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Philip Davis decided to test whether open access journals — which make the author pay for publication of research findings — employ first-rate peer review. Or might they be tempted to accept less than stellar manuscripts, at least as long as authors are willing to pony up the publication fee?
For the experiment, Davis, a Cornell grad student, together with a friend at the New England Journal of Medicine, used a computer program to develop a totally bogus (if grammatically correct) paper, and on January 29 submitted it to The Open Information Science Journal, which for some reason seems to be abbreviated TOISCIJ.
Two weeks ago, Davis received word that “your submitted article has been accepted for publication after peer-reviewing process in TOISCIJ.” (From the stilted language of that acceptance, you might be tempted to suspect it also had been written by computer, using grammatically challenged software.) As long as the authors sent the publisher a check for $800 (to a post-office box in the United Arab Emirates), Davis learned, his paper would be published.
You only need to read the manuscript, “Deconstructing Access Points,” to confirm it’s pure nonsense. Take the intro’s second paragraph. It starts off: “We describe a novel heuristic for the extensive unification of web browsers and rasterization, which we call TriflingThamyn. However, this method is generally adamantly opposed. Unfortunately, this method is rarely significant.” The five-page paper concludes, saying: “our research . . . explored . . . a method for virtual methodologies. To accomplish this ambition for unstable models, we constructed new metamorphic algorithms.” Yeah, right.
On June 10, Davis described the sting at Scholarly Kitchen, a blog published through the Society for Scholarly Publishing. Of the bogus paper’s putative authors — David Phillips and Andrew Kent — “Any similarity to real or fictitious, living or dead academics is purely coincidental," Davis said. Their affiliation was also a sham: The Center for Research in Applied Phrenology — or CRAP.
Observes Davis, even if the journal’s reviewers didn’t pick up on that farsical acronym, the reference to phrenology should have raised a big red flag. After all, phrenology is the “science” of divining an individual’s personality on the basis of bumps on the scalp. It was really big in the early days of the last century. I saw a couple examples of these quackery devices several years back while visiting the Museum of Questionable Medical Devices in Minneapolis. I think I even let one of those assess my personality.
But I digress.
Not wishing to throw away good money on his joke, Davis retracted the paper . . . and got great fodder for his blogs. Today, Nature News posted a story reporting that TOISCU’s editor-in-chief, a University of Pittsburgh scientist, was so outraged at learning about the hoax paper’s acceptance that he vowed to resign in protest.
Wow, you just can’t make up something this good.
Found in: Science & Society
- Davis, P. 2009. Open Access Publisher Accepts Nonsense Manuscript for Dollars. The Scholarly Kitchen (June 10). [Go to]
- Gilbert, N. 2009. Editor will quit over hoax paper. Nature (June 15). doi:10.1038/news.2009.571 [Go to]
- Anderson, K. 2009. 2009. The Tip of an Iceberg? The Scholarly Kitchen (June 10). [Go to]
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The journal in question was targeted because it is part of the Bentham group which has displayed, shall we say, "aggressive solicitation practices." "Crap" manuscripts have been submitted to other open source journals and rejected soundly. I know, because I reviewed such a manuscript.
Any discussion should also mention that this is not the first journal that accepted a ridiculous manuscript. There was another such, and it got some press play around 4-5 years ago. I played with generating manuscripts from the program afterward.
One should also touch on the fact that recent publication has stated that with an algorithm dependent on matching abstracts, 9,000 manuscripts were flagged for plagiarism.
In other words, science has a problem with fraud and ethics. Bentham's contribution appears to be in the direction of fraud and unethical movement. But the problem is hardly contained there. Science needs to face the problem head-on. But, unfortunately, the training process of science teaches a "keep your head down" mode.
So, I appreciate the article here. To a degree I appreciate the catty/snarky tone. But, my dear Janet, your discussion is so thin it becomes wrong. It suggests that open-source is the problem, which is not at all the case. The problem is much more than that.
John Toradze is correct regarding the training process of science; don't make waves with the prevailing paradigm. Go along to get along. Watch your six. This attitude keeps science mired down in the prevailing belief system instead of properly pioneering research into new areas.
My forte' is origins issues. To discuss them, come to Talk About Origins at [Link was removed]
In fact, more subscription journals (by numbers and percentages) charge author-side fees than open-access journals. Details here: [Link was removed]
If there's any implication that charging author-side fees results in vanity publishing and lax peer review, the problem would be more widespread among subscription journals than open-access journals.
The Bentham affair is much more about low standards and deceptive practices than open access.
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