Science journalism by Leonid Schneider, on research integrity and academic publishing in life sciences and biomedicine
A new Open Letter against Plan S appeared on the internet. Presently over 600 scientists are protesting against what they see as a bit totalitarian Open Access initiative by Robert-Jan Smits and his partners from Science Europe. Among the Open Letter signatories are many early career researchers and tenured academics, including two Nobelists.
Research by German journalists revealed whole lists of German academics engaging in predatory publishing and scamferences. Named on over 60 predatory conference papers is Bernd Scholz-Reiter, Rector of the University of Bremen and former Vice-President of DFG. Several such papers are even self-plagiarised, and were used in DFG project reports and Scholz-Reiter’s rectorship application from 2011
I obtained a near-verbatim transcript of a video-conference Plan S architects Robert-Jan Smits and Science Europe president Marc Schiltz had on October 19th with Lynn Kamerin and other authors of the Appeal. It appears that Smits and Schiltz see the scientists and their scholarly societies as the reactionary elements blocking the road to the universal Open Access (OA).
This is Appeal by several European scientists protesting against Plan S, recently revealed by the EU and a coalition of European research funders. Lynn Kamerlin and her coauthors worry that Plan S will deprive them of quality journal venues and of international collaborative opportunities, while disadvantaging scientists whose research budgets preclude paying and playing in this OA league. They offer instead their own suggestions how to implement Open Science.
Frontiers describes itself as “a community-rooted, open-access academic publisher”, and boasts a ~71,000 head strong “virtual editorial office”. This guest post by Regina-Michaela Wittich, a former senior editor of a Frontiers journal, narrates how she was sacked by Frontiers because she rejected too many papers for being of insufficient scientific quality, instead of sending them into the “rigorous” Frontiers peer review process
It is now quasi official: do not mess with Frontiers. My earlier reporting made it a credible possibility that thisContinue Reading
The Swiss publishing business Frontiers was placed by the US librarian Jeffrey Beall on his well-known and hotly disputed listContinue Reading
Journal peer review is a mysterious black box all scientists fear. The task of the reviewers is to help authorsContinue Reading
The British research funder Wellcome Trust (now just Wellcome) is about to launch its own journal, where the funding recipients and theirContinue Reading
There are papers which contain image duplications. There are papers which contain outrageous image duplications, which can only be explainedContinue Reading
