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Predatory Journals Hit By "Star Wars" Sting (discovermagazine.com)
intellitech quotes an article from Discover's Neuroskeptic blog:
A number of so-called scientific journals have accepted a Star Wars-themed spoof paper...an absurd mess of factual errors, plagiarism and movie quotes. I know because I wrote it... I created a spoof manuscript about "midi-chlorians" -- the fictional entities which live inside cells and give Jedi their powers in Star Wars...and submitted it to nine journals under the names of Dr. Lucas McGeorge and Dr. Annette Kin... The American Journal of Medical and Biological Research accepted the paper, but asked for a $360 fee, which I didn't pay. Amazingly, three other journals not only accepted but actually published the spoof.
At one point the paper simply transcribes dialogue from Star Wars: Episode III - Revenge of the Sith. ("Did you ever hear of the tragedy of Darth Plagueis the Wise? I thought not. It is not a story the Jedi would tell you....") And the author also cut-and-pasted big chunks of the Wikipedia page for mitochondrion (after globally replacing mitochondr* with midichlor*), then admitted in the paper's "Methodology" section that "The majority of the text in the current paper was Rogeted from Wikipedia" -- with a direct link back to that Wikipedia page. One sentence even mentions "JARJAR syndrome."
Three more journals did reject the paper -- but at least one more unquestioningly asked the author to revise and resubmit it. The author calls it "a reminder that at some 'peer reviewed' journals, there really is no meaningful peer review at all" -- adding that one journal has even invited Dr. Lucas McGeorge to join their editorial board.
At one point the paper simply transcribes dialogue from Star Wars: Episode III - Revenge of the Sith. ("Did you ever hear of the tragedy of Darth Plagueis the Wise? I thought not. It is not a story the Jedi would tell you....") And the author also cut-and-pasted big chunks of the Wikipedia page for mitochondrion (after globally replacing mitochondr* with midichlor*), then admitted in the paper's "Methodology" section that "The majority of the text in the current paper was Rogeted from Wikipedia" -- with a direct link back to that Wikipedia page. One sentence even mentions "JARJAR syndrome."
Three more journals did reject the paper -- but at least one more unquestioningly asked the author to revise and resubmit it. The author calls it "a reminder that at some 'peer reviewed' journals, there really is no meaningful peer review at all" -- adding that one journal has even invited Dr. Lucas McGeorge to join their editorial board.
Isn't that the problem here ?
Putting make a dollar ahead of honesty. It's a pervasive problem, it's not obvious to me why "scientific journals" would be immune.
And once again it's a two party problem. The person publishing wants their paper published to put it on their resume, and the journal needs to fill the journal.
The real question is, who's subscribing to this crap ?
A more worrisome tin-foil hat idea - I suppose you could create faux journals to show that journals are not trustworthy and use them to cast doubt on legitimate science.
Absolute statements are never true
A vanity press, if you will.
Exactly. You pay them, and they publish your paper. So TFA is reporting that someone paid them, and they published his paper. The exact same thing has been done many times before. Why is this news?
I put a page full of fake news on my photocopier, pushed the button, and the copier printed it without fact checking it. Outrageous!
How many of researchers doing science for a living are actually talented and are actually producing useful/meaningful work? Because if you aren't very good, there's always this escape of publishing their poor quality work in one of these journals, perpetuating their title as researchers/scientists and allowing them to make a living without any contribution to society.
Nope. If you're publishing only in crap journals, you're not getting jobs or grants, because the people giving out those grants and hiring people for jobs are generally not morons. If they are, they don't keep their ability to spend that money.
So, to answer your question: if you're doing science for a living, you're probably producing meaningful work, or you're either a) not doing it for very long; or b) a really really good con man. I suspect the same is true for most fields. What's your field? How's it work there?
Many people reading slahdot are coders. If someone came on here and broadly proclaimed "all code review is messing only with whitespace, no one really does it, therefore coders must all be frauds", would that fly?