One of my student colleagues posted this sheet on a forum regarding ‘Evaluating online material’ http://www.rbs0.com/credible.pdf. One thing it highlights is how readers should not use peer review as a reason to skip the evaluation process and advises that they “can, and should, make their own evaluation of credibility, even if the work has been endorsed by peer review”. I have always known that there have been incidents where professionals have used inaccurate information or have plagiarised, but I have still tended to think of peer reviewed articles as having almost a guarantee of credibility. This week I spotted the following article which has made me question this idea even more http://www.theguardian.com/higher-education-network/2013/oct/04/open-access-journals-fake-paper . The article states that a fake scientific paper of poor quality was sent to 304 open access journals. It was accepted by 157 of the journals and rejected by 98. 106 journals conducted peer review and 70% of these accepted the paper.
I do find this a cause for great concern. The amount of information that is available is growing at such a phenomenal rate (you can see the astonishing figures here http://www.emc.com/leadership/programs/digital-universe.htm ) it is essential that there are methods in place for verification. When the methods we are using, like peer review, appear to be failing, how are we ever going to know what information we can or can’t trust?