Re: [tlug] Open Access Journals

[Raymond Wan <rwan.kyoto@example.com>]

On Thu, Mar 20, 2014 at 9:21 AM, Simon Cozens <simon@example.com> wrote:
> On 20/03/2014 00:14, Raymond Wan wrote:
>> Well, one "good" thing that publishers still do is quality control.
>
> Funny that we're talking about this while the whole Riken thing is happening.
>
> Anyway, being published by a major publisher guarantees precisely nothing
> about quality control, as this story (and other similar ones) demonstrate:
>
> http://www.nature.com/news/publishers-withdraw-more-than-120-gibberish-papers-1.14763


I've heard of these stories or similar ones before.  I can't speak for
Springer as it doesn't seem to mention the conference or journal name
in the article?  But for IEEE and for the conference mentioned in the
article, the publisher here puts faith in the organizers of the
conference who handle all aspects from call for papers to reviewing
and the conference itself.  The program committee is like an editorial
board and they didn't do their job.  Perhaps IEEE should have more
oversight, but it is actually difficult as there are so many
conferences.  The publisher doesn't send staff to check up on how
conferences are run.

More could be done.  Maybe create a "black list" of bad conference
organizers or something?  Maybe send spies to conferences to see how
they are run?

But this doesn't prove that publishers are worthless.  The scary part
is not that all those papers in the Chengdu, China conference were
retracted but maybe if it wasn't an IEEE conference, it could have
been worse...  [Pure conjecture with no proof...I know.

This, BTW, is perhaps (hopefully??) different from IEEE journals where
the quality control is better.  Maybe IEEE should split off and create
a publisher for just journals and another for just conferences so that
one's reputation shouldn't taint the other??


> The only reason editorial boards haven't moved to shoving all their accepted
> papers up onto a free Wordpress blog or similar is... well, Stephen mentions
> inertia, which is certainly true, but really, it's about prestige.


Yes, agreed!

Ray