Tuesday, October 15, 2013

Online Medical Journals Accept Fake Study: Could the Public Be Hurt?

A fake study that was accepted at dozens of medical journals for a fee has experts worried that lax oversight of published studies could affect the health of patients searching for medical answers online.

The fake paper was written by John Bohannon, a science journalist who received his doctorate in molecular biology at the University of Oxford. Bohannon submitted the paper to 302 open-access medical journals as an experiment over 10 months.
The results of Bohannon’s experiment were published in Science, a peer-reviewed general science publication that charges subscription fees.

“I chose, for the start of this, to [target] open-access publishers who charge fees for scientists to publish,” Bohannon told ABCNews.com. “Acceptances kept on coming more frequently than rejections. … I thought it would be more like 10 percent.”

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