Profanity-Laced Academic Paper Exposes Scam Journal 137
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."
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The Source Document (Score:5, Informative)
Of course I didn't use the word "F******" in my submission, but I suppose Slashdot must be couth.
Anyway, here's a link to the actual paper (warning: PDF) - http://www.scs.stanford.edu/~d... [stanford.edu]
Re:Beall's list not neutral (Score:4, Informative)
Mr. Beall's list has been criticized as being not neutral...
Not by Science Magazine... From Wikipedia:
In 2013, Science published the results of a "sting operation" in which a scientifically flawed spoof publication was submitted to open access publications.[11] Many accepted the manuscript, and a disproportionate number of the accepting journals were on Beall's list. The publication, entitled Who's Afraid of Peer Review?, stated that "The results show that Beall is good at spotting publishers with poor quality control: For the publishers on his list that completed the review process, 82% accepted the paper."[11] Beall agreed, saying that the author of the sting, John Bohannon, "basically found what I've been saying for years."