The status quo want to discredit any journal that gives access to the majority of scientists to publish their works. First it was PlosOne. Now it is oncotarget. But the so-called prestigious journals with so-called rigorous peer review publish more papers with a few zip codes or post codes. Count the number of universities that publish in the so-called top ten scientific journals and you will realize that those so-called top journals are also an old boy’s club! Open access publishing is the future of science. Why are people so afraid of information being published? If the science is bad and published anyway, it does not matter because science is self-correcting and soon we will know that it is bad science. What what good is it to society to block publication of works that could be good science but prevented from being published because it does not come from a prestigious university or the authors are not connected?
The world does not need a few opinionated people to tell the millions of scientists what is good science and what is not. So stop your crusade of trying to suppress the free publication of information and scientific censorship!
But you can’t convince me that all the other papers in other journals that are citing papers published in oncotarget are doing so because of some grand conspiracy. concentrate on your own research and advance science, rather than waste time criticizing people who want to give scientists the platform to publish their works.
I can give you several examples of papers published in Science and Nature that were retracted because it was junk science. Do you remember the paper about Arsenate in DNA. Of course editors and peer reviewers make mistakes so lets not waste our time always criticizing every mistake journals or editors make.
Why don’t we all publish our works without any “gatekeepers” and then let the public decide what is good science and what is not via citations and paper downloads and reproducibility?