An anonymous blogger for Discover Magazine conducted a publishing “sting” operation to see if scam-inclined, so-called scientific journals would publish his fake study inspired by "Star Wars." Three did. His “study” consisted of copying and pasting the Wikipedia entry for “mitochondria” and changing some of the wording to reflect themes of the cinematic space opera franchise. One journal even invited him to serve on its editorial board.
From Discover:
Read Full Article »This matters because scientific publishers are companies selling a product, and the product is peer review. True, they also publish papers (electronically in the case of these journals), but if you just wanted to publish something electronically, you could do that yourself for free. Preprint archives, blogs, your own website – it's easy to get something on the internet. Peer review is what supposedly justifies the price of publishing.
All of the nine publishers I stung are known to send spam to academics, urging them to submit papers to their journals. I've personally been spammed by almost all of them. All I did, as Lucas McGeorge, was test the quality of the products being advertised.
