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A Paper By Maggie Simpson and Edna Krabappel Was Accepted By Two Journals
An anonymous reader writes "A scientific study by Maggie Simpson, Edna Krabappel, and Kim Jong Fun has been accepted by two journals. Of course, none of these fictional characters actually wrote the paper, titled "Fuzzy, Homogeneous Configurations." Rather, it's a nonsensical text, submitted by engineer Alex Smolyanitsky in an effort to expose scientific journals — the Journal of Computational Intelligence and Electronic Systems and the Aperito Journal of NanoScience Technology."
It'd be a lot more newsworthy if it was a journal with an extant impact factor. Neither of these even show up on search.
This is a terrible summary, and should clearly state that this was a joke effort to expose two essentially fake journals (that no one in the field thinks are real) as predatory and accepting papers for money without peer review. The summary makes it sound like this is a big deal or that these might have been important journals, but really as an academic (or anyone with a university email address) you get at least 10 of these offers to publish papers in random fake journals for money in your inbox every day.
For non-academics, these "journals" are basically the difference between a guy in a trench coat coming up to you on the street and offering to "publish" your book for money, and a real and respected publishing house like the MIT Press offering to publish your book after a laborious review process. If a real journal or publisher accepted a paper or book that was fake or had genuine errors, this would be substantial news (and it does happen occasionally that things do get past the reviewers, they're only human), but that is very far from the case here.