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."
Re:Random sample from one paper (Score:5, Insightful)
Also note the "Editorial Board" for this illustrious publication: http://www.ijact.org/eb.htm [ijact.org]
I suspect that this "journal" not only provides these guys with extra income, but also serves publication destination for their own dubious science papers.
Of course what keeps these "journals" in business is the fever pitch that academics must publish just to stay relevant in their professional / social strata (and who cares what they publish as long as they do), and their quest for tenure...