By Poncie Rutsch
BU News Service

As pop culture would tell you, scientists are old white guys with crazy hair. While that perspective is heavily biased (my hair is crazy, but not white), it isn’t totally unfounded.

The people who make science share their knowledge through academic journals, which traditionally take their contents very seriously. The journals accept science by peer review, meaning that the most prestigious, whitest haired, top-of-the-line scientists make sure the contents of the journal are up to snuff. And you can only read the journal if you, as part of the scientific elite, choose to pay for access.

But this model is outdated…or so would say the open access journals, which sprung to popularity about a decade ago. Open access journals claim their goal is to remove legal, financial, and technical barriers between people and their science. The only thing keeping people from reading the contents should be access to the internet itself.

The problem is, open access journals don’t have quite as spiffy a reputation as traditional journals. And this was what inspired the recent efforts of John Bohannon.

John wrote a spoof paper and sent it to hundreds of open access publishers. 157 published it. And then Science published him.

“Any reviewer with more than a high-school knowledge of chemistry and the ability to understand a basic data plot should have spotted the paper’s short-comings immediately,” John writes. “Its experiments are so hopelessly flawed that the results are meaningless.”

John submitted a paper that proclaimed a new wonder drug. He set up the paper with a simple formula: “Molecule X from lichen species Y inhibits the growth of cancer cell Z.” He substituted each variable with molecules, lichens, and cancer cell lines to create hundreds of papers. Each was unique enough to not attract attention, but the structure was similar enough to be used as a constant in John’s investigation. He submitted the paper using false names and institutions that he generated randomly from databases of common African names, words in Swahili, and African capital cities.

He included the same flaws in each paper – data that showed the opposite of his conclusions, an obvious lapse in the methods, and a control group that didn’t receive one of the constant level of radiation as the others.

Over 150 open access journals accepted the fake paper. John writes that over 250 of his papers went through an editing process, but that 60% showed no sign of peer review.

The final verdict is that open access journals have a long way to go. There may in fact be some merits to the peer-review system…even if you have to pay to get in.

You can also see John’s paper at BMJ. But of course, you’ll have to pay to get in.

Also, here’s a history of open access journals, courtesy of the wise people of tumblr:

By Cassie Martin
BU News Service

In January, footage of the elusive giant squid in its natural habitat aired on the Discovery Channel. Researchers captured the video in July 2012, more than a mile and a half below the surface 600 miles south of Tokyo, Japan. The last time anyone saw a giant squid alive was in 2006, when Japanese researchers caught a 25-foot female squid and brought it to the surface to photograph, but it died soon after. For a creature that usually lives 3,300 feet underwater, coming to the surface is deadly. Is it possible that the squid was a victim of the bends, an illness common to scuba divers?

The answer is no. The bends, also known as decompression illness, occurs when the diver is put under immense external pressure from deep dives then rises to the surface too quickly. The sudden release of pressure forces dissolved gasses inhaled from the atmosphere, like nitrogen, to bubble up in tissue and blood effectively starving the body of oxygen.

Giant squid don’t inhale nitrogen from the atmosphere; in fact, they don’t have a trace of gas in them. Many invertebrates use gas bladders to float and move deep underwater. However, giant squid are unique. Because the pressure in their habitat is so high, a gas bladder would implode. Since there is no gas for pressure to act on, giant squid cannot get the bends. But they have to keep afloat somehow. Instead of gas, squid re-purpose ammonium ions from their waste to keep buoyant in the water column. Ammonium ions are lighter than the sodium ions in seawater, so they avoid sinking to the sea floor or floating to the surface by adjusting the concentration of ions.

But if they aren’t affected by pressure, then why can’t they survive at the surface? Giant squid thrive in a deep, cold, and dark environment. Oxygen is hard to find deep beneath the ocean surface, but cold water has a high affinity for holding dissolved oxygen, which the squid needs to survive. The shallower the water gets, the warmer it gets and the less dissolved oxygen it holds. If a squid surfaced, its blood would become de-oxygenated and it would likely suffocate to death.

However, there is evidence that the giant squid’s mortal enemy, the sperm whale, is susceptible to decompression illness. Sperm whales are ferocious hunters of giant squid—the beaks of squid have been found in the stomachs of beached whales and scars from battle have been observed on their bodies. Whales will dive as deep as 10,500 feet and stay down for an hour or more. If they rise too quickly, nitrogen bubbles will form and cause bone damage. According to researchers at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute, that’s just the hazard of doing business. Researchers inspected a collection of sperm whale bones spanning more than a hundred years. The researchers noticed the bones all had one thing in common—pitting and lesions, indicating the whales may have suffered chronic but mild decompression illness.