Opening Pandora's box: cause and impact of errors on plant pigment studies

Abstract

Today, there is an astonishing volume of scientific information available for researchers, which can be easily accessed through powerful search tools. Yet, the question now is whether all this vast amount of information is reliable. In this sense, a “bad science” controversy arose recently when many Open Access (OA) journals (more than a half) published a false, error-ridden paper, which had been submitted in order to test the publishing ethics of these journals (Bohannon, 2013). This fake article was published mainly by fraudulent journals, but it was also accepted by a number of OA journals of renowned publishers with peer-review systems. The failure to reject an article full of errors revealed that the system's gearbox is leaking somewhere. The carelessness of peer-reviews in a number of OA journals has opened a Pandora's Box, and what is more disconcerting, nobody can guarantee that it could not also affect regular journals (non OA). Traditionally, it has been assumed that scientific journals should detect and correct all these failings through the peer review before publication. Regrettably, as we show in this communication, the system is far from being perfect (Pulverer, 2010; Székely et al., 2014).