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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."
This example was about predatory journals. There are also predatory "vanity publishers" that convince aspiring authors to pay money to get their book published.
A group of science fiction authors put together a complete novel to sting one such vanity press. The result, Atlanta Nights, is a hoot!
In one chapter, Bruce Lucent is a young hotshot software developer; in another, he is an old, broken-down shell of a man. Some chapters have new characters that are never heard from again. Near the end of the book, the full text of the first chapter appears again as a new chapter. Also, someone wakes up and realizes that it was all a dream... and then the book continues for a few more chapters. And my favorite: the last chapter was written by feeding other chapters into a Markov Chain nonsense generator. Example: "Bruce Lucent walked around anymore."
Rather than using Simpsons names, they chose a fake name "Travis Tea" that sounds like the word "travesty".
Atlanta Nights was accepted for publication, but after the authors had their press release the publisher changed its mind.
http://www.sfwa.org/members/travistea/backstory.htm
They got a bunch of famous authors to give tongue-in-cheek blurbs about the book. Jerry Pournelle: "Don't fail to miss it if you can!"
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
I'm more concerned about the "papers" that contain gibberish nonsense than one where the author isn't correct. Those are both names that could easily exist, but even if they didn't, it shouldn't be a problem to publish an article by Anonymous as long as it's peer-reviewed and contains good material.
Sheesh. What kind of journal accepts a paper written by a baby?
Journals that charge an author fee. Basically the author offered to give away hundreds of dollars, and thinks it is "news" that someone agreed to take it.