Why you can't copy abstracts into Wikipedia

This is a guest post by Joe Dunckley
This is an archival repost of something first published elsewhere a year ago.

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, raised at FriendFeed: 'Does an article in pubmed belong to the "legal public domain", can I copy and paste it in wikipedia?'

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 why 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.

First the definitions. 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:

• 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.
• 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.
• Copyright: you're not allowed to do anything with the work, unless the copyright owner has said you can.

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 not 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 was 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.

Fair use is not a fourth category, 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.

The copyright status of journal abstracts. 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.

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.

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.

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."

Why you can't turn abstracts into Wikipedia articles. 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 could 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?

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 must 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.

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.

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 bureaucratic. 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.

Conclusions. 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.

Amusing typo of the day

The authors of a manuscript say their work has been approved by an "intuitional review board". I suppose it just knows when a study is ethical.

Medical Hypotheses' editor is sacked

So Bruce Charlton's editorship at Medical Hypotheses comes to an end, 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.

The final straw was allowing AIDS denialists a platform, and the subsequent outcry from scientists and Charlton's inability to see what he did wrong 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 Medical Hypotheses (the only criterion being that a paper was 'interesting') always doomed it to be derided by serious scientists and medics.

Will the new (and improved?) Medical Hypotheses see any more gems like too much sex causing RSI, kissing evolving to spread germs, cancer being caused by stopping smoking, masturbation being good for relieving a bunged up nose, or the origin of belly button fluff?

Peer review in the dock

This is a guest post by Joe Dunckley
Academic publishing, and peer review in particular, was headline news in February -- from stem cell researchers claiming that their work was being sabotaged by reviewers with conflicts of interest, to mainstream news noticing 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 Peer Review in the Dock. So now certainly seems like a good time to post an unedited repeat of my comments from the time.

--

A few thoughts on Peer Review In The Dock (this evening, Radio 4).

1. 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 PLoS ONE (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 world revolution for it to have any chance of working; going it alone will just lead to your own collapse.
2. 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...
3. Reviewers aren't all that great at spotting errors: so what? Academics and publishers know this. The system is designed 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 entirely 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.)
4. 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 BMC Research Notes and PLoS ONE, and initiatives like trial registration are explicitly tackling.

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.

This is, of course, the limitation of having a half-hour national radio programme about a topic like academic publishing.

Peter Suber's open access word contest

Peter Suber, the guru of open access, has challenged readers of the SPARC Open Access Newsletter to come up with a new word.

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."

Oh, the joys of verbing a noun. Here are my entries:

• "Openpublished"; "to openpublish" (or "open-published", "to open-publish"). Apparently there is already a meaning of "open publishing", which is to make the process of publishing transparent (open peer review would be an aspect of this, as well as Indymedia and Wikinews), but I think the term is little used.
• "Commoned"; "to common". Meaning "to place into the commons", as most OA publishing uses the Creative Commons licenses.
• "Publicked"; "to publick". 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.
  
• "Freeshared"; "to freeshare" (echoing freeware and shareware). This term is already a synonym for freecycling, and for a defunct image upload site.
• "Openshared"; "to openshare" (echoing open source and shareware). This term is already used for an icon that represents the open sharing of content - an icon that could be adopted by the open access movement.
  
• "Copylefted"; "to copyleft". Using the existing term, which refers to Creative Commons and GNU GPL licenses among others.
  
• Referring to libre and gratis: "Libred"; "to libre". "Gratised"; "to gratis".

Can you do better? Seize the glory by emailing Peter.

The Open Share icon is under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License from http://www.openshareicons.com/.

Article-level metrics

This is a guest post by Joe Dunckley
Guys, are you sure you've thought this through? I mean, they're nice. They're fun. Data is fun. Seeing that somebody somewhere has read something you've written is satisfying and reassuring. It's good to know that you've sparked a conversation, and gotten people recommending you to their friends. But you think that it can't possibly go wrong? You think we should roll it out as the universal metric right now, and sort out the details later?

The impact factor is just data. It's nice for a publisher to know that people are reading the papers that they publish, and that all their hard work is having some effect. I can't believe that it would ever have been intended that such an absurd situation as the current practice of making and breaking careers according to a journal citation index should have arisen. Give out article-level metrics and they're soon going to stop being a bit of fun. People are going to use them and abuse them. It's what people do with data.

If you're going to reduce somebody's life's work to a number, it would certainly be less absurd to pick a number that is in some way relevant to that work, rather than relevant to the work that a whole bunch of other people did several years earlier. But only a little bit. What are article-level metrics representing? The quality of the work, or the controversy you've stirred up? The web-savviness of the field? The number of friends you have? There is already huge variation between the kinds of impact factors that medical journals get compared to, say, the sort that ecology journals get. What if, at the article level, breast cancer turns out to be inherently more comment-worthy than bowel cancer? If tenure and funding committees are willing to use something as absurd as an impact factor when making a decision, do you think that they're going to give a damn about the inherent variation in readership between fields? All those bowel cancer researchers better start reading up on their breast cancers now.

But what happens when article-level metrics really start to mean something? Give a large enough number of people an incentive to cheat and some of them are going to cheat. Remember when the World Journal of Gastroenterology boosted its impact factor with a little citation loading? How are you going to stop academics from doing what flickr users do to get themselves into the site's front-page "Explore" section for the day's best photos -- posting their stuff to "I'll leave an inane comment on yours if you leave an inane comment on mine" groups? What happens when academics spend ever increasing hours marketing their work to each other? How long is it going to be before journals and universities are competing for researchers by advertising how good their average article-level metrics are? Before journals and universities open departments dedicated to pressuring people into reading and commenting and blogging their articles?

What happens when pharmaceutical companies get in on the act? What about the ideas that get ignored for ten years, before it becomes apparent how important they are -- do the metrics count for the original paper, or for the review article that reignites the interest? What about the assholes, the trolls, the groupthink...?

Article-level metrics are a bit of fun. It's possible for them to remain a bit of fun. But it's going to take a lot of forethought and vigilance to make sure that is so.

Literature hack: context search

This is a guest post by Joe Dunckley
Ryan Gregory has just started a new blog: Hackademe. It's a Lifehacker for academics, sharing his tips for scientists who are struggling to cope with all the shiny distractions around them. Here at Journalology towers, we have a whole bunch of these hacks lying around, and I hope we won't be treading on Ryan's toes if we share some of our literature searching and managing tips. (Though Ryan has already discussed reference manager software on his day old blog, so perhaps he has this one covered...)

A very simple one to get us started, then: install context search. Firefox comes with a built-in right-click tool for easy searching of Google for the text on the page that you have highlighted. Context search replaces that search Google tool with a search any-number-of-search-engines tool.

You can add all your own favourite search engines to the menu: just go to the search engine website and use the drop menu in the toolbar search box.

Now you can run through PubMed every unfamiliar gene, disease or researcher you stumble upon while reading, with three easy clicks and no typing. (Warning: novices may find themselves up at two in the morning having followed a long chain of context searches from cell signalling pathways to YouTube videos of snow ploughs on speeding trains.)

Dudes, I don't know how you coped in the olden days of typing your search terms into PubMed, and yet people seriously try to tell me that mankind once worked with "card catalogues" and "interlibrary loan". I'm not buying it, you guys.

A piece of peer review history

This is a guest post by Joe Dunckley
I love browsing PubMed Central. How about this, from May 1985. The paper, Exaggerated responsiveness to thyrotrophin releasing hormone: a risk factor in women with coronary artery disease, by Fowler and Dean in the BMJ, is not in itself a work of unusual historical significance. But the associated sections in the document could be: is this where open peer-review began?

In a comment posted letter published the day after I was born, Thomas Walever said:

SIR,-I congratulate you on your publication of the paper by Drs J W Dean and P W B Fowler (25 May, p 1555) complete with the referees' comments and authors' replies. This correspondence indeed illustrates some of the problems with the peer review system. It was a help to know that others have had some of the same problems that we have had as authors. While comments made by referees are often helpful, it is indeed distressing when one does not agree with the criticism of the methods. This is especially true, it seems, for statistical matters; and this was well illustrated here. It has even happened that a major criticism was that something was not done which in fact had been done and was clearly stated to be so in the manuscript.

As a suggestion, perhaps matters might be improved if we had to sign our names to our reviews. There would be many problems with this, but the comments made to the authors would probably be more careful, considerate, and constructive. Some journals already suggest this as an option; perhaps the practice should be encouraged?

Twenty-five years on, and we do not have universal open peer-review. Further experiments have been conducted, though, led by the BMJ, which now uses signed reviews (but, so far as I can tell, does not publish the reviewer reports). In 1999, a blinded trial of open review by the BMJ editors found that open review didn't really make a difference to the quality of reports, and probably lengthened the time taken for review. Editor Richard Smith, campaigner for open-science and publishing reform, stubbornly decided to adopt it anyway, citing ethical reasons: you can not be tried by an anonymous judge. (In his editorial, Smith also declares his intentions to publish reports alongside the accepted papers, and introduce live community review, neither of which have come to fruition, so far as I can see.)

Other trials have had more positive findings regarding benefits of open review, such as more thorough reports, but the utilitarian merits of open review remain contested. This Nature Neruoscience editorial from 1999 complained (without evidence) that open review is likely to lead to "bland" and "timid" reviews, in which technical deficiencies are identified, but no comment is made regarding the interest level of a paper. If true, this would, of course, be a problem for high-end journals like Nature Neuroscience which select on the basis of interest level.

It's nearly ten years since the BMJ's switch to open review, and, so far as I know, the the model is still restricted to just a minority of medical journals and hardly any journals in other fields. The BMJ's initial hope to publish reviewer reports seems to have been forgotten. Open peer review seems to be just another area where publishers are still looking at new technology and discussing where they want to go, when everyone on the internet is asking "are you guys coming, or what?"

This is an edited re-post of something previously posted on cotch dot net.

Fraud epidemic in China?

This is a guest post by Joe Dunckley
Last week's Nature included a news feature on scientific misconduct in China which contained the extraordinary (but not unbelievable) claim that a third of all researchers at "top institutions" in China admitted to plagiarism, falsification, or fabrication. The feature contains the extreme example of the systematic fabrication of crystal structures, but one would hope that the majority of the confessions of misconduct represent no more than the borrowing of a few paragraphs by those for whom English is not a first language (a crime, but not a hanging offence). But every publisher has its examples of photoshopped figures and impossible datasets, and it's hard to deny that certain countries pop up more often than others.
The fun part of the article, though, is the comments thread, which is full of readers' speculating about why China should have such a high-rate of misconduct. A drive for quick success and control of the sector by short-sighted bureaucrats with no actual understanding of science are suggested. A rapid expansion of science with a bottom-heavy hierarchy and insufficient supervision, or else the fierce competition and pressure in a publish-or-perish world. Perhaps it's just in the nature of communist societies? Even the impact factor is cited as a contributory cause, and the blame somehow shifted onto the publishers.
Nobody seems to consider the simple possibility that researchers from other countries might have access to better tools for disguising their fraud.

Reviewing Medical Hypotheses

This is a guest post by Joe Dunckley
Zoë Corbyn writes in the Times Higher this week that Elsevier have "started an internal review" of legendary journal Medical Hypotheses following its publication last year of two hiv/aids denialism papers (covered in Bad Science here and Respectful Insolence here). One of the offending papers, lead-authored by notorious aids denialist Peter Duesberg, took an entire two days from submission to acceptance by the peer review shunning "journal", and had already been rejected from all of the real hiv/aids journals for making such embarrassing claims as that Uganda's population increase proves that hiv can not cause aids.

It would be a shame to loose the journal that gave us Ejaculation as a potential treatment of nasal congestion in mature males and the equally entertaining response, Ejaculation as a treatment for nasal congestion in men is inconvenient, unreliable and potentially hazardous, but at the same time, we have to consider whether we are really comfortable continuing to humour the confused outbursts of Bruce Charlton.

It's interesting to note that the best defence for the journal's existence that Corbyn could find was this: "while peer review worked for 'normal science', it also had the power to suppress radical ideas." The defence comes from intelligent design creationist Steve Fuller, whose ideas I don't think even Med Hypotheses sunk as low as publishing.

Hello!

This is a guest post by Joe Dunckley
I am Joe. You might remember me from such websites as cotch dot net, friendfeed, and twitter. I work for a STM publishing company, formerly editing molecular biology journals, but now helping them develop their web publishing technology. I will be posting my ill-considered thoughts about science publishing alongside Matt's on Journalology, so that I don't have to bore the readers of my real blog with them. Do follow my vanity site for updates on all my other blogging.

Defining Open Access: Gratis vs Libre

Peter Suber and Steven Harnad have introduced two new terms into the Open Access lexicon: gratis and libre.

I'll let Peter explain:

"When the Bethesda and Berlin statements came out (June and October 2003) they followed the Budapest statement in calling for the removal of both price and permission barriers. As a result, all three components of the Budapest-Bethesda-Berlin (BBB) definition of OA now call for both sorts of free online access.

But unfortunately we still don't have widely accepted terms for the two sorts of free online access: (1) the kind which removes price barriers alone and (2) the kind which removes price barriers and at least some permission barriers. This gap in our vocabulary has caused confusion and conflicts, not least because it created pressure to use the term "open access" for each. For now, my choice is to use "gratis" and "libre". They are accurate, neutral, and descriptive. In the neighboring domain of free and open source software, they exactly express the distinction I have in mind".

Gratis is cost free
It means free to read.

Libre is cost free & permission free
It means free to use.

Heather Morrison is a fan of these new terms, and I think they are going to catch on (although some are confused). I do still think that 'real' open access is more than just giving it away for free - permission barriers matter, and others like Jim Till agree. That the initial suggestions for gratis and libre were 'weak OA' and 'strong OA' speaks volumes.

A short post about Bentham Open

I've had my eye on Bentham Open since before various bloggers, Peter Suber and Richard Poynder raised concerns about their email marketing and the recruitment of their editorial boards.

When they launched they copied some of their instructions for authors verbatim from the BMC-series journals, but the below really took the biscuit. Spot the difference. They stopped using that logo pretty sharpish; I think someone put a shot across their bows...

My view of Scientific Journals International

Richard Poynder, Gunther Eysenbach and others have been investigating the practices of some of the new Open Access publishers, such as Bentham Open, Libertas Academica and Scientific Journals International (SJI). The fear is that an unscrupulous publisher might look on Open Access as a way to make a fast buck (in a "Gold Rush"), hoping to take advantage of the goodwill that many researchers have towards Open Access journals. There's a fine line between being a respectable Open Access publisher and a vanity publisher, and that line is held by rigorous peer review and good editorial processes. Quite rightly, a spotlight is being shone on the way that publishers are marketing themselves, recruiting editorial board members and conducting peer review. BioMed Central has faced similar scrutiny, and has weathered it.

Richard Poynder is a well-respected freelance journalist with an interest in the Open Access movement. He is known for his incisive interviews, and he has recently been asking whether anyone knows about SJI. His questions were prompted by researchers wondering about SJI:

"What kind of quality can I expect from a journal titled “Journal of Electronic Book”? Not to be too harsh, but it might be grouped with another journal such as “Journal of Gooder Grammar”."

"Nowhere on the website could I find any indication of who is actually behind these journals"

"SJI sometimes speaks of itself as a publisher of journals (plural) and sometimes of one multi-disciplinary journal (singular)."

"The fact that some of the lead authors of articles are using lycos and aol as email addresses really raises alarms"

In response, Zinath Rehana, co-founder of SJI, sent a lengthy post to the SPARC Open Access Forum, threatening to sue Richard Poynder and others for libel. This response is not very measured.

"Dr. Niaz [the founder of SJI] is also well aware of the realities of prejudice and racism, and knows how to deal with them with legal actions"

"Why is there such hostility toward an Asian American immigrant of 25 years?".

To bring the issue of race into this as Zinath Rehana has done is uncalled for. Dr Niaz's institution, St. Cloud State University, may have problems with racism but that does not mean that it is lurking around every corner. I see no reason to believe that Richard Poynder is motivated by racism. The further implication that Richard Poynder is in some way anti-Open Access is simply incorrect. I believe that Zinath Rehana was mistaken if she was hoping to garner support in the Open Access movement with her post to SOAF. Dorothea Salo isn't impressed, for starters. I think that it is best to answer legitimate concerns with openness rather than threats of legal action.

Zinath Rehana calls on other Open Access publishers for help against unfair criticism, but then goes on to criticise BioMed Central and PLoS for being unsustainable and profligate. The picture she paints of BioMed Central is not one I recognise - we're getting more submissions than ever, and rumour has it that we're 'in the black'. SJI claims that article processing charges are not scalable, when that's exactly what they are. Zinath Rehana also neglects to mention the waiver schemes operated by PLoS and BioMed Central for authors who have difficulty paying. I don't think that criticising PLoS and BioMed Central is the best way to make friends in the Open Access movement.

While biomedical publishing is edging towards being open, SJI may be going the other way.

"We employ an innovative quadruple-blind review system, where the referees, authors and editors remain anonymous throughout the peer-review process. Names of the chief editor or associate editors are not published on SJI Web site. Authors or reviewers cannot contact the editors to influence the review process deliberately or unintentionally"

Quadruple blind? Does this mean that there is no editorial accountability? I believe that it is essential that people know who runs a journal, but authors and readers seem to have to take the editorial processes at SJI on trust.

The payment model of SJI is unusual. They charge article processing charges, but ask for more money the more authors there are. Articles do not cost more to process if they have more authors. This payment model might lead to authors being unfairly left off papers to save a group money. If authors do pay the fee it may be a canny move by SJI because the number of authors on scientific articles increases year by year.

There is an impressively long list of journals, but many are "Coming soon..." when you follow the links. How many active journals are there? There is an Editorial Board, but this spans across all the journals. The journals have no scopes to my knowledge, no information on indexing, and I can find no information on the license under which the articles are published.

Importantly, there is no official information available on how peer review is conducted: who selects reviewers, who makes editorial decisions, how many reviewers are used, what are the editorial policies and standards? The only information we have about the peer review at SJI is from an anonymous comment on the Open Access blog. I hope that this is not an accurate or representative depiction. If it is, I would advise those running SJI to read and adopt the policies of the World Association of Medical Editors.

We need answers, not legal action.

This post is my opinion, and not that of BioMed Central

[Post edited 22/8/08 - I had not realised that Zinath Rehana is female]