Rewarding the quantity of peer review could harm biomedical research

Voluntary peer review is generally provided by researchers as a duty or service to their disciplines. They commit their expertise, knowledge and time freely without expecting rewards or compensation. Peer review can be perceived as a reciprocal mission that aims to safeguard the quality of publications by helping authors improve their manuscripts. While voluntary peer review adds value to research, rewarding the quantity or the volume of peer review is likely to lure academics into providing poor quality peer review. Consequently, the quantity of peer review may increase, but at the expense of quality, which may lead to unintended consequences and might negatively affect the quality of biomedical publications. This paper aims to present evidence that while voluntary peer review may aid researchers, pressurized peer review may create a perverse incentive that negatively affects the integrity of the biomedical research record. We closely examine one of the proposed models for rewarding peer review based on the quantity of peer review reports. This article also argues that peer review should remain a voluntary mission, and should not be prompted by the need to attain tenure or promotion

Cost-benefit Assessment of Congresses, Meetings or Symposia, and Selection Criteria to Determine if they are Predatory

Not a single day goes by in which academics receive one or more emails inviting them to attend a congress, meeting or symposium (CMS). Increasingly, most of these invitations are for attending CMSs that lie beyond the scope of their fields of research, and are usually characterized by images of grandeur and finesse, enticing the invitee with claims of international status, the pompous nature of the steering committee, or the meeting’s sheer size and dimension, including a list of famed participants. In other cases, emphasis is placed instead on the exotic nature of the location, and the invitation often sounds more like a travel brochure than an invitation to join a professional CMS. In several cases, a promise to publish the CMS proceedings in an indexed database is made. It is difficult to judge the veracity and significance of such meetings at a distance, even more so through an email. However, when the balance sheet is drawn up, and the costs are assessed, including of travel, accommodation and meals, it is clear to see that most CMSs are simply traps to make money, and that true academic discovery is a secondary, or more distant, objective. This article draws readers’ attention to the need for making a cost-benefit analysis based on the criteria that we present before deciding on whether to attend a CMS, or not

Challenges Facing the DOAJ (Directory of Open Access Journals) as a Reliable Source of Open Access Publishing Venues

Academics in the post-Jeffrey Beall era are seeking to find suitable solutions to differentiating reliable from unreliable open access (OA) journals and publishers. After the controversial, vague and unreliable Beall lists of “predatory” OA journals became defunct on 15 January 2017, two main contenders stepped forward to fill that gap: Cabell’s International blacklist and a newly revised Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) whitelist. Although the DOAJ has in fact existed since 2003, it is only in recent years that it has reached prominence, garnering attention after the infamous 2013 Bohannon sting in Science revealed multiple, approximately one in five, Bealllisted “predatory” OA journals and publishers on the DOAJ lists. T he DOAJ conducted a massive clean-up of its lists and continues to undergo constant reevaluation of its members and journals it lists. This paper highlights some of the changes that occurred in the DOAJ, as well as several challenges that remain, highlighting why this whitelist of A journals and publishers is still far from perfection. Academics are cautioned against relying on any one list such as that held by the DOAJ to avoid repeating the serious errors and misguided approaches that took place when global academia placed blind trust in Beall’s lists