Who's Afraid of Peer Review?

Between January and June 2013, Science contributing correspondent John Bohannon submitted 304 fake research papers to open access journals. The papers were designed with such grave scientific flaws that they should have been rejected immediately by editors and peer reviewers.

Click for interactive figure.

This map shows which journals accepted or rejected the papers, along with the email correspondences that led to those outcomes. Using data from email IP addresses and bank invoices, it also compares the countries where publishers claim to be with the location of their editors and bank accounts—information that is frequently obscured by open access publishers.

Read the full report here: http://www.sciencemag.org/content/342/6154/60.full

Citation: J. Bohannon, "Who's Afraid of Peer Review?" Science 342, 60-65 (2013)

The fake papers used for this project were created with help from Nicholas Douris (1), Shangyu Hong (1), ffolliott Martin Fisher (1), Olga Dudchenko (2),(3),(4), Elena Stamenova (2),(3),(4), Jim Robinson (2),(3),(4), Miriam Huntley (2),(3),(4), Benjamin MacDonald Schmidt (2),(3),(4),(5),(6), Adrian Sanborn (2),(3),(4), Ivan Bochkov (2),(3),(4), and Erez Lieberman Aiden (2),(3),(4)

• (1) Harvard Medical School, Boston, Massachusetts
• (2) School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts
• (3) Baylor College of Medicine, Houston, Texas
• (4) Rice University, Houston, Texas
• (5) Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, Cambridge, Massachusetts
• (6) College of Social Science and Humanities, Northeastern University, Boston, Massachusetts

Data

These data sets were curated by John Bohannon and Kelly Servick.

Summary data spreadsheet [data_summary.zip] (57 KB) documentation [data_summary_readme.txt]

Papers [papers.zip] (15 MB) documentation [papers_readme.txt]

Emails [emails.zip] (268 MB) documentation [emails_readme.txt]