Will Publish For Food

The Truthers have made much of getting one of their papers published in an online journal, which they paid for, as if this were proof of their scientific validity. A recent "sting" operation has shown how dubious many of these "journals" are.

On 4 July, good news arrived in the inbox of Ocorrafoo Cobange, a biologist at the Wassee Institute of Medicine in Asmara. It was the official letter of acceptance for a paper he had submitted 2 months earlier to the Journal of Natural Pharmaceuticals, describing the anticancer properties of a chemical that Cobange had extracted from a lichen.

In fact, it should have been promptly rejected. Any reviewer with more than a high-school knowledge of chemistry and the ability to understand a basic data plot should have spotted the paper's short-comings immediately. Its experiments are so hopelessly flawed that the results are meaningless.
I know because I wrote the paper. Ocorrafoo Cobange does not exist, nor does the Wassee Institute of Medicine. Over the past 10 months, I have submitted 304 versions of the wonder drug paper to open-access journals. More than half of the journals accepted the paper, failing to notice its fatal flaws. Beyond that headline result, the data from this sting operation reveal the contours of an emerging Wild West in academic publishing.

And to save you the trouble of looking, yes, the only Bentham Journal queried fell for the scam.

bio0026.doc accepted http://www.benthamscience.com Bentham open http://www.benthamscience.com/open/tobcj/index.htm The Open Bioactive Compounds Journal