font-style: italic;">designed</span> this way. Review is supposed to be a basic filter for sanity and competence; it is only journalists who hear "peer-reviewed" and think it is the definitive stamp of authenticity. Like democracy and trial-by-jury, it is not used because it works, but because it fails less disastrously than the alternatives. (Incidentally, their example of introducing deliberate errors to a paper and seeing who notices them is not <span style="font-style: italic;">entirely</span> fair: most papers are not only reviewed by the journals reviewers, but by the authors' colleagues before they submit the manuscript, and by editors before review.)</li>
<li>The last part of the programme was devoted to publication bias. Publication bias is a big problem. But it has little, if anything, to do with peer-review, and everything to do with publisher policies and author dishonesty. The only conceivable connection it has with peer-review is that some people still mistakenly believe that negative results aren't worth publishing at all -- something that journals like <a href="http://www.biomedcentral.com/bmcresnotes/"><span style="font-style: italic;">BMC Research Notes</span></a> and <a href="http://www.plosone.org/"><span style="font-style: italic;">PLoS ONE</span></a>, and initiatives like trial registration are explicitly tackling.</li>
</ol>
The programme explored what is an interesting issue in academic publishing at the moment (there are more interesting issues, of course), but, I think, from the wrong perspective. While it discussed many very real problems with the system, these problems are all well known and acknowledged; for decades people have explored solutions, and there are many interesting current developments. The makers of the programme seemed mostly unaware of these.<br />
<br />
This is, of course, the limitation of having a half-hour national radio programme about a topic like academic publishing.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5919517653892378810.post-70778208793594460602010-03-03T21:08:00.005+00:002010-03-03T21:43:12.020+00:00Peter Suber's open access word contest<span style="font-family: trebuchet ms;font-size:100%;" ><a href="http://www.earlham.edu/%7Epeters/hometoc.htm">Peter Suber</a>, the guru of open access, has challenged readers of the <a href="http://www.earlham.edu/%7Epeters/fos/newsletter/archive.htm">SPARC Open Access Newsletter</a> to come up with a new word.<br /></span><div style="font-family: trebuchet ms;font-family:trebuchet ms;" ><span style="font-size:100%;"><span><blockquote style="font-style: italic;">English speakers need a verb that means "to provide OA to". It should be as succinct as "sell" for use in sentences such as, "We sell the print edition but ____ the digital edition."</blockquote>Oh, the joys of <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conversion_%28linguistics%29">verbing</a> a noun. Here are my entries:<br /></span></span></div> <ul style="font-family: trebuchet ms;font-family:trebuchet ms;" ><li><span style="font-weight: bold;font-size:100%;" ><span>"Openpublished"; "t</span></span><span style="font-size:100%;"><span><span style="font-weight: bold;">o openpublish" </span>(or "open-published", "to open-publish"). </span></span><span style="font-size:100%;"><span>Apparently there is already a meaning of "<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_publishing">open publishing</a>", which is to make the process of publishing transparent (<a href="http://journalology.blogspot.com/2007/06/open-peer-review-community-peer-review.html">open peer review</a> would be an aspect of this, as well as <a href="http://www.indymedia.org.uk/">Indymedia</a> and <a href="http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Main_Page">Wikinews</a>), but I think the term is little used.</span></span></li><li><span style="font-size:100%;"><span><span style="font-weight: bold;">"Commoned"; "to common"</span>. Meaning "to place into the commons", as most OA publishing uses the <a href="http://creativecommons.org/">Creative Commons</a> licenses.</span></span></li><li><span style="font-size:100%;"><span><span style="font-weight: bold;">"Publicked"; "to publick"</span>. Meaning "to make public". It's an archaic word, used by Joyce in Finnegan's Wake, sometimes meaning "published", sometimes meaning "populated", and recently resurfacing to mean making a private message public.<br /></span></span></li><li><span style="font-size:100%;"><span><span style="font-weight: bold;">"Freeshared"; "to freeshare" </span>(echoing freeware and shareware). This term is already a synonym for freecycling, and for a defunct image upload site. </span><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhLYiQ43oZR_eV8PpPiQg7_t55ITfUUIUIwze-a33ibZJFXEpj7C_cyYYryjrepe0rDZsGPSl1Cd_JDIZcdxa_-abRfILeK2utlVdCiBByXOuoWu3r2YXHxMvA3ArKDeiY6x5Up0cxczkYM/s1600-h/openshareicon-64x64.png"><img style="margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px; float: right; cursor: pointer; width: 64px; height: 64px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhLYiQ43oZR_eV8PpPiQg7_t55ITfUUIUIwze-a33ibZJFXEpj7C_cyYYryjrepe0rDZsGPSl1Cd_JDIZcdxa_-abRfILeK2utlVdCiBByXOuoWu3r2YXHxMvA3ArKDeiY6x5Up0cxczkYM/s200/openshareicon-64x64.png" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5444523158841684130" border="0" /></a></span></li><li><span style="font-size:100%;"><span><span style="font-weight: bold;">"Openshared"; "to openshare"</span> (echoing open source and shareware). This term is already used for an <a href="http://www.openshareicons.com/">icon</a> that represents the open sharing of content - an icon that could be adopted by the open access movement.<br /></span></span></li><li><span style="font-size:100%;"><span><span style="font-weight: bold;">"Copylefted"; "to copyleft".</span> Using the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyleft">existing term</a>, which refers to Creative Commons and GNU GPL licenses among others.<br /></span></span></li><li><span style="font-size:100%;"><span><span>Referring to <a href="http://journalology.blogspot.com/2008/08/defining-open-access-gratis-vs-libre.html">libre and gratis</a>: <span style="font-weight: bold;">"Libred"; "to libre"</span>. <span style="font-weight: bold;">"Gratised"; "to gratis"</span>.</span></span></span></li></ul><span style="font-family: trebuchet ms;font-family:trebuchet ms;font-size:100%;" >Can you do better? Seize the glory by emailing Peter.</span><br /><br /><span style=";font-family:trebuchet ms;font-size:78%;" ><span style="font-style: italic;">The Open Share icon is under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License from http://www.openshareicons.com/.</span></span>Matt Hodgkinsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02376788922895957748noreply@blogger.com0