Chronicle of Higher Education, Lila Guterman
Published June 22, 2006
ACCESS EXPANDING: Like elite colleges, top scientific journals often advertise their rejection rates to show how exclusive they are. But the open-access publisher Public Library of Science is now moving in the opposite direction. PLoS is starting a multidisciplinary journal in August that will publish papers no matter how unimportant their results are.
The multidisciplinary online journal, PLoS ONE (
http://www.plosone.org), will concentrate on speedy review and publication of just about anything that editors deem scientifically sound. Online discussions, along with reader ratings, will accompany published papers to give readers a sense of the papers' importance.
When editors of other journals receive a manuscript, says Christopher D. Surridge, managing editor of the new journal, they often have to say, "'It should be published, but not in this journal.' That's not something we want PLoS ONE ever to say."
Each manuscript will be reviewed by a member of the editorial board which numbers 59 and is growing who will decide whether or not to publish the paper or to seek comments from external reviewers. The Web technology should allow the journal to grow as large as it needs to, regardless of the number of submissions it receives. Mr. Surridge plans to recruit enough editors so that each will consider two or fewer manuscripts a month.
The journal covers all of science, but Mr. Surridge who left the journal Nature last year to work on PLoS ONE does not see it as a direct competitor to the leading journals Nature and Science, although he does hope that PLoS ONE will publish papers that could have appeared there. "We'll also be publishing papers that could have been published in some obscure journal like Canadian Limnology," he says. "We're providing a journal that's parallel to almost the entire hierarchy of journals we have at the moment."
But PLoS doesn't want to be alone in its efforts. Its online technology is open source, so it can be used by others. "PLoS's mission," says Mr. Surridge, "is to get as much of the literature into an open-access environment as possible," whether PLoS publishes it or not.
The publisher revealed PLoS ONE just two days after Nature announced a three-month experiment allowing users to add online comments to manuscripts under consideration for publication. Perhaps Nature anticipated the online competition? "That was not the impetus," says Linda J. Miller, U.S. executive editor of Nature and the Nature Publishing Group's research journals.
Mr. Surridge says both journals were reacting to users' demand for online services. "This really fits in with where the Web is going," says Mr. Surridge.
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PUBLISHING MEETS BROCKOVICH: The peer-reviewed Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine plans next month to retract a 1997 paper that was prepared by corporate consultants but did not acknowledge their contribution.
"This was a violation of editorial policy in terms of disclosure," says Paul W. Brandt-Rauf, the journal's editor, who is also a professor and chairman of Columbia University's department of environmental health sciences.
It is the first time the journal has retracted a paper because of disclosure violations. "It is possible," says the planned notice of retraction, "that full knowledge of the circumstances may have altered the review process or the subsequent interpretation of the study by readers."
The paper in question listed two authors, Chinese scientists, one of whom had written a paper in a Chinese journal demonstrating an association between cancer and exposure to a form of chromium. The 1997 paper reached the opposite conclusion.
The Environmental Working Group, a Washington-based watchdog organization, told Dr. Brandt-Rauf late last year that the 1997 paper had actually been written by consultants for the PG&E Corporation, which was a defendant in a lawsuit charging it with releasing chromium into groundwater. The lawsuit, which the company later settled, was dramatized in the 2000 movie Erin Brockovich.
The 1997 study, says Bill Walker, a vice president of the group, helped proponents of looser drinking-water standards temporarily head off regulations in California regarding the amount of chromium allowed in water. The study also affected decisions by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency on whether to permit chromium to be included in wood preservatives. "Our main concern," he says, "was trying to set the record straight about this particular contaminant."
The advocacy group says it has amassed documents demonstrating fraud in the published paper. Dr. Brandt-Rauf responds, "We have no evidence of scientific fraud."
The Wall Street Journal was the first news outlet to report the planned retraction, calling the event "a black eye for scientific publishing."
But Mr. Walker defends the journal. "They are the victim in all this," he says. "We don't believe that any taint should be pointed at them."
