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Journal Accepts CRAP
Cornell grad student Philip Davis describes on Scholarly Kitchen an experiment he designed to test the peer-review process at Bentham Science, a publisher of "open-access" journals. (Open-access journals charge authors for publication, but make the articles available for free.)

He used software to create an article full of computer-generated nonsense, such as, "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]."

He told Bentham the manuscript had two co-authors from the Center for Research in Applied Phrenology (CRAP). Four months after submitting it, a Bentham representative told him the manuscript had passed peer-review and would be published in The Open Information Science Journal... assuming he paid the $800 publication fee. He declined the offer. New Scientist has more details.

Four years ago a group of MIT students pioneered the "computer-generated article" hoax when they submitted a nonsense paper that was accepted for presentation at the World Multi-Conference on Systemics, Cybernetics and Informatics Conference. Though you can go back to 1944's Ern Malley hoax for an example of hoaxers submitting nonsense for publication.
Categories: Science
Posted by Alex on Thu Jun 11, 2009
Comments (5)
More from the Hoax Museum Archives:
N.B. Open Access as defined in this article is Gold O.A., as distinct from Green O.A.
Posted by Robert Seddon  in  Durham, UK  on  Thu Jun 11, 2009  at  07:06 PM
personally i prefer SCIgen, http://pdos.csail.mit.edu/scigen/ I have used it successfully several times with most amusing results.
Posted by John  on  Thu Jun 11, 2009  at  08:08 PM
Kind of reminds me of the Atlanta Nights hoax.
Posted by Yoyogod  on  Thu Jun 11, 2009  at  10:41 PM
John, it actually was SCIgen he used. I just failed to mention that.
Posted by Alex  in  San Diego  on  Thu Jun 11, 2009  at  11:37 PM
You don't mention Alan Sokal's fake paper for Social Text, in which he argued that liberal politics are rooted in quantum physics.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokal_affair
Posted by Goober  on  Fri Jun 12, 2009  at  03:02 PM
Comments: Page 1 of 1 pages

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