by T Nelson

Are Open-Access Journals Harming Science?

n the wake of an inflammatory political article masquerading as science published in the open-access journal Plos One last week, scientists and science publishers have to wonder whether such journals can really be considered on the same footing as traditional printed scientific journals.

The article is premised on the idea that whites in America are fundamentally “racist,” and pulls no punches in calling gun owners racists. This has caused widespread outrage among conservatives and gun owners. Others have dissected the numerous fatal methodological and scientific flaws in this article. Strangely, though, the mass media, with one exception, have been largely silent, except for a smattering of praise from the usual suspects.

The maligning of gun owners by gun-control advocates is common in the popular press, and not unheard of in soft fields like sociology. Calling people with whom you disagree the "R"-word is a cheap way of avoiding the need to think about the issue constructively. But the appearance of such articles in the scientific literature by authors representing themselves as scientists is unprecedented.

In Pubmed, the standard database for biomedical research, I could only find two other articles containing the terms “firearms” and “racism.” Both were social psychology articles, and they used the term in order to dismiss it as a hypothesis.

I am neither a gun owner nor a conservative myself (I am what's known as a “running dog capitalist imperialist”), but I have lots of contact with both groups. My observations indicate that neither group cares in the slightest about race. To these people, who care only about making a profit, raising their children, and living their lives, race is a boring, tiresome question. (Many of them are mad as hell, though, about being accused of racism all the time by the news media). The only people who ever talk about race are my liberal friends. Some of them are practically obsessed with the subject, and they find racism under every rock.

Ironically, this has the effect of creating what they're looking for, and it could be argued that, in many cases, that is their goal. Some people, it seems, need something to be opposed to in order to give their lives a purpose.

Gun ownership has nothing to do with race. It is associated with a rural lifestyle and with our tradition of self-reliance and personal responsibility. These are characteristics that conservatives, traditionalists, and libertarians all value. But as liberals and conservatives self-segregate into urban and rural environments, the political dialogue has only gotten nastier.

Plos One calls itself a peer-reviewed journal. But their instructions to reviewers are clear: we are not allowed to judge articles on their scientific merit, importance, credibility, or lack thereof. The only criterion for acceptance is whether the paper is methodologically sound. In the past two years, I have refereed three articles for them. Even this low bar was not cleared by one of the papers I reviewed.

It's now clear that this level of peer review is not adequate to prevent publication of fake articles and bad science.

Publication of thinly disguised opinion pieces as if they were peer-reviewed science strikes at the heart of the integrity of science. Open-access journals should either do a complete peer-review or none at all. Calling it “peer review” when the only criterion is whether they labeled their test tubes correctly and used the right statistical test is dishonest and undermines the concept of peer review.

Plos One should also change their name. Maybe they could kill two birds with one stone by trading names with the Washington Redskins. Heck, maybe I'd even send them a manuscript sometime. But they'd have to prove to me they're a real journal first.