When I just opened my mailbox, I found this*:
“Dear Colleague,
Please accept our apologies if we have caught you at a busy time.
We wish to introduce WebmedCentral, a unique portal for rapid and free dissemination of biomedical knowledge through Post Publication Peer Review. It offers:
* Guaranteed publication of your research within 48 hours of submission
* No pre-publication screening.
* Peer review takes place post publication in an open and transparent manner
* No cost to authors or readers.
Please visit our website for further details. You may wish to forward this email to your students or trainees.
Regards,
The WebmedCentral Team”
Who on earth would care for any stuff published without peer-review? It says on their website that “it is the authors’ responsibility to actively solicit at least three reviews on their article. Authors can seek more reviews, if they so wish. We discourage authors from choosing their reviewers selectively. WebmedCentral reserves the right to invite further reviews on any article.” However, when I checked some of the “Popular Articles” none had been reviewed. It also seems that the majority of “Latest Reviews” comes from some “Mr.Admin WebmedCentral”.
With the increasing number of open access journals with questionable reputation (I’m NOT referring to BMC or PLoS) and then this on top, I think one should really watch out from which journals citations stem from when reading papers or refereeing manuscripts. In this context the similarity in names between WebmedCentral and BMC isn’t really coincidental!
* admittedly in the junk-folder when checking whether Thunderbird would have again been over-critical
5 Comments
Agree that caution, skepticism and critical thinking are ALWAYS the right course of action. However, I wonder if this could be a useful repository for negative results. Assuming that sufficient detail is provided within the methods section, one could judge the merits of the study one’s self: knowledgy of well designed experiments that yielded no “significant” results could help us all refine further work without re-invinting a broken wheel.
I don’t think I quite agree for two reasons:
1) Why should we leave the judgement whether something is methodologically sound to the reader for negative results and not also for positive ones? I.e. abandon the whole peer-reviewing process. If we want to have expert-reviewers checking positive results, we should also want them to check negative.
2) It should be possible to publish ‘good’ negative results (based on proper experimental design, with sufficient power etc.) in decent journals. I agree that this is difficult but rather them publishing them without peer-review I would try to press the peer-reviewed journals to take them.
I actually quite like this concept and think this will overcome a lot of bias in the publishing world. It seems the website has just been launched and the reviews mentioned before are just sample reviews to give users an idea of how website functions. I will give it a go.
Yeah, I see both sides to it. Awhile back it struck me that this sort of thing goes on in the physics and math field all the time. They post on a site called: arXiv ( http://arxiv.org/ ), which has no peer review.
I first heard of arXiv after Grigori Perelman posted his proof for the poincarre conjecture. This work alone proves that there is a place for this type of publishing eh?
I don’t have anything against pre-print severs (or however it’s called) as arXiv, simply because it’s very clear that things on them aren’t peer-reviwed. As opposed to above mentioned ‘journal’.
PS: I guess things like the proof of Poincarre’s conjecture are still in minority even on arXiv.