Re: [tlug] Open Access Journals

["Stephen J. Turnbull" <stephen@example.com>]

Attila Kinali writes:

 > Yes, but journal submissions are usually evaluated by people from
 > the field. Or am I wrong?

Sure.  That doesn't mean that they have knowledge of every subfield,
or even more than one in some cases.

The top people worldwide, yeah, they're capable of judging a rather
wide spectrum.  I can say from personal experience doing English
editing that I can identify bad papers (not good ones!) in chemistry,
physics, and Japanese history quite readily. :-)  I can do a pretty
good job of assessing the mediocre to good papers in most fields in
economics, although there are only a couple of subfields where I would
claim to be able to distinguish path-breaking research from merely
"good stuff".

But most of my Japanese colleagues won't touch a refereeing assignment
unless they have written a paper on that subject, or are cronies of
the editor handling the paper.  And there you see the problem, I think.

 > Hmm.. I have met quite a few professors during my studies and a few
 > afterwards. Although i cannot judge them on their field, most of
 > them gave me the impression of people who knew what they are doing
 > and deeply care about their field. Yes, sampling bias and all, i
 > know. But that's the image i have of professors.

That depends on the quality of the institution.  Sampling bias,
definitely: all of the accredited PhD-granting institutions in the
U.S. and Europe are well above the world average in quality.

And perhaps more important to the case in point, the journals we're
talking about are bottom of the barrel, and they aim at scooping up
the worst papers of the worst researchers.  This is from a recent spam
I received:

    • International journal of science, commerce and humanities
    (IJSCH) is an open access, peer-reviewed and refereed
    multidisciplinary journal published by post academic
    publications. The objective of (IJSCH) is to provide a forum for
    the publication of scientific articles in the fields of science,
    commerce and humanities. In pursuit of this objective the journal
    not only publishes high quality research papers but also ensures
    that the published papers achieve broad international credibility.

    • The journal publishes research papers in the fields of History
    and Philosophy of Science ,Cognition and Instruction,
    Environmental & Geographical Education Learning Environment,
    Science and Literacy, Using Technology in Environmental & Science
    Education, Pedagogical Issues and Teaching/Learning Strategies,
    Educational Technology, Computer Assisted Learning/Teaching,
    Biology, Chemistry, Health sciences, Physics, Mathematics,
    Geology, Social Sciences, Computer Science, Agriculture and
    Forestry, Statistics, Engineering, Natural sciences,  Political
    Science, Zoology,  Botany, Banking Economics, Marketing business
    ethics,  journalism and mass communication, hotel and tourism,
    architecture, women studies,  music, psychology,  anthropology,
    international relations, corporate governance, human resources
    so on.

Yeah, right.