Miles, the central protagonist in the movie “Sideways,” is a writer who is down to his last gasp at publishing fame. When he receives the bad news that his masterpiece has been finally and irretrievably rejected, he drinks the spittoon at the winery where he is exercising his remarkably sensitive palate. Not all writers take such desperate measures after their work has been rejected. Indeed, a segment of the publishing industry, the “vanity press,” will publish any work for a fee, and some of these publishing houses will even market the work for the author. Unfortunately, according to my friends in the publishing industry, as publishers are increasingly languishing in the economic doldrums, we may soon be left with fewer outlets for reviewed and accepted work, and a greater proportion of fiction as well as nonfiction will be published only on a fee-for-service basis.
In contrast, when a scientist or medical investigator submits work to a scholarly journal, the manuscript is reviewed by experts in the field (peers) before acceptance (or rejection) for publication. Although medical and scientific societies, such as the ACR, publish journals on a nonprofit basis, there is a thriving for-profit publishing sector that also publishes peer-reviewed work. The Nature Group, Elsevier, Springer, and others all publish well-respected medical and scientific journals that are profitable. The business model to date has been to charge author(s) a fee to cover expenses and pay for reprints or other related costs, while the bulk of the revenue and profits are derived from subscriptions. If you have spoken with the librarian at your institution, you will understand that these subscriptions are quite expensive. Access to many of these journals is limited, and unaffiliated members of the public or physicians and scientists without access to a large library frequently have a great deal of difficulty even reading articles published in these journals without making some sort of payment.
In the open access paradigm, there is no cost for access to publications over the Web, and the revenues to support peer review and other costs, as well as profits, are derived from fees (quite hefty at times) paid by the authors.
Open Access Publishing
More recently, online, open access publishing is gaining acceptance in the medical and scientific community. In the open access paradigm, there is no cost for access to publications over the Web, and the revenues to support peer review and other costs, as well as profits, are derived from fees (quite hefty at times) paid by the authors. This business model satisfies our growing expectation that everything we want on the Web is free and provides the public with direct access to this work.
Like all human endeavors, open access publication of scientific work is open to abuse, and recent events suggest that at least a segment of the open access medical and scientific publishing world may also be functioning as a vanity press. According to a story in The Scientist, a pair of “investigators” submitted a fake paper containing nonsense generated by computer to The Open Information Science Journal.1 The “authors” were promptly sent a notice that the manuscript had been reviewed and was now acceptable for publication, along with a bill for $800. Although this sum is only a quarter of the bill I recently paid for publication in a different open access journal (Journal of Clinical Investigation), it highlights the potential for unscrupulous operators in this new and growing field of technical publishing.
One of the troubling aspects of this scandal, however, is the role played by an employee of a large and prestigious medical journal. The individuals who exposed the online publishing scam included a postdoctoral fellow and another individual who was described as the “executive director of international business and product development at the New England Journal of Medicine.” Although it is unlikely that the New England Journal of Medicine, a publishing behemoth, really saw The Open Information Science Journal as a major competitor for ad revenue or readers, the involvement of an employee of a potential competitor in this expose casts a shadow on this undercover investigation.
What if a more credible sounding article (with faked data) was submitted by these investigators to a competing journal and, upon acceptance, the journal was exposed for having accepted a paper that was a fake? Indeed, one wonders whether self-appointed watchdogs or ambitious and unscrupulous journal owners have made spurious submissions to competing journals in order to discredit the competition. The New England Journal of Medicine has weighed in extensively on conflicts of interest, both real and perceived, and the pernicious influence of commercial interests on the practice of medicine and research abuses. If one described this expose as a clinical study designed to test the hypothesis that some publishers will publish anything for a fee, my institutional conflict of interest committee would not have permitted the involvement in such a trial of an employee of a company with “skin in the game.”
Another troubling aspect of this case is the use of a computer program to write the scientific-sounding gibberish that was submitted to The Open Information Science Journal. Have we really gotten that lazy that we have to have a computer write our nonsense? Judging from some of my own published work, writing scientific-sounding nonsense seems to be more the rule than the exception. Unlike the situation with chess, humans remain highly competitive with computers in the generation of incomprehensible nonsense and I, for one, would like to strike a blow for the human element here.
For the most part, the open access movement is inspired by a desire for transparency, and well-respected new open access publications are increasing in number. Indeed, Congress has demanded that research sponsored by the federal government be made available freely to all taxpayers, and investigators now are required to submit duplicate manuscripts to an online repository if the journal is not freely available online. Older, established journals, like the Journal of Clinical Investigation and the New England Journal of Medicine, are increasingly moving to an open access model, and ultimately the open access system will allow information to be as free as Willy the Whale. But like all human endeavors, if there is a way to abuse a system established in good faith, then somebody will find it.
Dr. Cronstein is the Paul R. Esserman Professor of Medicine and director, Clinical and Translational Science Institute, New York University School of Medicine in New York.
