John Bohannon’s Peer-Review Sting Against Science

An extraordinary study has come to light today, showing just how shoddy peer-review standards are at some journals.

Evidently fascinated by Science‘s eagerness to publish the fatally flawed Arsenic Life paper, John Bohannon conceived the idea of constructing a study so incredibly flawed that it didn’t even include a control. His plan was to see whether he could get it past the notoriously lax Science peer-review provided it appealed strongly enough to that journal’s desire for “impact” (designed as the ability to generate headlines) and pandered to its preconceptions (that its own publication model is the best one).

So Bohannon carried out the most flawed study he could imagine: submitting fake papers to open-access journals selected in part from Jeffrey Beall’s list of predatory publishers without sending any of his fake papers to subscription journals, noting that many of the journals accepted the papers, and drawing the flagrantly unsupported conclusion that open-access publishing is flawed.