Like all human endeavors, open access publication of scientific work is open to abuse, and recent events suggest that at least a segment of the open access medical and scientific publishing world may also be functioning as a vanity press. According to a story in The Scientist, a pair of “investigators” submitted a fake paper containing nonsense generated by computer to The Open Information Science Journal.1 The “authors” were promptly sent a notice that the manuscript had been reviewed and was now acceptable for publication, along with a bill for $800. Although this sum is only a quarter of the bill I recently paid for publication in a different open access journal (Journal of Clinical Investigation), it highlights the potential for unscrupulous operators in this new and growing field of technical publishing.
One of the troubling aspects of this scandal, however, is the role played by an employee of a large and prestigious medical journal. The individuals who exposed the online publishing scam included a postdoctoral fellow and another individual who was described as the “executive director of international business and product development at the New England Journal of Medicine.” Although it is unlikely that the New England Journal of Medicine, a publishing behemoth, really saw The Open Information Science Journal as a major competitor for ad revenue or readers, the involvement of an employee of a potential competitor in this expose casts a shadow on this undercover investigation.
What if a more credible sounding article (with faked data) was submitted by these investigators to a competing journal and, upon acceptance, the journal was exposed for having accepted a paper that was a fake? Indeed, one wonders whether self-appointed watchdogs or ambitious and unscrupulous journal owners have made spurious submissions to competing journals in order to discredit the competition. The New England Journal of Medicine has weighed in extensively on conflicts of interest, both real and perceived, and the pernicious influence of commercial interests on the practice of medicine and research abuses. If one described this expose as a clinical study designed to test the hypothesis that some publishers will publish anything for a fee, my institutional conflict of interest committee would not have permitted the involvement in such a trial of an employee of a company with “skin in the game.”
Another troubling aspect of this case is the use of a computer program to write the scientific-sounding gibberish that was submitted to The Open Information Science Journal. Have we really gotten that lazy that we have to have a computer write our nonsense? Judging from some of my own published work, writing scientific-sounding nonsense seems to be more the rule than the exception. Unlike the situation with chess, humans remain highly competitive with computers in the generation of incomprehensible nonsense and I, for one, would like to strike a blow for the human element here.
