linking back to brembs.net






My lab:
lab.png
I'm an ardent supporter of and campaigner for the Open Access movement. I try to support any member of this movement as much as I can. However, I just finished a review of a manuscript for BMC Neuroscience and I must say this will have to be my last review for this journal. The paper itself wasn't so outrageous (it was peculiar, with figures more similar to a student lab-report than a professional manuscript and with rather sub-standard methods, but while unusual that's not unusual ebnough to warrant a blog post), but the questions I was supposed to answer once I had filled in the form with my review were ludicrous. Among them was this gem:
Level of interest

BMC Neuroscience has a policy of publishing work deemed by peer reviewers to be a coherent and sound addition to scientific knowledge and to put less emphasis on interest levels, provided that the research constitutes a useful contribution to the field. If you choose one of the first three categories below, we may ask the authors if they would like the manuscript considered instead for the more selective journal BMC Biology.

  • An exceptional article (of the kind that might have warranted publication in such journals as Nature, Cell, Science, New England Journal of Medicine, British Medical Journal)
  • An article of outstanding merit and interest in its field (of the kind that might be found in the leading specialist journal in its field, such as Immunity, Development, Journal of Clinical Investigation, Gastroenterology)
  • An article of importance in its field
  • An article whose findings are important to those with closely related research interests
  • An article of limited interest
  • An article of insufficient interest to warrant publication in a scientific/medical journal
The question itself is ridiculous, as every person has a different opinion on what should and shouldn't be published in the GlamMagz and surely BMC Neuroscience is not recruiting sufficiently large numbers of reviewers to do some meaningful, representative statistics?

The sort of journals they list is also very funny, refering to 'Immunity' or 'Gastroenterology' as a point of reference for a reviewer reviewing a paper in the field of neuroscience. I didn't even know there was a journal called 'Gastroenterology' (although no journal name surprises me, given that there are about 24,000 of them).

Since they were so keen on the journal hierarchy thing, I went and checked the dreaded Impact Factors of some of the journals they mentioned as well as those of BMC Neuroscience and BMC Biology. Not even BMC Biology is even close to the journals they list as comparisons. BMC Biology 'ranks' right next to such well-known classics as "Clinical Gastroenterology and Hepatology" or "Ageing Research Reviews". What were they thinking to accomplish with this question, other than alienating their reviewers and making them lol? elated.png

This way of thinking in journal hierarchies has to stop. Now.
Posted on Thursday 03 February 2011 - 17:30:39 comment: 0
{TAGS}


You must be logged in to make comments on this site - please log in, or if you are not registered click here to signup
Render time: 0.0715 sec, 0.0064 of that for queries.