By Alastair Creelman. An article in Inside Higher Ed, Puzzling peer reviews, highlights supposed dangers of open access publications. John Bohannon of Harvard University wrote a deliberately flawed biology article using a fictitious name and non-existent institution and submitted it to over 300 open access publications. It was accepted by about half of them (read a longer description of the experiment can be found in Science, Who's afraid of peer review?). The article was written as part of a survey to see how much peer review was involved in the rapidly expanding open access journal market and the results cast a serious shadow over many of them. It contained serious scientific flaws that would be obvious to any academic in the field so the journals who accepted it had clearly not carried out any sort of serious peer review. Interestingly it was not only obscure journals that failed the test, even journals run by the big academic publishers fell for the trap. More...
World Bank and Coursera to Partner on Open Learning
The World Bank has signed an agreement with Coursera, a leading provider of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs), to help meet the demand for practical solutions-oriented learning on pressing issues in developing countries. Ending extreme poverty within a generation and boosting shared prosperity among the bottom 40 percent of the population in developing countries are the goals guiding the World Bank Group's work.
These Massive Open Online Courses will be offered as part of the new Open Learning Campus being built by the World Bank, where practitioners, development partners, and the general public can more systematically access real-time, relevant and world-class learning. The Bank has offered e-learning successfully through its e-institute in critical areas of development, such as health, education, urban development and climate change, and is now planning to scale up its offerings through the Campus and through partnerships with regional and country-based institutions and via innovative delivery vehicles. This partnership with Coursera will give people across the globe easier access to valuable, evidence-based knowledge on complex development problems. Working together with 91 educational institutions across four continents, Coursera now offers more than 450 free online college-level courses to 5 million students around the world. More...