Seralini Redux: Roundup-Ready GMO Maize Causes Serious Health Damage

[mike_c]

4. LOL-- it's a self pay-to-publish online "junk journal" with an impact factor of zero....

It's a junk journal. The paper was NOT republished by any of the journals that have rejected it. It was published by an advocacy "journal"-- for a fee-- with pretty much zero scientific credibility. Seralini paid them handsomely to publish it, and he doesn't even get a printed copy, LOL!

http://www.geneticliteracyproject.org/2014/06/25/examining-environmental-sciences-europe-journal-that-re-published-seralini-study/

Environmental Sciences Europe therefore levies an article-processing charge of £730/$1220/€880 for each article accepted for publication.

The journal, part of SpringerOpen, is too young to have an official Impact Factor (IF). Using the same calculation, however, the journal would have an IF of .55. That would place it about 190th out of the 210 journals in the “environmental sciences” category at Thomson Scientific. (For comparison, Food and Chemical Toxicology has an IF of just above 3, and a ranking of 27th.)

Seralini appears to have quite an ego to sustain, and the retraction from an okay journal must have hit pretty hard. It was almost certain that he’d attempt to republish the work— but it isn’t going to a decent journal.

ESEU is perceived by scientists as having an ideological slant against genetic modification. Folta describes ESEU as a “journal with a less-than-rigorous grasp on reality, a clear anti-biotech slant, and the journal that has published such duds as Benbrook’s famous paper on increasing pesticide use that used interpolated and extrapolated data (because actual numbers didn’t exist).” He elaborates:

It boils down to this—if these data were significant, if the experiments were good, and the interpretations sound, this would not be buried in the depths of a crappy journal. If there was hard evidence that our food supply truly caused tumors, it would be on the New England Journal of Medicine, Science, Nature, or maybe Cell if he wanted to go slumming. But it’s not there. It is in a tiny, obscure journal that has quite a visible agenda, and that’s the only thing visible about it.

(emphasis is from the original link)

Interestingly, this is the route that many such anti-GMO papers take-- publish in junk journals ignored by most scientists, because the real audience is the scientifically illiterate woo FUDsters who get their information from advocacy web sites that pick this crap up like it was gold.