Bentham Journals Get Punk'd! Again.

LOL, remember all the pride that the kooks expressed when Jones and Harrit, et. al., got their paper published in the "peer-reviewed Bentham Open Journals?" Well, turns out that's not the only BS paper published at that venue:

Earlier this year, Davis started receiving unsolicited emails from Bentham Science Publishers, which publishes more than 200 "open-access" journals – which turn the conventional business model of academic publishing on its head by charging publication fees to the authors of research papers, and then making the content available for free.

As the emails stacked up, Davis was not only encouraged to submit papers, but was also invited to serve on the editorial board of some of Bentham's journals – for which he was told he would be allowed to publish one free article each year. "I received solicitations for journals for which I had no subject expertise at all," says Davis. "It really painted a picture of vanity publishing."

Oh, but it gets better, much better. After creating their paper with a computer program that generates nutty stuff:

Davis and Anderson, writing under the noms de plume David Phillips and Andrew Kent, also dropped a hefty hint of the hoax by giving their institutional affiliation as the Center for Research in Applied Phrenology, or CRAP.

Yet four months after the article was submitted, "David Phillips" received an email from Sana Mokarram, Bentham's assistant manager of publication:

This is to inform you that your submitted article has been accepted for publication after peer-reviewing process in TOISCIJ. I would be highly grateful to you if you please fill and sign the attached fee form and covering letter and send them back via email as soon as possible to avoid further delay in publication.

The publication fee was $800, to be sent to a PO Box in the United Arab Emirates.

Of course, those of us who've been paying attention know that the Bentham Journals got punk'd the first time when they published the ridiculous paper by Harrit, Jones, Ryan and Szamboti.

Hats off to Philip Meir Davis and Kent Anderson, who pulled off the hoax. Here's a sample of the computer-generated nonsense:

In this section, we discuss existing research into red-black trees, vacuum tubes, and courseware [10]. On a similar note, recent work by Takahashi suggests a methodology for providing robust modalities, but does not offer an implementation [9].

It makes more sense than what Jones and Harrit published.

Hat tip for this excellent find to alienentity at JREF, who points us to this post by Volatile, also at JREF.

Update: More discussion here. Turns out that the footnotes have some hilarity in them, including a 2005 article by Alan Turing and Timothy Leary (both dead by that point--Turing had been dead for 50 years), and Noam Chomsky's work on vacuum tubes and voice over IP protocols.

Davis posts here.

What is surprising is that the assistant manager claimed that the article went through peer-review although there is no evidence that it actually did. Anyone with English proficiency — with or without a degree in computer science — would recognize that this manuscript makes absolutely no sense.

Remember Jones claiming that this was the most rigorous peer review he'd ever undergone? I'm certainly hoping that's not true.

Update: Fallout from the incident:

Bambang Parmanto, a University of Pittsburgh information scientist, resigned from his editorship at The Open Information Science Journal (TOISCIJ) after reading a story on The Scientist's website yesterday (June 10) that described a hoax paper submission to the journal. Editors at journal claimed to have peer reviewed the article and slated it for publication pending the submission of $800 in "open access fees."

"I didn't like what happened," Parmanto told The Scientist. "If this is true, I don't have full control of the content that is accepted to this journal." Parmanto said that he had never seen the phony manuscript that was accepted by TOISCIJ. "I want to lessen my exposure to the risk of being taken advantage of."

You may recall that the editor of the Journal that published Harrit and Jones' paper also resigned immediately after that paper was accepted.

By the way, Parmanto may have to wait for awhile for his name to be removed from the masthead; check out the first comment here:

Well done! I have had my doubts about that journal for quite some time. Actually, I have long ago withdrawn from the so-called editorial board because I felt something was wrong. I am actually a bit shocked to find out that my name still figures on the list!!

The Bentham Journals

Some of the guys over at JREF have dug up some interesting information regarding the Bentham Journals, the company that Steven Jones is all proud published his letter to the editor, for $600 of course. Some highlights:

Chris Reed, Distinguished Professor of Chemistry (University of California, Riverside), offers the following modest proposal on CHMINF-L:

Colleagues:In last week's interesting CHMINF-L discussion on Nature's proliferation of new journals, faculty habits, and the serials market, I saw no mention of an ongoing parallel onslaught by Bentham. In the past month, I have received no less that three invitations to join the editorial boards of new Bentham journals -- "Current this", "Frontiers of that" -- none in areas of my real expertise.The same old tactics are being used: exploiting a faculty weakness for seeing one's name in print, offering a career advance by having Editorial Board appointments on one's CV at promotion time, flattering authors with invitations to contribute papers in special issues, etc. All this effectively silences faculty from speaking out, or even caring about, the issues librarians understand so well. It is one of the reasons I am advocating that promotion policies at the University of California specify that appointments to the editorial boards of low quality, overpriced journals should count against promotion. The idea may not be so outrageous in five or ten years time.

And this one:

I was particularly pleased with the following:

Based on your record of contributions in the field of Education, I would like to invite you to submit to me your CV with current list of publications so that we may consider you as a possible *Editorial Board Member* for the journal.

Since I my record in the field of Education is nil, I feel particularly well-qualified. I have never written a thing in an Education journal. I don't know whether or not to be honored to be invited to contribute to the Open Journal of Sleep.

If you look at the web page of the "Open Journal Advisory Board" http://www.bentham.org/open/toeconsj/EBM.htm
you will find something remarkable. There is a list of about 40 economists who are "members of the advisory board," all but one of whose last names start with the letters A-C and only one of whom I have ever heard of. I suppose these are the top of the list of people who responded to the spam letters. What an embarrassing list to have one's name on.

Check out the thread for some more great info by Lashl, TAM and more.

Bentham Editor Resigns over Steven Jones' Paper

Looks like the "peer-review" didn't include the editor:

"They have printed the article without my authorization else, so when you wrote to me, I did not mean that the article was published. I can not accept, and I have written to Bentham, that I withdraw myself from all activities with them, "says Marie-Paule Pileni, which daily is a professor specializing in nanomaterials at the prestigious Université Pierre et Marie Curie in France .

The language sounds a little stilted, but it's translated from the original (Danish).

Update: A translation of the article from Steve S, one of our commenters:

Editor in chief resigns after controversial article on 9/11
28 April 2009
From videnskab.dk ( Danish science news service)

An article on explosives in the World Trace Center was published in a scientific journal without the editor in chief knowing about it. Now she is resigning, she tells Videnskab.dk ([science.denmark])
By Thomas Hoffman (th@videnskab.dk).

It created a great attention, surprise and suspicion when the Open Chemical Physics Journal in April published a scientific article on remains of nanothermite which were found in great amounts in the dust from the WTC.

One those most surprised is apparently the editor in chief of the journal. Professor Marie-Paule Pileni first heard about he article when videnskab.dk wrote to her to ask for her professional assessment of the article’s content. The e-mail got her to immediately close the door to the journal.

“I resign as the editor in chief”, was the abrupt answer in an email to videnskab.dk

PRINTED WITHOUT PERMISSION
A telephone call reveals that editor in chief Marie-Paule Pileni had never been informed that the article was going to be published in The Open Chemical Physics Journal, which is published by the journal giant Bentham Science Publishers.

“They have printed the article without my permission, so when you wrote to me, I did not know that the article had appeared. I cannot accept this, and therefore I have written to Bentham that I resign from all activities with them”, explains Marie Paule Pileni, who is professor with a specialty in nanomaterials at the renowned Universite Pierre et Marie Curie in France.

She feels not only stabbed in the back, but is puzzled that the article on dust analysis following the terror attack on the U.S. on 11 September 2001 could at all have found its way to the Open Chemical Physics Journal.

“I cannot accept that this topic is published in my journal. The article has nothing to do with physical chemistry or chemical physics, and I could well believe that there is a political viewpoint behind its publication. If anyone had asked me, I would say that the article should never have been published in this journal. Period.” Concludes the former editor in chief.

FAILING GRADES TO THE JOURANL
The editor-in-chief’s dramatic departure gives critics additional reason to doubt the article’s conclusions, but Marie-Paule Pileni points out that because the topic lies outside her field of expertise, she cannot judge whether the article in itself is good or bad.

Nevertheless, the publication gets her to give the Open Chemical Physics Journal failing grades.

“I was in fact in doubt about them before, because I had on several occasions asked about information about the journal without having heard from them. It does not appear on the list of international journals, and that is a bad sign. Now I can see that it is because it is a bad journal”, says Marie-Paule Pileni and continues:

“There are no references to the Open Chemical Physics Journal in other articles. I have two colleagues who contributed to publishing an article which was not cited anyplace either. If no one reads it, it is a bad journal, and there is not use for it”, is the harsh verdict.

The professor informs us that a few years ago she was invited to be editor in chief of a journal which would open new possibilities for new researchers and because she supports the idea of open access journals where the articles are accessible to everyone, she said, “Yes” thank you.

“It is important to allow people to try and gain success, but one should not be allowed to do everything, and all this is certainly a bunch of nonsense. I try to be a serious researcher, and I will not have my name connected with this kind of thing,” concludes Marie-Paule Pileni.

DOES NOT CHANGE THE INVESTIGATION
The editor-in-chief’s decision is viewed as regrettable by the Danish chemist Niels Harrit, who is one of the authors to the controversial article on nanothermite in the dust from the WTC.

“It surprises me, of course, and it is regrettable, if it discredits our work. But her departure doesn’t change our conclusions, for it is a purely personnel related thing she his angry about. I still believe that we have carried out chemical physics, and if there is something wrong with our study, she is welcome to criticize us for it,” says Niels Harrit, Associate Professor at the Institute of Chemistry at the University of Copenhagen.

It is Niels Harrit’s coauthor Steven Jones who was in charge of contact to Bentham, and therefore the Danish researcher is presently not aware which responsible assistant editor the group has been communicating with.

However, he does know the names of the two researchers –so-called referees—who have reviewed he article, but he will not give their names because they ‘are in principle anonymous’.

DANE WITHDREW FROM THE JOURNAL
Niels Harrit’s superior at the University of Copenhagen, Nils O. Andersen has himself participated in the pool of researchers who could be selected as editor, on an article which should be published in The Open Chemical Physics Journal. He has recently chosen to resign from the journals Editorial Advisory Board.

He informs videnskab.dk that the decision has nothing to do with Niels Harrit’s article, and that he otherwise did not achieve having any experiences with the journals, so that he cannot shed further light on how the journal operates.

“Open access is an exciting development, and as a principle the idea should be tried out for there is no reason for the commercial publishers to earn money from our work. But professionally, the journal lay at the margin of my expertise, and as I had said No to be editor of two articles, I decided that I would not use my time on anything else.”, explains Nils O. Andersen, dean of the faculty of Natural Sciences and editor of the European Physical Journal D.

It has not yet been possible to get any comment from Bentham Science Publishers.

Thanks, Steve!

Donations Requested for Thermite Testing

Here's an email from Chris Mohr, who so humiliated Box Boy Gage in a debate that the latter decided not to put the debate out on DVD as originally planned:

Request for contributions to WTC Dust Analysis

Here is my official request for funds to analyze the WTC dust. To summarize, after three months of investigating this, the best person I found for the job is James R. Millette, Ph.D. of MVA Scientific Consultants. He is an independent researcher with extensive experience in forensics and dust analysis. He promises an objective study: "At present, I have no opinion as to whether we will find any active thermitic material. All I can say is that to this point in time we have not found any during the general particle characterizations we have done. Because we have not focused on this particular question in the past analyses, we are proceeding with a careful, forensic scientific study focused on the red-gray chips in a number of WTC dust samples. When I present the data, it will be in front of critical members of the forensic science community... I am an independent researcher without an interest in how the research results come out. Our laboratory is certified under ISO 17025 which includes audits of our accuracy, reliability and integrity. I am a member of the American Academy of Forensic Scientists and have sworn to uphold the high ethical standards of the organization."

Dr. Millette continues to receive input from forensic experts as well as from me and my JREF companions. He has already found red-gray chips using stereomicroscopy and has created initial spectographic analyses of some of the red-gray chips in his lab's possession. He plans to do, at a minimum, a replication of many of the experiments already done in the original Harritt/Jones/Ryan et al Bentham study as well as additional testing by PLM, SEM, TEM and FTIR after sample treatment. I am thinking other tests may be added to the protocol. We will get a full report and he will also make it public.

Chemist and 9/11 Truth activist Kevin Ryan has refused to provide samples of red-gray chips he believes are thermitic, or even to sign off on the chips Dr. Millette would provide. He believes Dr. Millette's past work with the EPA and other dust studies were deceptive and that his results would not be objective. Dr. Millette has expressed confidence that he can find red-gray chips that are a scientifically valid match for the chips studied in the Bentham paper. I am confident of Dr. Millette's scientific integrity and knowledge. He has taken a strong interest in this subject and plans to do a very thorough job. He has never once hinted at any prejudice against the thermitic materials hypothesis and consistently says he has no opinion until he has thoroughly analyzed the data. 

Because of his strong interest in the subject, he is charging only $1000 for several thousand of dollars worth of tests. I am now asking all people of good will on "both sides of the aisle" to make the necessary contributions to have this work move forward.

Please write a check or money order payable to Classical Guide Inc. and mail to Chris Mohr, Foothills Chapel, 1950 Ford St Golden CO 80401. This is not tax-deductible. Leave me an email address and a snail-mail return address so I can acknowledge receipt of your contribution and mail you back your check if we can't raise the necessary funds (though I believe we can). Whatever you pitch in will be kept private unless you tell others on the JREF thread how much you pitched in. Once we get $1000 in checks, I'll deposit them all and give Jim Millette the "Go" sign. If you have any questions you can send me a private message right here on JREF.

Thanks all and Happy New Year!

Chris advises that he has already received $500 in pledges so far.  This is a great opportunity to put the nano/iso/super thermite/thermate theories to the real peer review, and as such the Truthers themselves should welcome the opportunity.  What a surprise that Waterboy Kevin Ryan isn't cooperating; guess we know who isn't interested in the Truth.

Mostly About the Bentham Open Chemical/Physics Journal

A terrific bit of debunking here. Note that the Bentham Open Chemical Physics Journal only published four papers in 2009. Care to guess their total for 2010? Here's a hint; it's a nice, round number.

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

Goodbye Bentham Open Chemical Physics Journal

Well, well, it looks like they do have some standards after all. Bentham Publishers has dropped the journal which published the Active Thermitic Materials paper by Harrit and Jones:

There is an Open Physical Chemistry Journal, but the Thermite paper is not located there. If you do a search for Harrit, the paper is shown on their site, but it's a ghost; clicking on the link gives you a 404 error.



But I'll let the Von Trapps have the final word:


Hat Tip: moorea34 at JREF.

Bentham Comedy Continues

It seems that the storied nanothermite paper is collapsing into to its footprint at freefall speed. A former professor at the University of Ottawa did a critique of the paper and sent it to the supposed current editor. Guess what? The supposed current editor resigned awhile ago. Why?

1) I was not editor of the journal at the time the manuscript you refer to was received and processed. I was not involved in its handling, and in no way do i agree with its conclusions. In fact i do not even know how the paper's peer reviewing was handled - or if it was reviewed at all. The journal never wanted to disclosed this matter to me

2) What may be even worse - noone seems to be at the helm of this Journal. Months ago -simply after becoming acquainted with the article you mention, its possible misshandling, etc- i submitted my immediate resignation as editor to the open chemical physics journal. As you can see from the email below, my letter of resignation was received and acknowledged. However, i still appear as the journal's editor - in fact i'm still receiving manuscripts to handle (which i naturally ignore).

(bolding added for emphasis).

Yep, he resigned over the Harrit/Jones paper. Note in particular that the professor who critiqued the nanothermite paper is sympathetic to the "Truth" Movement.

Hat Tip: grandmastershek at JREF.

Project Censored Kooks On Pacifica

I enjoyed listening to this MP3 of Peter Phillips and Mickey Huff whining about how they don't get any respect since they started including 9-11 Troofy Troof in their books. It takes up about half of the program, and they natter about the Bentham Open Chemical Physics journal and a lot of other stuff. Huff opines that every war that the US has engaged in involved false flag operations. Anyway, it is good to see that 9-11 Truth is becoming like leprosy: Nobody wants to touch it.

Jones & Company Go the Vanity Publishing Route Again

The Raw Story runs with it:

A team of nine scientists have unearthed startling data from dust gathered in the days and weeks after the World Trade Center towers collapsed on 9/11. They discovered that scattered throughout the dust samples were red and gray chips of 'active thermitic material', or an un-reacted pyrotechnic explosive.

Here's the actual article itself; published again at the Bentham Open Journals, a vanity publishing outfit based in... wait for it... Pakistan.

Ongoing discussion of the article at JREF. I particularly recommend this post, which shows that the chemical signatures are not there.

Jones & Company Beclown the Europhysics News

In terms of our usual metric, TTFLMO (time to first lie, mistake or omission) this one actually does pretty well; it is almost three paragraphs into the article.  Talking about why high-rise buildings usually do not collapse due to fires, they write:

2) Most high-rises have fire suppression systems (water sprinklers), which further prevent a fire from releasing sufficient energy to heat the steel to a critical failure state;

True enough as far as it goes, but it omits one critical detail: when WTC-2 (the South Tower) collapsed, it took the water mains with it, and thus there were no sprinklers running in WTC-1 and WTC-7 to prevent the fires from spreading.  As a practical matter, I suspect that the sprinklers in WTC-1 and WTC-2 were already not functioning after the plane impacts, but even if they were they would have been insufficient to put out the massive fires in those two buildings.

But after that, the errors and omissions abound.  Next paragraph:

3) Structural members are protected by fireproofing materials, which are designed to prevent them from reaching failure temperatures within specified time periods; and

Ignores the obvious, which is that the impact of the plane debris stripped away a good deal of the fireproofing.  This is the usual Truther nonsense of focusing solely on the fires and not considering the enormous energy released by the two 757s (correction: 767s) when they hit the two towers.

4) Steel-framed high-rises are designed to be highly redundant structural systems. Thus, if a localized failure occurs, it does not result in a disproportionate collapse of the entire structure.

Which ignores the unusual tube-in-tube design of the towers, which were not as capable of shifting the enormous loads they encountered on 9-11 as conventional skyscrapers.

The total collapse of WTC 7 at 5:20 PM on 9/11, shown in Fig. 2, is remarkable because it exemplified all the signature features of an implosion: The building dropped in absolute free fall for the first 2.25 seconds of its descent over a distance of 32 meters or eight stories [3]. Its transition from stasis to free fall was sudden, occurring in approximately one-half second. It fell symmetrically straight down. Its steel frame was almost entirely dismembered and deposited mostly inside the building’s footprint, while most of its concrete was pulverized into tiny particles. Finally, the collapse was rapid, occurring in less than seven seconds.

All the signature features of an implosion?  Sorry, Dr Jones, but I have watched quite a few controlled demolition implosions of buildings before and there were several missing from WTC-7's collapse on 9-11:

1. No deafening explosions of the shaped charges which (Jones admits) are usually used in controlled demolitions.

2. No prior removal of the glass and other materials which might impede the collapse (not to mention the belongings inside the buiding.

3. No miles of detonation cord as is commonly used to ensure the simultaneous (or nearly) loss of load-bearing supports to the building.

And of course, when it comes to the towers, the usual focus on why the NIST report didn't go past the moment that collapse became inevitable:

Whereas NIST did attempt to analyze and model the collapse of WTC 7, it did not do so in the case of the Twin Towers. In NIST’s own words, “The focus of the investigation was on the sequence of events from the instant of aircraft impact to the initiation of collapse for each tower....this sequence is referred to as the ‘probable collapsesequence,’ although it includes little analysis of the structural behaviour of the tower after the conditions for collapse initiation were reached and collapse became inevitable.”[5]

Gee, I don't know, maybe it's because the collapse became, you know, inevitable?  After that, there are too many variables to really measure, but it doesn't really matter.

Thus, the definitive report on the collapse of the Twin Towers contains no analysis of why the lower sections failed to arrest or even slow the descent of the upper sections—which NIST acknowledges “came down essentially in free fall” [5-6]—nor does it explain the various other phenomena observed during the collapses. When a group of petitioners filed a formal Request for Correction asking NIST to perform such analysis, NIST replied thatit was “unable to provide a full explanation of the total collapse” because “the computer models [were] not able to converge on a solution.”

 If NIST really acknowledges that the Twin Towers came down "essentially in free fall" then bad on them.  As for why the lower sections failed to arrest (they did slow) the descent of the upper floors, it is blindingly obvious: The floors were connected to the exterior and central columns of the building.  As the weight from above collapsed on each floor, it pulled in on the connections until they snapped on the exterior.  Very quickly the exterior portions of the building peeled away from the floors, leaving nothing to support them.  This is why you can see, in aerial photographs of the devastation, large sections of the exterior walls virtually intact.

The references section contains four footnotes from JONES, and one from the ridiculous Bentham paper.  I hope that there will be some vigorous pushback on this article from the magazine's subscribers.