How archaeology is distorted by Science magazine and the National Geographic Society

The public has a lot of interest in archaeology, and new finds and discoveries are often in the news. Sometimes the press reports outlandish, nonsense claims, and sometimes it reports rigorous and important claims. Many archaeologists ignore such press coverage (good and bad), and many of us engage with it. If there are elements of the press that distort archaeology, we may or may not want to deal with this. I often ask myself if it is worth the time and effort to try to correct some misleading claim going around social media and the internet. In a very real sense, this kind of thing can be viewed as separate and apart from the actual process of scientific research. I can do my archaeology just fine without worrying about whether the latest "news" about an ancient monkey god is a pile of baloney or not.

But there are other distortions of archaeology that are more insidious and more troubling. These come from well-established, serious institutions whose missions include furthering research and knowledge in many fields, including archaeology. I am thinking here of Science magazine and the National Geographic Society. Science publishes archaeology, and thus promotes the scholarly work of archaeologists while showcasing our work to a wider audience beyond archaeology. This is good. But the kinds of archaeology article they publish is a biased and distorted sample of current scientifically-inclined archaeological research. Thus, Science distorts archaeology.  The National Geographic Society funds archaeology, and also publicizes archaeology in its website, TV shows, and magazine. Again, this is good. But, again, the archaeology promoted by NGS is often a distorted view of the past, emphasizing spectacular and mysterious finds, often to the point of severe distortion. This is done for commercial gain.

Science Magazine

The review process for Science is a clear example of scholars and individuals who are not archaeologists making decisions about what archaeology is worthy of publication in Science, and those decisions distort our field. The single most popular post in the 11-year history of this blog -- by far -- is one from 2012 called "Rejected by Science" (over 100,000 hits, when most of the posts get well under 5,000 hits). So, let me quote from that post:

 If you pay attention to the journal, you will know that they tend to favor high-tech methods, archaeometry, fancy quantitative methods, and reports about "the earliest" this or that. While I can only recall one or two papers in Science that I thought were incompetent (a much better record than most archaeology journals, some of which are full of incompetent articles), their selection of archaeology papers is definitely biased in a certain direction. I think one way of expressing this might be that Science publishes archaeology articles that will appeal on methodological grounds to non-archaeological scientists. My guess is that papers that are more synthetic or less methods-heavy don't make it through the initial review (which is done by non-archaeological scientists).

I have been rejected by Science at least four times (and about 3 times by Nature, and a couple of times by PNAS). I've been rejected by some of the finest journals in the world! So, maybe my complaint is just sour grapes. But I have had many colleagues over the years express agreement with my sentiments as quoted above. Papers are first skimmed by a high-level reviewer, none of whom is an archaeologist. If they think it might be interesting, the manuscript is sent out for review. Most papers are dropped at this stage. I must say, Nature does the same thing, but quicker. I think one of my rejections from Nature took only a couple of hours!

The fact that papers are initially screened by someone who is NOT an expert in the subject matter of the paper is a common critique of the Science review process. Indeed, one of the ways that PLOS-One touts their rigor is their claim that all papers will be reviewed by subject-matter experts.

This review process, and its outcomes, clearly distorts the archaeological content published in the journal Science. Paper are not judged by archaeologists, and only a narrow range of types of archaeological papers get published. Check out my older on issues with Science and Nature:

"Rejected by Science!"  (2012), initial post

"Rejected by Science, Yet Again!" (2012)

"Problems with Science and Nature"  (2013)

National Geographic Society

The publicity put out by the National Geographic Society provides another case where the nature of the archaeology that is funded and reported is often distorted. But instead of a bias within science, as in the case above, this is a commercial bias that favors sensationalism, mystery, and click-baiting themes. The NGS website may make sensationalist claims, and these get taken up by the mainstream media. The Guardian often seems to swallow them, hook, line, and sinker. The latest example is the claim that archaeologist Chris Fisher has discovered an ancient city in Mexico, using LiDAR, that "had as many buildings as Manhattan," to quote the Guardian. Some Mexican and French archaeologists objected in the Mexican paper, El Pais. They claimed that a city that big could not possibly have existed, because it was not mentioned in the historical sources! Give me a break, that is just silly. The city (Angamuco) IS large, but much of the LiDAR has not been ground-truthed yet, so this is a speculative claim.

Another recent case was the announcement that a new huge city was found below the jungle in Guatemala by LiDAR! It was accompanied in the press by image of Tikal. See my prior post on this. The National Geographic Society press release is mostly hype and speculation, which then got worse as other media outlets picked up the story. My purpose here is not to question hype or expose silly claims. Rather, I want to emphasize that the nature of the archaeological finds that get promoted are in the hands of an institution outside of archaeology, one that does a lot of good through funding and publicizing. Maybe we should give NGS a break, since they do a lot of good for archaeology. But I am more inclined to question their methods and goals. They are commercializing archaeology, and using our hard work to make a buck. That might be ok, if they were more objective in their reporting. I did get some funds from NGS back around 1990, but I'm not sure I would accept their funding now. Who knows what nonsense they could create from my research.

More hype than archaeology

If you want an extended example of NGS nonsense and hype, check out the story of the "Lost city of the Monkey God." NGS-funded "explorers" tramped around the Honduran jungle and came out with outrageous claims about finding a lost city. Never mind that the site in question was well known to archaeologists and had been studied earlier. A whole story of intrepid explorers and fantastic discoveries was generated. The resulting book has become a best-seller. Please check out these sources for some objective, archaeologically-appropriate writing about this episode:

blog post by Rosemary Joyce from 2012

another post by Joyce, 2015

article in Smithsonian magazine about the episode (2015)

An open letter to NGS signed by a bunch of archaeologists that lists all the problems with the activities and their reporting.

These archaeologists are so discouraged that they feel that any additional harping will only increase sales of the book by Preston. I hope I am not contributing to the hype here.

Apart from the scientific and scholarly nonsense of the Monkey God episode, I find it discouraging for the same reason as the reviewing procedures used by Science: archaeology is being distorted by non-archaeological institutions that purportedly exist, in part, to promote and improve archaeology.

Academia.edu wants to commercialize its "recommendations"

Academia.edu has a system of "recommendations" for publications that I have never been fond of. Now they want to commercialize them by selling commendations. The way the recommendations work is that some scholars are invited to submit recommendations. I can't find the criteria listed on the website, but as I recall the only criterion was that one had published one or two papers ever. The recommenders are then supposed to recommend papers by clicking a button on the paper in question. This information become public, and the number of views on those papers increases. Individuals are given an "Authors rank" based on the number of recommendations their papers have received, adjusted for the rank of the recommenders. My author rank is 3.6, but I have no idea if that is high or low; the nature of the scale is not revealed.

I tried being a recommender for a while. I recommended some things, and then I'd get messages stating that views of those papers had increased dramatically after I had recommended them. Wow, I am an influential guy in Academia.edu! I'll put that on my CV. But without information on why one is recommending a paper, these recommendations don't carry much weight. And when the system got started I snooped around to see who was doing the recommending. Some recommenders are serious scholars whose views I take seriously (people like Gary Feinman and Linda Manzanilla). Others are low-quality scholars whose views I do NOT take seriously (I won't name names here. I manage to get enough people pissed off at me as it stands, I don't need make a bunch more people mad). So having one's papers recommended by someone like Gary Feinman (one of the top archaeologists, in my opinion) has the same weight as having them recommended by low-quality scholars. Not a very good system.  Plus, there is no way to give a negative recommendation. Some papers are terrible and deserve to be described as such, but that is not possible with this system. This is one more example of the facebookization of online scholarship. You can like something, but you can't dislike anything.

I just got the following email from someone on the Academia.edu staff:

 Hi Dr. Smith,

   My name is XXXXX, here at Academia. I noticed you had received a few recommendations on your papers. Would you be open to paying a small fee to submit any upcoming papers to our board of editors to be considered for recommendation? You'd only be charged if your paper was recommended. If it does get recommended then you'll see the natural boost in viewership and downloads that recommended papers get. Would love to hear your thoughts.

Here are my thoughts (this was my email reply) - I don’t have a very high opinion of your system of recommendation. As it stands, you have a bunch of low-quality scholars making recommendations, and I don’t consider the recommendations any kind of rigorous or useful measure of anything. Getting visibility through Academia.edu is useful, I guess, but it is not very high on my list of professional goals. The idea of paying a fee for recommendations sounds ludicrous. Who is on the “board of editors” to make these decisions? Non-professionals? Low-quality scholars? I have previously looked at Academia.edu as an alternative to the trend of increasing commercialization of scholarship. But now you want people to pay for some kind of recommendation? The recognition that matters to me is citations, not some social-media type of “liking” or fee-based recommendations. Please leave me out of it.

(END OF EMAIL)

 Academia.edu is strange. It will have some very positive scholarly practices, and then it will introduce a retrograde, anti-scholarly features like co-authors listing. I think the whole idea of recommendations, as currently implemented, is a pseudo-scholarly feature, and I don't trust it. One could design a better and more transparent system but that might be too complex. But this idea of selling recommendations is terrible. If this is implemented, I might consider leaving Academia.edu and posting my papers elsewhere.

Bill in US Congress to limit Open Access

The Research Works Act, H.R. 3699, is a bill that would make it illegal for researchers to post their own publications on the internet for public access. Guess who is behind this bill? Elsevier and the commercial publishing lobby (the Association of American Publishers).

Steven Harnad's post: The Private Publishing Tail Trying To Wag The Public Research Dog, Yet Again contains the most detailed and useful discussion of the issue that I've seen.

Michelle Clement's blog at Scientific American, Reseaerch Works Act would deny taxpayers access to federally funded research., starts out, "Carolyn Maloney, a congresswoman funded by Elsevier, which is a major for-profit publishing company, is trying to pass the Research Works Act, which would deny Americans free access to research funded by taxpayer money."

For more information about the bill and about WHAT U.S. CITIZENS CAN DO about this, see the Alliance for Taxpayer Access.

"Sign here"

Perhaps you should think about adding the SPARC Author's Addendum to the copyright agreement form the next time you are asked to "sign here." It lets you keep some of the rights to your own published article.

Thanks to Daniel Lende at Neuroanthropology for this.

Commercial publishers and scholarly research

Have you have ever wondered about the curious situation in which academic scholars do research for free, and then publish it in commercial journals, whose corporate owners then get rich by charging big fees while preventing authors from distributing our work? You may want to read:

"Academic publishers make Murdoch look like a socialist" in The Guardian.

Desperate to present a paper? We can help! Go to BogusConference.Com

Every time I get one of these email solicitations for a bogus conference I vow to blog about it. I just received this message:
 -------------------------------------------------------------

Call for Papers from ICSSS 2011

Considering your research in related areas, we cordially invite you to submit a paper to ICSSS 2011.

2011 International Conference on Social Sciences and Society (ICSSS 2011) will be held in October 14-15, 2011 in Shanghai, China.

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to: economics, management, sociology, education science, linguistics, art theory, political science and other humanities and social sciences.

Website: http://www.icsa-association.org/icsss/

The submission system is open.

http://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=icsss2011

Paper format see: http://www.icsa-association.org/icsss/ps.htm

Paper Submission Due：August 10, 2011(Extended)

Contact Email: icsss2011reg@163.com

Tel: + (86) 186 2787 2331

 -------------------------------------------------------

Okay, what is wrong with this message? (This is like one of those kids games: can you spot five things wrong with this picture?)

1. The theme is way too braod to be of any intellectual value at all.
2. You've never heard of this conference or organization.
3. You've never heard of any of the people on the organizing committee.
4. The registration fee is $1,400. That's right, $1,400. Check the website.
5. The "Call for Papers" is a long list of disciplines (including archaeology!), many of which have nothing to do with one another.

Let's look a bit deeper. I googled one of the organizers, Gary Lee, of the "Information Engineering Institute." In about three minutes of searching, I found him listed as an organizer  for these conferences:

• 2011 International Conference on Social Sciences and Society (ICSSS 2011)
• 2012 International Conference on Electronics, Information and Communication Engineering (EIEC 2012) 
• 2011 2nd International Conference of Electrical and Electronics Engineering
• 2011 International Conference on Future Information Engineering (ICFIE 2011 - Bangkok, Thailand
• 2011 International Conference on Mechanical Engineering and Technology (ICMET 2011) 

If you haven't guessed yet, the goal of these conferences is to make money off students and professionals
who are desperate to present papers. A few years ago, some MIT students submitted some fake papers to one of these bogus conferences. The text was complete gibberish (computer generated blather), yet the papers were accepted. Shades of Alan Sokal.

I wonder what would happen if someone submitted an abstract for the SAA or AIA meetings that was gibberish. A good way to do this would involve the Postmodern Text Generator. Click on the link, and then refresh the site for a new text. I have served as Program Chair for the SAA meetings, and I can't honestly say whether we would have rejected a nonsense abstract or not. Hmmmmmmm...........

Write us an article, and pay us for the privilege!

The author-pay model is one approach to open access journal publishing. It makes sense and seems to work in the hard sciences, where researchers can put article fees into their research grants. For the social sciences and humanities, where most authors would have to pay the big fees (ca. $1,000 and more), this model is more problematic. But it only makes sense for peer reviewed journal articles, not for other types of publication.

I have just been invited to contribute to a scholarly encyclopedia that advertises itself as "open access," and they want me to pay about $1,000 for the privilege of publishing with them. Normally, scholarly encyclopedias pay authors for the hassle of writing articles that are not peer reviewed and not very valuable (for scholarship or for career building). A typical deal gets the author X amount of dollars (I've seen between $50 and $2,000 for encyclopedia entries), or twice that amount in books published by the press.

This encyclopedia is called "Urban Planning," published by "Intech," a Croatian company. They claim to have an editorial board of experts, but their listing of editorial boards includes fields like biology, engineering, and medicine, nothing in urban studies or social sciences. Their website gives these reasons to publish with them:

• High quality publications
• High impact and visibility
• Worldwide readership
• No copyright transfer
• Efficient publishing process
• Free access to research

Sounds like a scam to me. If I want to write something that is not peer reviewed, and I want it to have wide distribution on the internet, I'll just post it on my website.* I certainly won't pay a Croatian company big bucks to put it in an internet book of possibly dubious quality.

* NOTE -  I did this for once for an "anti-Wikipedia" article. The Wikipedia entry on the Aztecs was quite bad, almost beyond redemption, and the people who worked on it were defensive and hostile to my involvement. So I wrote a summary of Aztec culture and posted it from my home page. Later a Wikipedia editor contacted me and praised my summary. He claimed he was prevented from using it, however, since it did not have an official affiliation or citation! I guess wrong information from amateurs is fine for Wikipedia, but not correct information from scholars.

Headline: Scholar Holds Out Against Creeping Commercialization

News Flash: The owner of the web log, "Publishing Archaeology" stated today that he turned down a lucrative offer ($100) to commercialize his blog with third-party advertising. Dr. Michael Smith noted that he agonized over the attractive offer for about five seconds. "It was a tough decision," the archaeologist told our reporter, "I could have used those funds to pay for one-tenth of the author fee of an author-pay open access journal article. Now I will have to continue publishing in old-fashioned scholarly journals."

With this ground-breaking decision, Smith has countered the forces of commercialization that are infecting every aspect of life on the planet today. Whether it be billboards in public spaces, vending machines in the schools, advertising in the internet, the tide has now turned. Scholarship, freedom, local expression and cultural authenticity will now reign supreme as the forces of neoliberalism come to a grinding halt.

Well, maybe not.
.

Nova Scientific Publishers

For some strange reason, an old post on this blog about Nova Scientific Publishers has stayed active as a place for people to sound off about this commercial press. I'm not impressed with them, and it seems that most readers also have a negative opinion too.

My original post is: "Nova publishers: Legitimate or bogus?"  

I have decided to stop accepting comments to that post. Readers who want to sound off about Nova Publishers should see one of the groups started by Darren Pearce-Lazard; these are devoted to discussion about the press.

• A group on LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/groups?mostPopular=&gid=3425349
• A group on Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=156132787738631

I will add the final two comments to my old entry (they have been waiting for a while), and then I will not accept any others. See Darren's sites for more information.

Nova Science Publishers

This blog doesn't get a lot of comments, except for my post from May 15, 2009, called "Nova Publshers - Legitimate of Bogus?" This post has 43 comments !!! It seems that people from many disciplines want to say something about this press. These are mostly negative comments, although some are positive and supportive of the press. I also did a secondary post with a couple of links on Nova Publishers.  So instead of saying anything new today, I'm going to point readers to that discussion; the comments are interesting and informative.

Electronic Publishing at the American Anthropological Association

Savage Minds just posted a short piece on "Understanding the Current Future of the AAA" by Chris Kelty. It is about the AAA's Committee on the Future of Print and Electronic Publishing. The committee solicited a bunch of memos about the AAA's publications program. Kelty says,

• "I’ve read a handful of these memos, most of which seem to say something like “our section is still alive, so we have no complaints.” This is kind of worrying, since a bunch of memos recommending no action will lead to no action by the Section Assembly, no decisions by the Executive Boards and no executions by the Staff"

He then mentions an extraordinary memo by Kim Fortun, outgoing co-editor of Cultural Anthropology, that is posted on the Savage Minds site. Kelty says,

• "Kim’s memo could be a handbook for understanding the current crisis and politics of scholarly publishing in general, and the promises, fulfilled and unfulfilled, of the AAA’s union with Wiley Blackwell, in particular. It is incredibly detailed, well-sourced, well organized and throughtful–far beyond the call of duty of a memo."

Anyone interested in the publications situation at the AAA (and by comparison, at many scholarly societies) should check out Fortun's memo. I have long been disappointed in the AAA's approach to publishing (click here, for an example), and I was impressed by the detail and insight contained in Fortun's memo.

Another new commercial open access journal in anthropology

There are now several pay-to-publish open access journals for anthropology. The first one, Open Access Anthropology, was founded by Bentham Journals 2008; see my blog post about this. I just received an invitation to contribute to another such journal, the Journal of Anthropology, published by Hindawi. For $425, you can publish a paper in this journal, which claims to be peer reviewed (and if you have to submit an errata later, it is free!). So what are the pros and cons of these new journals? Here is an off-the-cuff balance sheet (of course I will think of other important reasons as soon as I post this...):

Positive features:

• These are fully open access journals. Articles are posted, and anyone with an internet connection can read or download the papers.

Negative features:

• The topical coverage is too wide. Does the world really need another journal that purports to cover the very wide subject matter of anthropology? Actually, the content tends to be rather idiosyncratic at best; I doubt anyone would claim that Open Access Anthropology is at the cutting edge of the discipline (check out their tables of contents).
  
• The cost of publishing is high.
• I am doubtful about the quality of the peer review process. I have no hard data to support my skepticism, which is just a hunch and could be incorrect. But my guess is that the reputation of these journals if pretty low among most anthropologists, if only because they are new; they don't seem to address hot new areas; and the contributors and board may not be the top experts.
  

If I am going to get excited about a new journal, it should focus on a tight and well-defined topic or theme; it should have leading scholars in that area as editors and board members; and it should have a clear goal or mission. To me, it looks like the goal of these new journals is to make money for their publishers (both are large commercial enterprises) rather than to address pressing intellectual and professional issues.

Now perhaps with electronic publishing today we don't need tightly focused journals. If I want to keep up on current research about, say, ancient basketry, I can find relevant papers through search engines, contents alerts, and the like. If a paper is available online, it doesn't matter whether it is published in the highly prestigious "Ancient Basketry Review" or in the newbie "Journal of Anthropology." The important thing is to get access to the papers. But I resist this notion, and I think that focused journals are still very important.

Perhaps you think I am just a cranky old traditionalist who likes to hold printed journals in his grubby paws and who looks askance at new internet publishing. Actually, I am pretty sure that the printed journal has a limited future, and before too long electronic format will be the only thing available for most journals. But I do feel strongly about the issues of intellectual focus and demonstrable quality, and in these areas the new commercial open access journals don't seem to measure up.

Academic "cold calls"

"Cold calls" are telephone solicitations for sales that are made "cold," without prior contacts or signs of interest from the consumer. This week I have gotten 2 cold calls soliciting academic work, which is surreal. The latest was this email:

Dear Michael E. Smith

You are invited to submit articles to the Journal of Biomedical Science and Engineering (JBiSE, ISSN Print: 1937-6871, ISSN Online: 1937-688X).

JBiSE, publishes research and review articles in all important aspects of biology. medicine, engineering, and their intersection. Accepted papers will immediately appear online followed by printed hard copy, which will be sent to over 200 scientific libraries around the world.

Do the editors of this journal really think messages to people outside of their discipline will be productive? Maybe this is just another case of the "Michael Smith" confusion (I did NOT ride the winning horse at the Kentucky Derby a few years ago, I am NOT a Christian singer, I did NOT write the book "How to Teach Your Dog to Eliminate on Command," and so on.). There is a list of this and other books by Michael Smith that I did not write. Or maybe this is just a blanket email, soliciting papers for a journal with high author fees hoping to increase their revenues.

The second example was a true cold call. Someone called and said they worked for a publishing company (that I hadn't heard of) and asked if I had any book manuscripts I wanted to submit. I briefly considered assembling a big batch of old email text, giving it a clever postmodern title, and sending it off to see what would happen. But that would be too much work. Of course I thought of several clever replies as soon as I hung up. But I am amazed that someone thinks this kind of phone solicitation makes economic sense.

These events serve to confirm my confusion about some areas of the publishing business these days.

It's Open Access Week - Here is a great link

This passage is from Jason Baird Jackson's blog:

"Last year, did you get paid nothing to work hard for a multinational corporation with reported revenues of over 1 billion dollars in 2008? [2]

If you have (1) done peer-reviews for, (2) submitted an article to, (3) written a book or media review for, or (4) taken on the editorship of a scholarly journal published by giant firms such as Springer, Reed Elisevier, or Wiley, then you belong to a very large group of very well-educated people whose unpaid labor has helped make these firms very profitable. Their profitability in turn has positioned them to work vigorously against the interests of (1) university presses and other not-for-profit publishers in the public interest, (2) libraries at all levels, (3) university and college students, (4) scholars themselves, and (5) particular and general publics with a need to consult the scholarly record.

I am not willing to freely give my labor to large multinational corporations whose interests align with their shareholders but that are antagonistic to my own."

You can read the whole thing here.

Jackson urges scholars like you and me to take these five steps:

• "Choose not to submit scholarly journal articles or other works to publications owned by for-profit firms.
• Say no, when asked to undertake peer-review work on a book or article manuscript that has been submitted for publication by a for-profit publisher or a journal under the control of a commercial publisher.
• Do not seek or accept the editorship of a journal owned or under the control of a commercial publisher.
• Do not take on the role of series editor for a book series being published by a for-profit publisher.
• Turn down invitations to join the editorial boards of commercially published journals or book series."

This is a great post, it echoes my sentiments pretty closely.

*** NEVERTHELESS *** I am now editing my initial post here, curbing my enthusiasm somewhat, and arguing that readers should consult Steven Harnad's comment below. While I can feel indignant about commercial publishers, what is really needed is the development of institutional repositories by universities and professional organizations. We need to post our publications on the internet, and then it matters much less what happens to commercial publishers or OA journals. The key point is to make our scholarly output available on the internet, and it is much easier and faster to post one's publications than to wait around for big corporations to change their ways to please scholars.

Nova Scientific Publishers again

Since my post of May 15, 2009, "Nova Publishers" - legitimate or bogus?", I have gotten several emails with more concerns and problems with this press. The most relevant and useful, from David Bade, includes a link to an online article of his about Nova Publishers, called

The Content of Journals Published by Nova Science Publishers, Inc.: Political History and Culture of Russia and Current Politics and Economics of Russia, Eastern and Central Europe.

He also referenced the discussion page of the entry for Nova Publishers on Wikipedia. Very interesting, indeed! I quote the end of his email to me:

"Don’t let your students get involved!"

Another Elsevier scandal: Paying for positive reviews

I just saw an article from Inside Higher Education, June 23, 2009, called "Elsevier Won't Pay for Praise." Here is the first paragraph:

"Elsevier officials said Monday that it was a mistake for the publishing giant's marketing division to offer $25 Amazon gift cards to anyone who would give a new textbook five stars in a review posted on Amazon or Barnes & Noble. While those popular Web sites' customer reviews have long been known to be something less than scientific, and prone to manipulation if an author has friends write on behalf of a new work, the idea that a major academic publisher would attempt to pay for good reviews angered some professors who received the e-mail pitch."

This and other recent scandals from commercial presses make one wonder about the trend of the commercialization of scholarship. What if we just had independent scientific journals, posted on the internet, with strict peer review but no commercial sponsorship? Wouldn't that be a good thing for resesarch, for researchers, and for disciplines? It's called Gold Open Access. Does it sound expensive or unlikely? Then perhaps we should think about posting our peer-reviewed published papers in institutional repositories (Green OA). Again, this is a way to make scholarship openly available without relying on commercial publishers, who don't always seem to have the highest ethical standards.

Hoax paper accepted by Benthan Publishers OA journal

One of the new mass-produced Open Access journals published by Benthan Scientific accepted a bogus hoax paper. A Cornell grad student and an editor from the New England Journal of Medicine submitted a paper to the “Open Information Science Journal” titled “Deconstructing Access Points.” The text is complete gibberish; the authors (acting under pseudonyms) listed their affiliation as the “Center for Research in Applied Phrenology” (C.R.A.P. for short).

This hoax is all over the internet; see:

The original exposé by one of the authors, Philip Davis, in the Scholarly Kitchen blog.

An article in New Scientist

Peter Suber's reporting and comments in an entry called "Hoax exposes incompetence or worse at Bentham AO journal..

In subsequent news, the journal's editor resigned, and members of the Editorial Boards of other Bentham OA journals are also resigning.

I have blogged on Bentham's journal "Open Access Anthropology" before: (my post from June 22, 2008). I can't say for sure that this journal would not accept a bogus nonsense paper, but I wonder if it may accept low-quality papers (I say this very tentatively, since none of the papers published so far are close to my own areas of competence).

It is possible that this event may give ammunition to some ignorant people who think that Open Access means lack of peer review. But the problem here is not open access, but rather the LACK or peer review. Peer review is peer review, whatever the kind of journal. Bad peer review exists in respected print journals (I'm sure anyone reading this can think of some examples), and the problems are not open access or peer review in general, but rather poor scholarly implementation of these processes. In many cases, the lapses can be attributed to commercial factors, whether Elsevier's drug-company publicity rags masquerading as scientific journals, or fake fee-generating conferences (see below), or fee-paying OA journals like Bentham's.

One final note on this affair. The authors used SCIgen to produce their bogus paper, a text generator that produces context-free prose in computer science in article format, complete with tables, graphs, and references. In other words, the paper produces gibberish that is gramatically correct and looks like scientific prose at first glance. (the SCIgen page also has information on bogus for-fee conferences that accept all papersfor a large fee, including hoax, nonsense papers; I've been invited to a few of these and you may have been invited also, if you ever received in invitation for a large conference that seemed too broad and strange in its coverage). Now SCIgen will not produce papers that look at all archaeoelogical, but the Post-Modern Text Generator may be closer. When you visit the site, hit the refresh button to generate new meaningless postmodern papers.

I am very tempted here to try an experiment, but I really dont have time for such fun and games right now.....

Elsevier published fake journals

These comments are from Peter Suber's Open Access News, Monday May 11, 2009

"Elsevier confirms 6 fake journals; more comments Bob Grant, Elsevier published 6 fake journals, The Scientist, May 7, 2009.

Scientific publishing giant Elsevier put out a total of six publications between 2000 and 2005 that were sponsored by unnamed pharmaceutical companies and looked like peer reviewed medical journals, but did not disclose sponsorship, the company has admitted."

[Elsevier called these pseudo-journals "sponsored article publications." --MES]

----------------------------------------------------

"When is peer review not peer view? (hint: when Merck pays Elsevier), Small Gray Matters, May 8, 2009.

... The bitter irony is that Elsevier, along with the other major academic publishers, have spent the last few years ceaselessly lobbying against the open access movement, on the grounds that open access journals can’t be trusted to maintain the high quality of peer review that the commercial publishers provide. Any guesses as to whether Elsevier will rethink that stance following this fiasco? ..."

-----------------------------------------------------------

Peter Murray-Rust, Trust in scientific publishing, A Scientist and the Web , May 9, 2009.

... So – as many have noted – here is a commercial company which has campaigned to rubbish Open Access as “junk science” behaving in a manner which totally destroys any trust in their ethics and practice. I have no option but to say that I now cannot absolutely trust the ethical integrity of every piece of information in Elsevier journals.
The need for Open, trusted, scientific data and discourse is now clear. The scientific societies are well placed to help us make the change from closed paper to open trusted semantic digital. They clearly need a business model that transforms the new qualities into a revenue stream. This will not be easy but it has to be tried – there is no alternative. Some of the modern tools will help – the ability to mashup, aggregate, etc. will lead to new forms of high-quality information that will have monetary value. Certified validated information will lead to productivity gains and may be a valuable commodity. ...

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Archaeology, of course, does not have anywhere near the level of commercial incentives that can generate this kind of unethical practice in journal publication. But what about junk edited volumes? Could commercial incentives trump scientific value for some of these? I remain puzzled at the program of evidently non-peer-reviewed edited books put out by Nova Scientific Publishers, but I have no evidence that commercial factors outweigh scientific factors in these books. And most professionals could tell a story or two about cases where journal peer review went out the window for one reason or another. But then we don't have a venue for discussing such activities. I hear from one or two colleagues each year with complaints about unethical or capricious or bizarre behavior by editors, reviewers, publishers, and others. Other than give personal advice, there is not much I can do because I typically lack both definitive data and some kind of official status that might warrant meddling in other peoples' business.