In holdover from print-dominant era, top 330 academic science titles too often seen as banning or hindering published rebuttals of their articles
More than a third of the world’s top scientific journals do not publish critiques of their articles, and many of the others impose sharp limits on such feedback, an extensive new survey has found.
We agree with Paul’s observations in this great THE piece. Publishers clearly have a conflicts of interest when it comes to publishing critiques of articles they have published. They don’t want it said they have published flawed junk. And they are applying rules that made sense when the primary way in which journals in which journals are distributed was in hard copy form. Open Science is valuable and we need considered and detailed critiques of published work.
And among those journals that did accept them, 67 per cent imposed length-based limits on any published responses, while 32 per cent set time-based deadlines for accepting submissions.
The survey project, published in Royal Society Open Science, was compiled by a team of researchers from the US, UK, Germany, the Netherlands and Australia, who described their work as identifying a major remaining hole in the peer-based system of scientific integrity.
“Overall,” the authors write, “post-publication critique appears to be tightly controlled and restricted by top-ranked academic journals.”