Again, the Bentham incident is beyond belief, and thanks to you exposing the issue I hope they either get their act together or suffer the consequences.

But your inference of the weakness of the author-pay model as a result of their actions is extremely weak. You read the Elsevier incident in an extremely generous light. Which would be fine (I don’t expect a computer generated paper to go very far in Elsevier journals in my field), except that it is plain that it was also a failure of the same sort as the Bentham one.

In summary, you would need to present much more evidence that this kind of incident can be used an indictment of the author-pay model and not of just a particular company or just, as in the case of Elsevier, just a “system failure”.

Cheers.

I don’t understand your reference to “the bill would have come,” since the Elsevier journal in question doesn’t charge authors page charges or anything else from what I can tell.

I agree that Elsevier doesn’t look good letting a paper get through. But any system is fallible — judicial, electoral, or mechanical. That doesn’t mean that all failures are comparable, or that the system is illegitimate.

But any system can also be improved.

The issue with Bentham was that the system they claimed to have implemented showed no sign of being in place for the paper they accepted. That’s not a system failure — that’s a failure to have a system. And again, the point here was that this same “failure to have a system” also seems to exist around management of author-pays funds.

Well, maybe I should have said it is an “analogous” story. And from the link I provided, it seems Elsevier backtracked after the students who have submitted the paper made their hoax public. Naturally, there’s no way a computer generated paper should make it to “accepted” status, what you call “pre-publication” state. The delay in publishing after that has to do with detecting minor errors (hence “proof” stage), not because Elsevier was taking a second look.

And a final point regarding the linked story: as an Elsevier published author, I can assure you the bill would have come to the Iranian students cited in the article, had they not made their hoax public (or had not the Editors found out about it indepently).

Of course, I don’t know all the details of the Elsevier incident, but if it is roughly true the fact that the paper was peer reviewed (it was computer generated!) doesn’t make the Elsevier incident look any better. It just looks like instead of having an editor that – at best – didn’t know what was going on in his own magazine, or – at worst – was part of a corrupt company, the reviewers and editors at Elsevier could not – in this case – distinguish garbage from actual research. Again, maybe not the same story, but definitely too close for comfort, don’t you think?

Cheers.

The Elsevier example you provide doesn’t compare after some scrutiny. First of all, there was obvious peer-review. We received no sign of peer-review, despite assertions that it had occurred. Second, the paper only made it into a pre-publication stage, and was withdrawn by the editors before full acceptance. Ours was accepted outright. Third, the authors who submitted to Elsevier were not billed for anything. Bentham sent us an invoice for US$800.

This is not “the exact same history.” Besides, my goal wasn’t to point to flaws in the model, but to identify flaws in the way the model is being managed. I also point to Elsevier’s mismanagement of a paid sponsorship model. No model is inherently flawed, but a mismanaged or unmanaged model will reveal flaws. As I state and you quote, “the author-pays model can become a charade.” Emphasis on “can.” If you take it in context, my point was that it becomes a charade when it’s mismanaged.

Author-pays is the new kid on the block in some ways, but how it ties into the “publish or perish” culture of academia, the allocation of budgets at universities, and the trust and independence that underpins scholarly works bears scrutiny and thought.

“Trust and independence are the foundations of valid scholarly communication. This story hints that the author-pays model can become a charade within the scholarly publishing community.”

Fair enough, you have a good example supporting your argument. But then, there are others, as somebody pointed out in the Nature article:

http://tinyurl.com/5qhkxo

So there we have what it looks like the exact same history you are touting as proof of the flaws of the author-pays model, except of course this is an Elsevier Journal. What are we to make of this? Is it possible that sloppy or dishonest editors or reviewers are to blame here, instead of the entire approach to publishing?

I don’t disagree with the fact that the author-pays model creates incentives that could lead to bad consequences. But I can’t see how having two data points showing that both this model and the one you defend can lead to failure proves anything.

Cheers.

I think this is an important point. When the author-pays model was first introduced, I was skeptical that it would create nothing more than vanity publishing.

Many high-quality open access publications have allayed my concerns over the years.

But this incident shows what we all know–follow the money to see where incentives can lead people and organizations astray–and institute adequate safeguards against misbehavior.

Traditional subscription-model journals are certainly not without their ethical violations.

Bentham needs to launch an investigation–clearly neither the reviewer nor the editor actualy read the manuscript. Is this a one-time problem. Maybe, as the other fabricated article was rejected.

Publishers need to build in internal safeguards. As Kent and Phil have pointed out, libraries and funding agencies need to know where their funding dollars are going.

And perhaps the industry needs to develop an accepted label of just what peer review is and means. (Hmmm, hasn’t Geoff Bilder beeing talking about something like this?…yeah, that’s right, CrossMark.)