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Vitek Tracz, our chairman, founder and all-round science publishing firebrand, has been interviewed by Science in their latest issue: Communication in Science Pressure and Predators. The interview provides an insight into the man who has become famous for his experimental approach to scientific publishing and his willingness to challenge the status quo.

In the interview, Vitek charts his diverse professional life, from his first postgraduate project, Medi-Cine (which made educational films for doctors) through to his move to publishing and the creation of BioMed Central, to his current work challenging traditional peer review with F1000Research.

This latest Science issue also has a nice article that highlights the importance of publishing negative results and the paucity of outlets that accept such results; topical as F1000Research is one of the few journals that accept negative results for publication.

However, the article that has generated the greatest reverberations is the undercover sting conducted by John Bohannon.

Bohannon submitted a spoof paper (on the anti-cancer properties of various lichens), that contained multiple, basic scientific errors, to 305 open access journals listed in DOAJ; 157 let this Trojan horse in, 98 rejected it and 49 did not provide an answer. (The article was not submitted to F1000Research – we were not yet listed in DOAJ in October 2012 when Bohannon selected his targets, though we are now.)

The sting was geared up towards assessing the quality of peer-review in open access journals and some have interpreted this as a failing of open access per se, though it is impossible to conclude this, as Bohannon didn’t target any subscription-based journals. Rather, the high proportion of journals that accepted the spoof appears to be due to a failing of closed peer-review, not open access. Peer review is a safety net, put in place to catch out scientific errors, both of the intentional and honest kind. However, in a closed system, there is no way for readers to assess the quality of this safety net or that there is even a net at all (just because a journal states it ensures peer review doesn’t mean this is the case). Further, in a closed system, there are no repercussions or disincentives if a reviewer only checks a paper half-heartedly. As such, this closed environment may have facilitated the acceptance of Bohannon’s fake article.

PLOS cofounder Michael Eisen makes a similar observation in response to Bohannon’s article, and writes on his blog: “If we had, instead, a system where the review process was transparent and persisted for the useful life of a work (…), none of the flaws exposed in Bohannon’s piece would matter.”

F1000Research recognizes the importance of transparent peer review, and publishes all of its non-anonymized referee reports alongside the main article. An openly viewable referee report is a quality control stamp in itself; it not only proves that the article has indeed been through peer review, but also allows the quality of the reviews to be assessed by a wide, informed audience of readers. As the referee’s name is associated with their report, it is expected that they will take more care in critically appraising the article, as a good, open report can enhance a referee’s reputation – and there are fewer incentives more potent than reputation.

As Vitek notes in his interview, traditional peer review is “sick and collapsing under its own weight”; transparency is the remedy it needs.