Maggie Simpson's published paper...

[aargee]

Not surprising and not surprising that I've never heard of the "electronics" one...

http://www.sciencealert.com/two-scientific-journals-have-accepted-a-study-by-maggie-simpson-and-edna-krabappel

Although it's interesting to note what is said about the IEEE and its need to retrospectively filter papers!

[Syntax_Error]

I should send off my resume to them for publishing and then put that on my resume, that I have been published. Literally, me.

[dannyf]

the article makes absolutely no sense

I am not sure if that's a scientific enough of a criteria: many of the widely accepted scientific theories didn't make sense to majority of the scientific communities at some point.

Science doesn't need to make sense to work; Nor does it need to be accepted by conventional wisdom to be true.

[ivan747]

Danny, they got the paper out of a random word generator. Specifically, from here:
http://pdos.csail.mit.edu/scigen/

The sort of thing it spits out literally doesn't make sense. It's not coherent. Here's an example paper:
http://scigen.csail.mit.edu/scicache/298/scimakelatex.14488.Ivan747.Dave.html

Even the graphs. Look at the graphs, it's hilarious!

[dannyf]

My point is that the fact that it doesn't make sense is not a valid reason to reject a paper as being "unscientific".

Large-scale communication and evolutionary programming have garnered great interest from both systems engineers and steganographers in the last several years.

That's the first sentence from your randomly generated paper. I wouldn't say that it doesn't make sense. Whoever wrote the paper generator is quite smart.

[T3sl4co1l]

As stuffy as they generally are, academics crack me up sometimes.  To explain:

Academic performance is frequently measured based on publications and citations.

A professor with many publications will be reviewed well.

A professor with many publications, some of which are cited very frequently by other authors' publications, is very likely to win tenure (or already has?).

Citations are the academic measure of influence, just as social networks' connectivity measures the same thing.

So there is a great incentive to publish as little as possible per paper, over as many papers as possible.

There is also a great incentive to induce others to have you cite them in your paper.

As a result, not all "influential" papers are at all substantial or useful, nor are all highly-cited authors influential (in the common sense).

Ok, that's just the academic part.

The journals know all this stuff.  They sell subscriptions at ridiculous prices, so they have great interest in publishing a high proportion of the most "influential" material, in order that they can sell the most subscriptions, for as long as possible.  Again, "influential" is measured, not necessarily authentic...

Established journals, that's fine.  Ain't nobody complaining about Nature, or the New England Journal of Medicine.  (Well, maybe; problems are problems, and everyone's got them.  But it's not as systemic.)  But suppose I were to simply create my own journal out of thin air?  It should:
- Sound authoritative (have a good heady title, maybe something reminiscent; "Vermont Medical Proceedings Journal").
- Have lots of recognized authors, and lots of well connected ("influential", if not necessarily recognized) authors.
- Well advertised, on the internet, in magazines, I don't know... academic stuffs.
- Cost probably marginal: you don't want it priced fairly, because that would look cheap.  Comparable to others would be fine.  Pricing it higher than established journals might be a ballsy move too ("it must be worth it!!").

Easy enough, right?  Well, you still need to get papers somewhere, but I'm sure enough people will submit entries for it.  Top quality entries, that don't need to be proofed or anything.  Yeah, about that...

Finally... Maybe it's not systemic.  But it's still systemic.  The owners of the top journals are doing business, like any other.  And like any other business, it's in their best interest to maximize profit.  They'll buy up dubious to trashy journals as long as they're profitable, and induce other established journals to dilute their product for the same end.

All in all... Is it right?  No.  Is it wrong?  No.  Business doesn't care about morally valued judgement, only money.  That's capitalism, and that's evolution.


Now having said allllllllllll that... what amuses me about the process is... of course, academics, generally being a sharp bunch, are self-aware of their lot.  They'd like to publish big and influential and revolutionary papers, but mostly they just need to survive, popping out small ones every so often.  And they recognize the flaws in the typical citation-weighted method.  So, randomly generated papers like these are one way to poke fun at that, and maybe achieve some change along the way.  Any journal dumb enough to accept these deserves the ire they get.  Presumably, those journals are aware of such attacks, so as with computer viruses and scanners, you get an evolutionary arms race between generators and detectors.  The system works... in a sense.

Tim

[Marco]

Although it's interesting to note what is said about the IEEE and its need to retrospectively filter papers!

Mostly conferences though ... low quality conferences which are little more than paid vacations are a much older scam than the low quality open access journals.

[madires]

That's a nice hack of the greedy scientific journals 

[dannyf]

How could that be? I was told that the scientists are the most saintly bunch,

They would never do that to further their own personal interests.

[jpb]

Though what has been said so far on publishing scientific papers in general is true, the original post referred to scam publishing.

Publishing in an established journal shouldn't cost the author anything but it can be a slow (one journal paper I published with a couple of colleagues took over two years from first submission) and difficult process. As people have said, academics tend to be judged on publications and scammers have hit upon this as a good source of money. Especially if they can dress it up as a conference (which is probably non-existent) for which registration fees must be paid.

I'd say such scam emails formed the major part of my spam input on my university email account. Unfortunately when you publish anything you need to give your contact email address and of course the subject of your paper, or the journal it is published in, gives the area of interest, so the scammers/spammers just make up a plausible sounding conference say somewhere in China (if they are targeting UK/US academics) and issue a Call for Papers and then offer a discount on the conference fees for the authors.

Academics can be as gullible as anyone else:

http://en.mercopress.com/2014/05/27/uk-physics-professor-fired-from-us-university-for-conviction-in-argentina-on-drugs

[dannyf]

Publishing in an established journal ... can be a slow...

thus the importance of going to seminars and reading working papers. They provide you with a far better view on where the research frontiers are.

Academics can be as gullible as anyone else:

Hopefully it doesn't take a rocket scientist to understand that,