November 2, 2015 — A leading critic of “open access” academic journals has cited the publication of an article on HIV dissidence in Frontiers in Public Health as one reason he has questioned that publisher’s integrity. Texas A&M Professor Patricia Goodson talked with “How Positive Are You” about the uproar over that article in its Episode 98 of March 11, 2015.

Was Frontiers singled out for its willingness to publish controversial views?

Academic librarian Jeffrey Beall of the University of Colorado Denver keeps an online “blacklist” of open access publishers with “potential, possible or probable” ethical problems, Scholarly Open Access. Beall suspects these may engage in “predatory” business practices and pay-to-play article selection. In an October 18 social media “tweet,” he announced he had added the Frontiers group of scholarly publications to his list “following wide disapproval from scientists.” (A full report on this is here.)

Open access journals are so called because they grant the public unrestricted access to their articles over the Internet. The journals cannot then depend on subscriptions from professionals in these fields to sustain the business. Rather, authors pay to publish. Some journals have even solicited authors’ business. This practice is widely criticized, as it not only preys on unsuspecting authors seeking more legitimate publishing opportunities but also may bias the acceptance and peer review processes, corrupting scientific information.

While charging a fee is not necessarily a corrupt practice and, says HPAY co-host David Crowe, these days “mainstream journals even charge fees” (after acceptance), the potential for abuse in the open access model is big. However, Beall’s criticisms of Frontiers seem have focused on its publication of two controversial articles: Prof. Goodson’s survey of 30 years of HIV dissidence and one related to “conspiracist ideation” on climate change.

(Frontiers has retracted the climate change article — based not on research integrity but because “the legal context is insufficiently clear.” Surprisingly, the article seems to have positioned itself against climate change “deniers,” the unpopular camp in the debate, by analyzing their alleged “conspiracist” way of thinking. It’s not hard to imagine the kind of “legal context” around one group of researchers analyzing the alleged “conspiracist” mindset of its scientific opponents.)

“Open access journals have shifted the burden,” says David. “Even the PLoS journals charge [authors] over $1,000 per article.”

Veteran journalist and former HPAY co-host Terry Michael is more disturbed about the practice: “I am a purist on this. If a publication seeks any kind of financial consideration from an author in the approval process, it has compromised its journalistic integrity.” Approving articles before seeking payment seems to raise fewer ethical concerns in the scholarly community, but the distinction is thin.

The owners of respected titles including Science, Lancet and Nature now put out many open access medical specialty journals, according to Virginia Tech Professor Emeritus Henry H. Bauer. (Nature Publishing Group partially and indirectly owns Frontiers.) Dr. Bauer tells us he is working on a paper on the topic. (He discussed his views on scientific “dogmatism” in general in Episode 56 of January 10, 2013.)

A report in Nature remarked: “Critics spoke out against Beall’s blacklisting of Frontiers, maintaining that the open access publisher is legitimate and reputable and does offer proper peer review.”

Far from perceiving that Frontiers has been predatory, Prof. Goodson reports she is satisfied with the “fair” way in which it handled protests to her article, if not the result. It demoted the piece to the opinion category, published a rebuttal from a researcher on the other side of the issue, and has since published several more. Frontiers refunded the publication fee back to the university without being asked, she says.

However, Beall has been concerned about Frontiers as early as 2013, when he quoted from e-mails received about suspicious peer-review invitations it allegedly sent to academic researchers. Then again, we note that the 2013 concerns came between publication of the above-mentioned article on climate change “deniers” and its retraction. Could the concerns have resulted from a coordinated attack by offended scientists? Beall has redacted their names from the complaints he quotes.

[CORRECTION, November 4, 2015: A previous version of this report stated at this point that “Beall did not respond to a request for comment.” In fact, Beall did respond with a detailed e-mail to HPAY co-host Elizabeth Ely, and this was lost in an incorrect e-mail account. We regret the error and have revised this article as shown below. Reporting a failure to respond to a request for comment is not an accusation of wrongdoing, in any journalistic context. We apologize for this mishap.]

[ADDITION, November 5, 2015:] 

“Over time, and regularly, people have emailed me advising me to add the publisher to my list,” writes Beall in an e-mail. “I was unable to confirm all of their allegations they included in their requests, but the allegations are disturbing nonetheless.” He cites as an example allegations that authors and reviewers have collaborated on research, a clear violation of generally accepted peer review standards.

In addition, Beall recommended a blog article detailing widespread concerns over the Frontiers group since a large change in editorial staff. (Another one citing abuses in Digital Humanities is here. A more general objection is here.)

One commenter on that blog was quick to point out ethical issues even at “traditional journals,” “some of which acted much worse in their choices of peer reviewer or in pressuring me to sign off on deficient and even plagiarized manuscripts.”

Even so, Beall notes the special temptation of open access: “The publishers, for the most part, use the gold  (author pays) OA model, so the more papers they accept, the more money they make. Many publishers have been started up just to earn quick and easy money from researchers.”

While these concerns seem legitimate and widespread — not just the work of organized groups with particular scientific agendas — Beall also says his decision was influenced by blogs that have criticized the content of published articles such as Professor Goodson’s. HPAY co-host Elizabeth Ely noticed among these a few of the better known attackers of any meaningful scientific debate on HIV science. (These include Drs. Tara Smith and Kenneth Witwer; Dr. Smith states that HPAY co-founder Christine Maggiore “died of AIDS,” which an autopsy long ago disproved.)

“There may be problems with reviewers at these publications, but neither do a few blogs protesting the very existence of AIDS rethinking – sneeringly called ‘denialism’ – constitute meaningful peer review,” she says, continuing:

Scientific consensus might form, dangerously, around ideas simply because the more powerful and respected persons in the field hold them. None of these critics address the substantive points of disagreement, for instance, on whether accurate and specific tests for HIV exist. Current tests look for surrogate markers such as antibody concentrations and bits of RNA (sold as “viral load” tests). They have not been validated back to the presence of virus under an electron microscope.

HPAY announced Dr. David Rasnick’s effort to conduct this research in Episode 103.

Dr. Bauer, though sharing Beall’s concerns about open access publishing, suggests a line might have been crossed:

Beall should not try to get into judging who is right on substantive issues unless he has himself dug into the evidence. Perhaps he would be surprised, like many other people, to see what the official figures are for how “HIV” is supposed to be transmitted. It is quite obviously impossible for this “transmissibility” to lead to any sort of epidemic. It is scientific malpractice to pretend otherwise. Those who defame “denialists” with personal attacks ought to explain how these officially promulgated “transmissibility” numbers  allow anyone to claim that “HIV” caused an epidemic of “AIDS.”

[End of ADDITION]

More resources:

• Frontiers’ own account of itself as a “grass-roots initiative” to expand access to scientific information appears here.
• An unusually detailed debate on open access publishing appears in the blog comments to this 2013 post by Library Journal.