{"id":2354,"date":"2016-10-04T16:50:26","date_gmt":"2016-10-04T16:50:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/trading-knowledge\/?p=2354"},"modified":"2016-10-04T16:50:26","modified_gmt":"2016-10-04T16:50:26","slug":"rapid-or-vapid","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/trading-knowledge\/2016\/10\/04\/rapid-or-vapid\/","title":{"rendered":"Rapid or vapid?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Someone recently asked me what I thought about the open access journal Molecular Metabolism<\/em>. I had just delivered a short talk to a group of researchers as a reminder about our open access policy and what my team could do to help them make sure their research was published open access.<\/p>\n

Well, I didn\u2019t think anything about Molecular Metabolism<\/em> as I had never come across it before. In case you wondered, it\u2019s been going since 2012 and has been published monthly for the past 2 years and more, so it seems to be reasonably well-established. Over that time it’s published about 350 articles, some of them having modest citation impact but nothing earth-shattering. \u00a0It’s not exciting in any way, but it seems an entirely worthy publishing venue. It is supported by the German Center for Diabetes Research<\/a> (DZD) and the Helmholtz Diabetes Centre<\/a>\u00a0so\u00a0it has roots in the diabetes and metabolism research community. And it\u2019s published by Elsevier as a fully OA journal.<\/p>\n

On the journal’s website<\/a> it describes itself as<\/p>\n

a platform reporting breakthroughs from all stages of the discovery and development of novel and improved personalized medicines for obesity, diabetes and associated diseases.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

As well as being an OA journal it has adopted a rapid publication model. \u00a0Its peer review instructions\u00a0require reviews to be delivered in 72 hours<\/strong>. Reviewers are asked <\/a>only\u00a0to accept, reject, or suggest minor revisions.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

My enquirer outlined this rapid process and asked what I thought. It seemed a good model to me. It\u2019s not a high grade journal, so long rounds of manuscript revision would be a waste of everyone\u2019s time. The option to reject papers is still there.<\/p>\n

My enquirer had been invited to review an article submitted to the journal. His response was that the journal must be a scam. He viewed their rapid review policy as an invitation to reviewers to accept substandard papers. My sense was that he was also implying a Bohannonian subtext of \u201cand all OA journals must be rubbish, innit?\u201d. \u00a0I suspect he has the same view about\u00a0PLOS ONE<\/em>.<\/p>\n

This little exchange gave me more information about the person asking the question than about the journal he enquired of. It seems a shame that in some quarters OA, and the idea of the ‘sound science’ peer review is still regarded with such suspicion.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Someone recently asked me what I thought about the open access journal Molecular Metabolism. I had just delivered a short talk to a group of researchers as a reminder about our open access policy and what my team could do … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":17,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,5,44],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2354","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-journal-publishing","category-open-access","category-peer-review"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/trading-knowledge\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2354","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/trading-knowledge\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/trading-knowledge\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/trading-knowledge\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/17"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/trading-knowledge\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2354"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/trading-knowledge\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2354\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/trading-knowledge\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2354"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/trading-knowledge\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2354"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/trading-knowledge\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2354"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}