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Romanian Science Journal Punked By Serbian Academics
schwit1 writes "A group of Serbian academics, disgusted with the poor state of their country's research output, have scammed a Romanian science journal by getting it to accept their completely fabricated hoax article. From the article: 'The paper is replete with transparent gimmicks — obvious, that is, had anyone at the publication been paying attention — including a reference to the scholarship of [singer Michael] Jackson, Weber, [porn star Ron] Jeremy and citations to new studies by Bernoulli and Laplace, both dead more than 180 years (Weber died in 1920). They also throw in references to the "Journal of Modern Illogical Studies," which to the best of our knowledge does not and never has existed (although perhaps it should), and to a researcher named, dubiously, "A.S. Hole." And, we hasten to add, the noted Kazakh polymath B. Sagdiyev, otherwise known as Borat.' Their paper is hilarious and completely ridiculous, and yet it was published in a so-called serious journal without question. The best part is that they list Alan Sokal's hoax paper from 1996 as one of their sources."
What I recall from my years in a post-Soviet Ukrainian university is a system that works like this. You need to publish N papers and a thesis to get your PhD, then publish M books and a thesis to get your Dr Math / whatever degree, then curate enough students, publish some more books and play some politics to become a Professor. All of this to increase your salary from $200/mo to $300/mo. All this work is judged purely on quantity. There are good scientists that also do something meaningful in parallel, and shameless bureaucrats who just spend the rest of their time looking for more ways to get corrupted. But no-one really takes the publishing game seriously.
In order to get a better bang for their dollar, Serbian government made some radical changes regarding the pay grades of researchers in state universities and institutes. The most important metrics is now the number of publications in the high impact factor journals.
In principle, the idea is not terribly bad. Academic success is being measured by some quantitative objective criteria.
Unfortunately, in practice the system is far from ideal. The problem begins with "impact factor". Too many journals are gaming the system. This is a global international phenomenon.
Upon the introduction of the new system, few unscrupulous Serbian researchers began exploiting the obvious loophole. Namely, there are tons of journals worldwide, who will happily take one's money and publish whatever junk one sends. For whatever reason they carry high impact factor. Few of these "scientists" built entire carriers using this shameful practice.
The prank has been widely publicized in Serbian news outlets and more than served its purpose.
Please check this out:
http://pdos.csail.mit.edu/scigen/
This is a random paper generator, and its output has been accepted at a conference.
There are plenty of low-quality conferences and publications.
I know this is /. .... :)
but you really should take a few peeks at the paper. It made me laugh
Some investigators agree that simulation through generating random data is an interesting new topic in the field of information discovery, and more and more researchers concur. On the sceptic side, many scientists would agree that, had it not been for the necessity of providing meaningful results, many of existing solutions would be self-sufficient, and, sensing this, we set to show that randomness is indeed often used as an opportunistic “golden standard” of appositeness to further recycle the subject at hand.
Hmm, the humour and sarcasm seem to have been be lost on you.
The point of scientific journals is not so much the publication as it is the peer review process. Peer review is important to establish that the experimental methodology and conclusions drawn are well controlled and sound. That's something you don't get with non-peer reviewed self-published papers (and if you've read many of them, it really shows sometimes).
Of course, the publishers of these journals, as demonstrated in the article, seem to think that the publication is the important part and obviously care less about good peer reviewing. There's still a place in modern science for this whole process, but clearly the journals want to ensure that they aren't a part of whatever better solution we find.
If you want a vision of the future, imagine a youtube comments section scrolling - forever.