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Comment on Relationships between Depression and High Intellectual Potential (2012)

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I was mildly appalled that such a low quality article made it onto the frontpage of HN, a psychological study that starts off by talking about Aristotle and les quatres humeurs scores high on my bullshit detection algorithm.

But I thought the publishers name sounded familiar and went googling and found http://www.the-scientist.com/?articles.view/articleNo/32426/...

Which contains this gem:

"""Bolstering this trend is the so-called “gold open-access” model, in which publishing is supported not by subscription fees but by author fees. An example of a gold open-access journal is The Scientific World Journal, currently published by Cairo-based Hindawi Publishing Corporation. This megajournal covers virtually all scientific fields and imposes an article processing charge of $1,000 for each accepted article. Similarly, the better-known Public Library of Science (PLoS) journals charge authors anywhere from $1,350 to $2,900 to publish, with a discount if the researcher is affiliated with a university that is an institutional member."""

So effectively, if you are giving this article your attention, you are supporting a sketchy vanity press that does not appear to engage in the same level of peer review as more traditional journals, open-access or not.

There are many problems with the golden model (like really golden prices if you compare them to their real costs), but it is not true that it implies bad quality -- greed does. Springer's BMC for instance is golden and quite reliable, while Elsevier lives from subscriptions and does even worse things than Hindawi.

Irrespective of individual publications, the pay to publish model is trying to take down the huge publishers charging outrageous fees to subscribers and should not be immediately taken to be an indication of low quality.

See also: "Pay To Play" in live music.

You see this article has a catchy title with no actual content, and it did quite well on the HN that is sort of exposing. Next time I'll read the article before submitting it, sorry.

> Next time I'll read the article before submitting it, sorry.

So what was your thought process in submitting that article?

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