Having been one who chose to publish a work in one of the OMICS journals, this adds further disappointment. Whoever is in charge of responding to complaints and requests for corrections always seems to be sound asleep at OMICS.
Still, each journal has different editors. Not all these people are bad. Some of the editors on their editorial boards have published good work. As an author, I certainly have confidence in my own work that was published there. As Benjamin Franklin said of his work to an editor “If my hypothesis is not the truth, it is at least naked; for I have not with some of our learned moderns disguis’d my nonsense in Greek, cloth’d it in algebra or adorned it with fluxions.” I stand by that, though my work does have Greek symbols, algebra and derivatives (fluxon notation is still used for time derivatives in mechanics but the more common notation is the one developed by Liebnez).
On the published work mentioned in this blog, it is odd that an editor would agree to pass this without much serious scrutiny. The title might have jargogled (hoodwinked) the editor, but the citation list (aside from some compendiums) consists of nearly half self references. It is fair for an author to cite his/her own work. However, just on the face of it, a red flag should have popped up when the editor looked at the citation list and noticed that the author does not cite any opponents (or differing views) and the other citations are only distantly related. On such a controversial topic, there should be some comment about opposing views and why the author disagrees. Moreover, it is hard to see how Google scholar would dig up these facts and only this one individual has somehow stumbled on this amazing (internet) finding. Maybe, but really? Hence, the editor doesn’t have to know the details of the subject matter to question whether this might be the work of a crank. These are some things that I can see right away even not being an expert on the subject matter itself.
If the editor wanted to permit alternative views, it would have been better to say so somewhere.
One must keep in mind always that caveat emptor applies to all articles in all journals, whether that is OMICS or Nature or Science. It is still the job of the reader to decide for himself/herself which works contain gold and which are dross. In other words, no journal is dross free.
