Rebuttal articles are a vital part of the scientific publishing process, since they help weed out mistakes made by other researchers, usually honest errors, but sometimes not. But anyone wanting to publish rebuttals in open access titles that are funded through article processing charges (APCs), generally paid by the researcher’s academic institution, has to contend with an additional problem. In this case, as well as writing cogent explanations why published research is faulty, people who wish to publish a rebuttal must generally pay an APC to do so. The Web Ecology editorial gives details of a particular case where several scientists spent considerable time and effort rebutting an article in the open access journal Ecosphere.
Rebuttal article was peer-reviewed in Ecosphere, where it was accepted for publication. However, the authors of this reply were requested to pay an APC of USD 2100/GBP 1300/EUR 1700 for a rebuttal article that largely disproved the original publication. The authors of the reply, who had altruistically devoted significant time to writing their rebuttal, refused to pay. They felt that they were doing the journal – and science – a service and that it was unreasonable to charge them for it.
Because these authors’ APC request was denied, the original Ecosphere article, which they claimed was flawed, remained uncontested, while the rebuttal was not published there. Instead, the editors of Web Ecology stepped in and published it themselves. Charging authors for brief, well-founded criticism of published articles creates a highly problematic disincentive to fruitful scientific discussion. When a clear error is detected, it is for the best interest of all to find a reasonable and ethical solution in the shortest possible time.
