[Phys-L] Faking It.

[brian whatcott <betwys1@sbcglobal.net>]

Interesting piece from a popular science report on line: "World-Science".

"157 re­search jour­nals ac­cept­ed for pub­lica­t­ion a spoofed 
sci­en­tif­ic re­port full of de­lib­er­ate non­sense---and most did so 
with lit­tle or no vet­ting, a "st­ing" ope­ra­t­ion has re­vealed.

"A cor­re­spond­ent for the sci­ence jour­nal and news mag­a­zine 
/Sci­ence/ sub­mit­ted the pa­pe­r to 304 jour­nals, of which more than 
half ac­cept­ed it, the cor­re­spond­ent, John Bo­han­non, re­ports in 
the cur­rent is­sue of /Sci­ence/.

"The tar­geted jour­nals were "o­pen ac­cess," a type that charges 
au­thors for pub­lica­t­ion rath­er than sub­sist­ing on sub­scrip­tion 
fees.

"The ranks of open-ac­cess jour­nals have swelled in the past dec­ade 
and, Bo­han­non ar­gues, now in­clude some clear bot­tom-feed­ers. Some 
of these both prey on le­git­i­mate sci­en­tists and, it now ap­pears, 
are will­ing to pub­lish non­sen­si­cal re­ports from non­ex­ist­ent 
sci­en­tists, he added.

"Act­ing in the name of a made-up sci­ent­ist from a made-up 
in­sti­tu­tion, Bo­han­non sub­mit­ted ver­sions of the fake pa­per, 
then with­drew them as soon as they were ac­cept­ed. The hoax pa­per 
claimed that a par­tic­u­lar mol­e­cule ex­tracted from li­chen slowed 
the growth of can­cer cells.

" "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 short­com­ings im­me­di­ate­ly. Its 
ex­pe­ri­ments are so hope­lessly flawed that the re­sults are 
mean­ing­less," wrote Bo­han­non, who cre­at­ed the pa­pe­r in 
con­sulta­t­ion with real sci­en­tists."