An Irish newspaper recently published a fairly glowing report in the end sourced from a pay for publish journal. Now, the research may be fine but it struck me that this needed to be noted. The journalist, well known in the area, when contacted by me and when I noted the “you pay, we publish” nature of this journal and its publisher being on Bealls list of predatory publishers (http://scholarlyoa.com/2012/12/06/bealls-list-of-predatory-publishers-2013/) kept saying “but its peer reviewed”. Despite much attempts to get this well known journalist to note that not all peer review processes are the same, it failed. Well done Science .
FWIW, the publisher of the journal of which I noted is also one of the ones on the Science list
Alan Sokal’s influence has certainly been felt strongly recently. Last month, a critique by Sokal — who in 1996 got a fake paper published in Social Text — and two colleagues forced a correction of a much-ballyhooed psychology paper. A few days after that, we reported on a Serbian Sokal hoax-like paper whose authors cited the scholarly efforts of one B. Sagdiyev, a.k.a. Borat.
And today, we bring you news of an effort by John Bohannon, of Science magazine, to publish fake papers in more than 300 open access journals. Bohannon, writing as “Ocorrafoo Cobange” of the “Wassee Institute of Medicine” — neither of which exist, of course — explains his process:
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Brian M. Lucey 