Who's afraid of peer review?

60 IL L U S T R A T IO N : D A V ID P L U N K E R T On 4 July, good news arrived in the inbox of Ocorrafoo Cobange, a biologist at the Wassee Institute of Medicine in Asmara. It was the offi cial letter of acceptance for a paper he had submitted 2 months earlier to the Journal of Natural Pharmaceuticals, describing the anticancer properties of a chemical that Cobange had extracted from a lichen. In fact, it should have been promptly rejected. Any reviewer with more than a high-school knowledge of chemistry and the ability to understand a basic data plot should have spotted the paper’s shortcomings immediately. Its experiments are so hopelessly fl awed that the results are meaningless. I know because I wrote the paper. Ocorrafoo Cobange does not exist, nor does the Wassee Institute of Medicine. Over the past 10 months, I have submitted 304 versions of the wonder drug paper to open-access journals. More than half of the journals accepted the paper, failing to notice its fatal fl aws. Beyond that headline result, the data from this sting operation reveal the contours of an emerging Wild West in academic publishing. From humble and idealistic beginnings a decade ago, openaccess scientifi c journals have mushroomed into a global industry, driven by author publication fees rather than traditional subscriptions. Most of the players are murky. The identity and location of the journals’ editors, as well as the fi nancial workings of their publishers, are often purposefully obscured. But Science’s investigation casts a powerful light. Internet Protocol (IP) address traces within the raw headers of e-mails sent by journal editors betray their locations. Invoices for publication fees reveal a network of bank accounts based mostly in the developing world. And the acceptances and rejections of the paper provide the fi rst global snapshot of peer review across the open-access scientifi c enterprise. One might have expected credible peer review at the Journal of Natural Pharmaceuticals. It describes itself as “a peer reviewed journal aiming to communicate high quality research articles, short communications, and reviews in the fi eld of natural products with desired pharmacological activities.” The editors and advisory board members are pharmaceutical science professors at universities around the world. The journal is one of more than 270 owned by Medknow, a company based in Mumbai, India, and one of the largest openaccess publishers. According to Medknow’s website, more than Who’s Afraid of Peer Review?