Randomly Generated Math Article Accepted By 'Open-Access' Journal 197
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!"
Literally accept anything. (Score:4, Insightful)
A lot of these "controversies" come from submitting to journals or conferences that will literally accept anything. That story from 2005 about the random paper was submitted to the _non-reviewed section_ of the conference. I like how this article does not even say what conference it was submitted to, and whether or not review was even required for acceptance.
Big deal? Not really. (Score:5, Insightful)
This has nothing to do with open access, and more to do with lack of proper review. Besides, as noted in the post, this particular journal charges a fee for publishing. Being a "low-tier" journal, they don't really have a reputation, and are probably more concerned with making money.
Hell, I could start up my own journal, give it a title, Generalities and accept anything at all to be published. It doesn't mean what is published is meaningful or useful. (Just because something is in a book doesn't make it true either. This journal sounds like it is about equivalent to "self published" books, where you pay the publisher to print your book. But they don't actually do any editing or similar. Not to say that reputable journals are the same as the non-self publishing world.)
Journals have reputations for a reason. One reason is because the good ones tend to do a bit more checking of the papers submitted. I doubt it this paper would have been accepted by a journal that actually reviewed papers properly, regardless of whether it was open access or not.
The Good Papers are in Reputable Journals (Score:5, Insightful)
In the literary world, you could take a picture of every bowel movement you've had for the last year, pay somebody $1,000, and have the resulting picture book officially published by some official-sounding company, but that doesn't mean your GI accomplishments are noteworthy or impressive.
The editors for this particular journal probably thought they were witnessing some profound new discovery since they couldn't understand what the hell the paper was even proving. My suspicion is that they were quick to approve it in a vain attempt to make their journal even slightly relevant.
View from the outside (Score:5, Insightful)
It seems like a lot of these academic authors try to "out dense" one another and deliberately make their papers as unclear as possible, so I think it's not just "journal will accept anything" and a little "thickly worded paper no one wants to admit they don;t understand and it sounds like every other paper."
I've had papers about communications concepts where I have written VHDL cores and embedded software that work perfectly, yet I can't make heads or tails of papers on the topic because they are written in such an obtuse manner with bizarre symbol choices and shoehorning every blessed value into a matrix, no matter how inappropriate, because Matlab is the only tool they know how to use.
Re:Big deal? Not really. (Score:5, Insightful)
This works in politics, too (Score:5, Insightful)
If you can't dazzle them with brilliance, baffle them with bullshit.
Re:Brilliant references! (Score:4, Insightful)
Incidentally, the choice of pretending to be affiliated with the University of Southern North Dakota at Hoople (here's a photo of the USND-Hoople campus [openlettersmonthly.com]) should have been a giant hint to any reviewer with access to Google.
Re:Argument (Score:5, Insightful)
Same can be said for the "modern art" most favored by academics in our institutes of higher learning. Most of it is also randomly generated. Most likely this randomly generated math paper baffled the reviewer. Instead of having enough confidence or ability to see if there was any validity to the paper, he just went forward with it, probably presuming that whoever could write such a baffling paper had to be more intelligent than he was. And he certainly wasn't going to be made a fool by questioning the work of such a brilliant mind.
Likewise, pseudo-intellectual art critics and academics over the last century fell for one of the greatest practical jokes of all time - modern art - except that the pranksters died before revealing the humor behind it all. The art academics, fearful of being exposed for being less intelligent than their peers in science, history, mathematics, and other fields, couldn't take the risk of challenging the "art" of what might be a superior mind. Ever since, to be accepted as art in modern academic circles the creator must be high on bath salts, suffering from dimentia, or have some other mental illness. Most of the "greatest" works of our modern time have been the result of randomly flicking, throwing, smearing, dripping, and pouring paint on a canvas. More "creative" works involved letting chickens run through paint, leaving footprints on canvas, or painting with different shades of feces. After all this, people still get upset when I suggest that perhaps artists have not necessarily improved our civilization on the same scales as scientists and engineers.
Re:Argument (Score:1, Insightful)
I don't think you know what art is, or you have missed much.