- A scientific study by Maggie Simpson, Edna Krabappel, and Kim Jong Fun has been accepted by two journals. Of course, none of these fictional characters actually wrote the paper, titled "Fuzzy, Homogeneous Configurations." Rather, it's a nonsensical text, submitted by engineer Alex Smolyanitsky in an effort to expose a pair of scientific journals — the Journal of Computational Intelligence and Electronic Systems and the comic sans-loving Aperito Journal of NanoScience Technology. These outlets both belong to a world of predatory journals that spam thousands of scientists, offering to publish their work — whatever it is — for a fee, without actually conducting peer review. When Smolyanitsky was contacted by them, he submitted the paper, which has a totally incoherent, science-esque text written by SCIgen, a random text generator. (Example sentence: "we removed a 8-petabyte tape drive from our peer-to-peer cluster to prove provably "fuzzy" symmetries’s influence on the work of Japanese mad scientist Karthik Lakshminarayanan.") Then, he thought up the authors, along with a nonexistent affiliation ("Belford University") for them. "I wanted first and foremost to come up with something that gives out the fake immediately," he says. "My only regret is that the second author isn't Ralph Wiggum." One journal immediately accepted it, while the other took a month before accepting (perhaps as part of an effort to fake peer review), but has since published it — and now keeps sending Smolyanitsky an invoice for $459. The fact that these journals would accept the paper is absurd, and the Simpsons connection is pretty funny. But it's also a troubling sign of a bigger problem in science publishing. (...) - Sei Dee già Pulp

sempre peggio - Guiseppe

Perché? è ovvio che se c'è qualcuno che ha bisogno di dimostrare di avere pubblicato su una rivista si crea il mercato di riviste farlocche, e non vedo perché la rivista farlocca deve preoccuparsi di leggere quello che c'è scritto. L'unica cosa strana è che abbiano pubblicato prima e chiesto i soldi poi - .mau.