Previously, I have understood this was a concern mostly with the so-called "open-access" journals.
In 2013, the Science Magazine went to some extreme lengths to discredit these journals, that more often than not seem to lack any form of scientific peer review. A fake paper, published by a made-up person working for a non-existent university, purporting to describe a cancer drug extracted from lichen, had experimental flaws that should be blatantly obvious to even an undergraduate of the field.
Of the 304 papers submitted, 157 were accepted and only 98 were rejected, with the rest not eliciting a timely reply. Only 36 papers received reviewer comments about the scientific shortcomings, and in 16 of those cases the paper was accepted anyway. Source: http://www.sciencemag.org/content/342/6154/60.full
It seems pretty shocking that even well-known publishers like IEEE and Springer are not alien to such obvious lack of peer review. Does it actually serve anyone's interest, that we have so many parallel "scientific" journals that publishers can't even find competent reviewers for a large number of the papers published? Does anyone follow the publications? Or are they all just a way to rip off institutional subscribers like universities, who must subscribe to all possible journals and pay outrageous sums to the publishers?
The paper you cite is a load of crap. And its author John Bohannon is a sell-out. Or at least I hope so for him, because if he compromised his intellectual faculties and his scientific reasoning for less than a very good place in hell, he is mad.
This paper makes and obviously false hypothesis: that the quality of a journal depends on it being open access or not, while clearly it depends on it being seriously peer-reviewed. The real question is: among peer-reviewed journals, are those which have an open access policy worse, better, or the same as the others? (My bet is that they are the same, since scientists/researchers doing the peer reviews have no more incentive to do it better in a case or another).
Bohannon shows his results in a way which can't say anything about that, mainly because he is comparing two things (open access and closed access journals) but only studied one of them and makes assumption about the other. With this level of scientific hypocrisy anyone can make numbers tell anything they want.
What I take from this article is that Science is scared of what is coming. Nothing else. If they were honest they would have titled it "Who's afraid of open access?" and the content would mainly be "us".
1. To prove that open access is worse than close access, you need to do experiments comparing both, not just do experiments on open access and say the results are bad. Try imagining a study using the same methodology to show that American journals are bad.
2. Even assuming that open-access journals on average are worse than closed-access journals, it does not follow that all open-access journals are crap. I think it is safe to say that 80% of all publications venues are crap regardless of their access policy. Fortunately, scientists usually do not choose a venue at random among open-access or closed-access ones, they pick those that have a good reputation. So to establish that open access is bad you should do so by evaluating the right venues.
To give another analogy, this is like looking at random emails in transit, observing that they are spam, and concluding that email is worse than Twitter, without observing anything on Twitter, or taking into account the fact that people are not reading random emails.
I think this study does exemplify the fact (well-known among scientists) that there is a huge mass of low-quality publication venues with little or no review of the submissions, but branding it as "open access is bad!" can only be explained by further political motives.
In 2013, the Science Magazine went to some extreme lengths to discredit these journals, that more often than not seem to lack any form of scientific peer review. A fake paper, published by a made-up person working for a non-existent university, purporting to describe a cancer drug extracted from lichen, had experimental flaws that should be blatantly obvious to even an undergraduate of the field.
Of the 304 papers submitted, 157 were accepted and only 98 were rejected, with the rest not eliciting a timely reply. Only 36 papers received reviewer comments about the scientific shortcomings, and in 16 of those cases the paper was accepted anyway. Source: http://www.sciencemag.org/content/342/6154/60.full
It seems pretty shocking that even well-known publishers like IEEE and Springer are not alien to such obvious lack of peer review. Does it actually serve anyone's interest, that we have so many parallel "scientific" journals that publishers can't even find competent reviewers for a large number of the papers published? Does anyone follow the publications? Or are they all just a way to rip off institutional subscribers like universities, who must subscribe to all possible journals and pay outrageous sums to the publishers?