Publishing: The Peer-review scam - 2 views
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#1 Alexandra Finch on 28 Nov 14http://www.nature.com/news/publishing-the-peer-review-scam-1.16400
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#2 Alexandra Finch on 28 Nov 14a. An unfortunate phenomenon is emerging in scholarly publishing: the artificial or contrived peer review. Ferguson, et al., report the emerging issue affecting several peer review systems used by academic journals. The core of the issue concerns the author suggestion of peer reviewers, which in some cases, has been found to be colleagues, family, acquaintances of the author, or even the author themselves under a pseudonym. Security breaches in the commonly used ScholarOne peer review software has resulted in the creation of fake peer reviewer accounts. Verification services, like ORCID (Open Researcher and Contributor ID), are designed to track researchers, regardless of institutional changes, throughout their research and verify their identities. This sort of system is not widely adopted in the research community, yet it appears to be a promising asset in the fight against fraudulent peer-review entries. However, this sort of occurrence signifies a weakness in the current dominant system of scholarly publishing.
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