Profanity-Laced Academic Paper Exposes Scam Journal

Frosty P writes: A scientific paper titled "Get Me Off Your F****** Mailing List" was actually accepted by the International Journal of Advanced Computer Technology. As reported at Vox and other web sites, the journal, despite its distinguished name, is a predatory open-access journal. These sorts of low-quality journals spam thousands of scientists, offering to publish their work for a fee. In 2005, computer scientists David Mazières and Eddie Kohler created this highly profane ten-page paper as a joke, to send in replying to unwanted conference invitations. It literally just contains that seven-word phrase over and over, along with a nice flow chart and scatter-plot graph. More recently, computer scientist Peter Vamplew sent it to the IJACT in response to spam from the journal, and the paper was automatically accepted with an anonymous reviewer rating it as "excellent," and requested a fee of $150. Over the years, the number of these predatory journals has exploded. Jeffrey Beall, a librarian at the University of Colorado, keeps an up-to-date list of them to help researchers avoid being taken in; it currently has 550 publishers and journals on it."

Not bad, but...

[Blrfl]

It's no Chicken Chicken Chicken [isotropic.org], but it'll do.

Re:Not bad, but...

[Anonymous Coward]

Thanks. I had never read the actual paper before, only seen the presentation. [youtube.com]

Re:They must have some really low standards

[BarbaraHudson]

And there's your explanation:

This includes blind review by three or more members of the international editorial review board

Possible "failure modes":

1. Blind review: The reviewers are blind, so as long as the paper passes the "sniff test" ...
2. International editorial review board: Their first, second, whatever languages aren't english ...

Obviously a scam, though I want to know - did he mange to get off their mailing list?