[Insight-users] OPEN ACCESS: "Is this the end of the scholarly journal? "

[Luis Ibanez]

http://www.usatoday.com/tech/science/2007-01-24-scholarly-journals_x.htm


For years, traditional "peer review" has come under fire. A jury of
three experts, the peer reviewers, assess each article and recommend
only those that they feel represent the most significant new work. At
many elite scientific journals, fewer than 10% of the articles submitted
are accepted. Many of the rejected articles eventually travel down the
"food chain" to be published in a plethora of less prestigious (and less
noticed) specialty journals.

A year ago, the respected U.S. journal Science was forced to retract two
papers it had published about stem cells. The articles had been
submitted by a South Korean team led by Hwang Woo-Suk. Peer reviewers,
as well as the editors, had failed to detect the fraud.

In general, peer reviewers, themselves researchers pressed for time,
don't try to re-create experiments and rarely ask to see the raw data
that supports a paper's conclusions. While peer review is expected to
separate the wheat from the chaff, it's "slow, expensive, profligate of
academic time, highly subjective, prone to bias, easily abused, poor at
detecting gross defects, and almost useless for detecting fraud," summed
up one critic in BMJ, the British medical journal, in 1997.

"There's a lot of discussion [in the scientific community] about how
peer review doesn't work," Mr. Surridge says. "It's not a great way to
decide [what to publish]. It's just the only way we have at the moment."

PLoS ONE takes a different tack. While articles receive a basic
screening, they don't have to attain the standard of representing
groundbreaking work in order to be published. An article only has to be
based on solid science. The idea is that the more valid research is
published, the better, as it contributes to an online database.

"If it is science, [if] it is well done, [and if] it provides a valuable
contribution to scientific literature, we can publish it," Surridge
says. He expects about two-thirds of those papers submitted to PLoS ONE
to be accepted.

Since its launch Dec. 20, PLoS ONE has published well over 100 papers
and expects to publish 15 to 20 more per week. Readers access the
articles for free. PLoS ONE pays its way by charging authors $1,250 to
publish an article. While that might seem a barrier to publication,
Surridge says most research is financed by grants or large institutions,
meaning individual scientists rarely have to pay themselves. But just in
case, PLoS ONE is waiving the fee for any authors who request it.