tl;dr: Data from thousands of non-retracted articles indicate that experiments published in higher-ranking journals are less reliable than those reported in ‘lesser’ journals. Vox health reporter Julia Belluz has recently covered the reliability of peer-review.

Over the last decade or two, there have been multiple accounts of how publishers have negotiated the impact factors of their journals with the “Institute for Scientific Information” (ISI), both before it was bought by Thomson Reuters and after. This is commonly done by negotiating the articles in the denominator.

Science has infected itself (voluntarily!) with a life-threatening parasite. It has  given away its crown jewels, the scientific knowledge contained in the scholarly archives, to entities with orthogonal interests: corporate publishers whose fiduciary duty is not knowledge dissemination or scholarly communication, but profit maximization.

In the last “Science Weekly” podcast from the Guardian, the topic was retractions.  At about 20:29 into the episode, Hannah Devlin asked, whether the reason ‘top’ journals retract more articles may be because of increased scrutiny there. The underlying assumption is very reasonable, as many more eyes see each paper in such journals and the motivation to shoot down such high-profile papers might also be higher.

Arguably, there is little that could be more decisive for the career of a scientist than publishing a paper in one of the most high-profile journals such as Nature or Science . After all, in this competitive and highly specialized days, where a scientist is published all too often is more important than what they have published.

Barely a fortnight has passed since Science Magazine published the outcomes of a hoax perpetrated by one of their reporters, John Bohannon. Not surprisingly, the news article was widely criticized, not the least on this obscure blog. The content was simple enough: Bohannon picked a swath of largely fake journals, submitted fake manuscripts and boasted that more than 60% of his submissions were accepted.

By now, everybody reading this obscure blog knows about the so-called sting operation by John Bohannon in Science Magazine last week. As virtually everybody has pointed out, the outcome of this stunt is entirely meaningless.

Yesterday, Science Magazine published a news story (not a peer-reviewed paper) by Gonzo-Scientist John Bohannon on a sting operation in which a journalist submitted a bogus manuscript to 304 open access journals (observe that no toll access control group was used). Science Magazine reports that 157 journals accepted and 98 rejected the manuscript.

Rejection is one of the unpleasant but inevitable components of life. There are positive components to rejection: they build character, they force you to deal with negativity and sometimes they force you to change your life to avoid future rejections.

I’ve just been invited to edit a special issue in the MDPI journal ‘publications‘ on a topic I can specify. If I do it, I thought it should revolve around replacing journal rank (i.e., altmetrics, ALM, etc.) and other (technical?) means to transcend a journal-based literature towards a coherent knowledge-dissemination infrastructure that incorporates of course text, but also software and data.