An exposé which found that a Wiley journal had likely published articles written by Russian-linked paper mills and vetted by fake reviewers has highlighted the case for making open peer review mandatory, one of the academic sleuths behind the investigation has said.
In a study that analysed six papers “with serious flaws” published last year in the Journal of Community Psychology, Anna Abalkina, a research fellow at Free University of Berlin, and Dorothy Bishop, who recently retired as professor of development neuropsychology at the University of Oxford, state that “none would be published if proper peer review and editorial scrutiny had taken place”.
