Randomly Generated Math Article Accepted By 'Open-Access' Journal

call -151 writes "Many years ago, a human-generated intentionally nonsense paper was accepted by the (prominent) literary culture journal Social Text. In August, a randomly-generated nonsense mathematics paper was accepted by one of the many low-tier 'open-access' research mathematics journals. The software Mathgen, which generated the accepted submission, takes as inputs author names (or those can be randomly selected also) and generates nicely TeX'd and impressive-sounding sentences which are grammatically correct but mathematically disconnected nonsense. This was reviewed by a human, (quickly, for math, in 12 days) and the reviewers' comments mention superficial problems with the submission (PDF). The references are also randomly-generated and rather hilarious. For those with concerns about submitting to lower-tier journals in an effort to promote open access, this is not a good sign!"

Re:Literally accept anything.

[interkin3tic]

The previous incident mentioned was from 1996, the "Sokal affair" as wiki calls it. It was a journal, not a conference, but was not peer reviewed at the time, according to the wiki article.

The current issue appears to have been peer reviewed, there were some comments for the "author."

In both cases, the journals were mentioned:Advances in Pure Mathematics for the current one, and "Social text" for the 1996 one.

Ridiculous conclusion

[narcc]

Small-time journal suffers same problem as prominent journal, therefore, small-time journals are terrible!

WTF?

This was reviewed by a human, (quickly, for math, in 12 days) and the reviewers' comments mention superficial problems with the submission

As every published Slashdot reader knows, the feedback you get from peer-review varies greatly in quality -- and, yes, you do tend to get lots of superficial junk. Unfortunately, you get more junk than quality feedback that actually improves the paper.

Re:Big deal? Not really.

[call -151]

Indeed, the central issue here is failure of standards and refereeing.

But this case does have something to do with open-access in that there seems to be now a proliferation of low-tier journals who are desperate for submissions, and some of them use ``open access'' in their promotion of why a researcher should submit there. I get many of such solicitations each day inviting me to submit articles. I get intermittent invitations to join editorial boards of journals with names that sound a lot like credible journals, but a slight investigation shows them to be quite weak journals. Some of those are using the ``open access'' issue as way of encouraging submissions, and in some cases it seems to work. There are also instances, like this one, where ensuring ``open access'' gives an excuse for a publication charge of, in this example, $500. I suspect that such journals as financial endeavors are actually making money, judging from the number of solicitations that there seem to be and from seeing a decent number of things appear there.

Re:Could be worse...

[wmac1]

In my university Mathematics and Computer science schools are in the same building and we have common courses (Discrete math, logic and applications, ...)

I am a computer science researcher and I publish most of my papers in mathematics and mathematical simulation journals. I have taught mathematics for computer science (Fourier series and transform, Laplace transform, differential equations, complex numbers, numerical methods, etc.) for a few semesters.

Is that really strange?