All the serious climate science blogs have articles debunking the "peer review" that alarmists
just love to quote. See next post.

http://sciencepolicy.colorado.edu/pr...cess-fees-5517

Paging Captain Renault - Research Journal Out for Access Fees
June 10, 2009, 13:58:28 | David Bruggeman

The Scientist is the source of our Casablanca flashback, with its report that an open access
journal published by Bentham was willing to publish a 'nonsense' paper that supposedly passed peer
review. A Ph.D. student in science communications and a staffer at The New England Journal of
Medicine have been testing journals peer review practices by submitting papers generated by
computer program. They document this particular incident on their blog. In short, the journal
agreed to publish the article, if the authors paid the fee, and asserted it had passed peer review.

At a minimum the publisher Bentham is guilty of allowing journals to assert peer review when none
had taken place. The scamming conclusion is reasonable, given the reports. I'm not in agreement
that open access journals are necessarily more suspect of putting out supposedly peer-reviewed
articles that weren't so reviewed. Yes, they do charge more fees than traditional journals (who
could be scamming authors for photo and chart fees, amongst other things), but an open access
journal is not more likely to skimp on peer review than any other journal.

What bothers me is that it has to take generating obviously lousy articles to ferret out derelict
peer review. Given the volume of scientific publishing, there's an enormous amount of implicit
trust in the processes behind these articles that people will continue to exploit. I wish I had
even the germ of a possible solution here.