Open Access News

News from the open access movement


Friday, June 12, 2009

Bentham editors resign

Bob Grant, Editors quit after fake paper flap, The Scientist, June 11, 2009.  Excerpt:

The editor-in-chief of an open access journal has stepped down from his post after learning that the journal accepted a fake, computer-generated article for publication. So has an editorial advisory board member of a second journal published by the same company, Bentham Science Publishers.

Bambang Parmanto, a University of Pittsburgh information scientist, resigned from his editorship at The Open Information Science Journal (TOISCIJ) after reading a story on The Scientist's website yesterday (June 10) that described a hoax paper submission to the journal. Editors at journal claimed to have peer reviewed the article and slated it for publication pending the submission of $800 in "open access fees."

"I didn't like what happened," Parmanto told The Scientist. "If this is true, I don't have full control of the content that is accepted to this journal." Parmanto said that he had never seen the phony manuscript that was accepted by TOISCIJ. "I want to lessen my exposure to the risk of being taken advantage of." ...

Parmanto did add, however, that the perpetrators of the hoax -- Cornell grad student Philip Davis and Kent Anderson, executive director of international business and product development at the New England Journal of Medicine -- were also guilty of some degree of unethical behavior. "This is a process based on trust," he said. "An author should submit something legitimate, and the process on the review side should decide if a paper is worth publishing or not. In this case, the process was broken on both sides."

Parmanto isn't the only one to react to the news of Bentham's ignominy by terminating his association with the publisher. Marc Williams, an immunologist and stem cell researcher at the University of Rochester School of Medicine & Dentistry who served on the editorial advisory board of The Open Stem Cell Journal (OSCJ), another Bentham publication, resigned as well. After reading the story of Davis and Kent's "little experiment" yesterday, Williams "immediately requested my name to be removed from the journal's editorial board."

"What upset me was the fact that this happened at all, in any of [Bentham's] journals," Williams told The Scientist. "It really informs us that it may be a company policy that this is permitted in general."

Williams, who had served on the OSCJ editorial advisory board since the journal's inception last year, said that in his 15 or 16 months on the job he has not reviewed a single manuscript submitted for publication, though the journal has only published one volume containing five articles since its inception.

Both Parmanto and Williams said that they support the idea of open access journals. "The open access system is definitely the way forward," said Williams. "At face value, it is an extremely valuable way of making scientific data widely available."

But Parmanto, though he said that he "believes in the open access system," noted that the business model of charging authors fees to publish in OA journals might become problematic. "I see that [Bentham would] have the incentive to maintain the credibility of the journal, but I also see the potential for abuse." ...

Comments

  • In April, Marie-Paule Pileni, editor in chief of Bentham's Open Chemical Physics Journal, resigned when the journal published a 9/11 conspiracy-theory paper without her knowledge or approval.  Now Parmanto is saying that he never saw the nonsense submission and doesn't have full control of what the journal accepts.  It's time for Bentham to explain how peer review works or is supposed to work at Bentham journals.
  • I applaud Marc Williams for asking Bentham to remove his name from the editorial board of Bentham's Open Stem Cell Journal.  This is a more effective way to get the company's attention than is available to most of us on the outside.
  • Also see my original post on the Bentham affair.  I've been adding updates on new comments and developments.  For more coverage, see the items tagged oa.bentham for the OA tracking project