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50 sats \ 2 replies \ @SimpleStacker 14h \ parent \ on: Scientific fraud has become an ‘industry,’ alarming analysis finds science
What's your view of PLOS ONE
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100 sats \ 1 reply \ @south_korea_ln 14h
Probably never read a paper from there... maybe even never cited a paper from there.
I've vaguely heard of it, but a paper published there is not really something taken seriously in my field.
As a rule of thumb, "open access"-only journals for which you pay a high publication fee as an author, but nothing as a reader, have a dangerous incentive structure in the sense that they have no reason to reject papers. So even though they are solving the paywall problem of scientific dissemination, they carry this burden of proving they are non-predatory.
Now, lots of standard journals let you decide as an author if you want to pay the fee to make it open access. This already mitigates part of the problem.
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193 sats \ 0 replies \ @SimpleStacker 14h
I'm only aware of it for two reasons.
  1. I was asked to referee a paper for it. That was my first exposure to it. I don't remember much, but I think the topic was in my field, so I said yes, but then when I got the paper, the techniques were totally foreign to me. Yet, the reviewing instructions were, "Review it on technical merits only, not on the novelty or importance of contribution."
    On one hand, i appreciated that they wanted to be open about accepting anything that was technically sound. On the other hand, there had to be some sense of contribution, right?
    In any case, it turns out that I actually lacked the expertise to review it from a technical perspective. But I had already agreed, so I did my best. Can't remember what the outcome was anyway.
    So on this incident, it left a poor impression of the journal on me.
  2. There was a paper that explored social causation of gender dysphoria (as opposed to psychological or physiological) from a researcher at Brown University that stirred up some controversy and got published in PLOS ONE because I think it couldn't get published anywhere else. In my effort to understand the science behind transgenderism, I read this paper. I thought it was a pretty decent paper (for the first paper to explore a topic from that angle, anyway) that raised important questions about the causal factors for transgender identification among teenage girls. IMO it shouldn't have stirred the controversy that it did, and I was glad I got to read it.
    So that left a positive impression of the journal on me.
Just wondering because I had always been curious about the legitimacy of this journal.
No one in my field would take it seriously or want to publish there either (nor would I, because I would not gain any reputation or internal credit for it). But some of its principles seem good to me.
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