At New Scientist we love a good hoax, especially one that both amuses and makes a serious point about the communication of science. So kudos to Philip Davis, a graduate student at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, who revealed yesterday on The Scholarly Kitchen blog that he got a nonsensical computer-generated paper accepted for publication in a peer-reviewed journal.

Earlier this year, Davis started receiving unsolicited emails from Bentham Science Publishers, which publishes more than 200 “open-access” journals – which turn the conventional business model of academic publishing on its head by charging publication fees to the authors of research papers, and then making the content available for free.

As the emails stacked up, Davis was not only encouraged to submit papers, but was also invited to serve on the editorial board of some of Bentham’s journals – for which he was told he would be allowed to publish one free article each year. “I received solicitations for journals for which I had no subject expertise at all,” says Davis. “It really painted a picture of vanity publishing.”

Sheer nonsense

So Davis teamed up with Kent Anderson, a member of the publishing team at The New England Journal of Medicine, to put Bentham’s editorial standards to the test. The pair turned to SCIgen, a program that generates nonsensical computer science papers, and submitted the resulting paper to The Open Information Science Journal, published by Bentham.


The paper, entitled “Deconstructing Access Points” (pdf) made no sense whatsoever, as this sample reveals:

In this section, we discuss existing research into red-black trees, vacuum tubes, and courseware [10]. On a similar note, recent work by Takahashi suggests a methodology for providing robust modalities, but does not offer an implementation [9].

Acronym clue

Davis and Anderson, writing under the noms de plume David Phillips and Andrew Kent, also dropped a hefty hint of the hoax by giving their institutional affiliation as the Center for Research in Applied Phrenology, or CRAP.

Yet four months after the article was submitted, “David Phillips” received an email from Sana Mokarram, Bentham’s assistant manager of publication:

This is to inform you that your submitted article has been accepted for publication after peer-reviewing process in TOISCIJ. I would be highly grateful to you if you please fill and sign the attached fee form and covering letter and send them back via email as soon as possible to avoid further delay in publication.

The publication fee was $800, to be sent to a PO Box in the United Arab Emirates. Having made his point, Davis withdrew the paper.

Mahmood Alam, Bentham’s director of publications, responded to queries from New Scientist by email: “In this particular case we were aware that the article submitted was a hoax, and we tried to find out the identity of the individual by pretending the article had been accepted for publication when in fact it was not.”

“Why hasn’t he attempted to contact me directly in order to determine my true identity?” Davis responds.

Pay to speak

This is just the latest use of SCIgen to probe the vetting of scientific papers. The program was devised by Jeremy Stribling, Daniel Aguayo and Maxwell Krohn, graduate students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who first used it to generate a spoof paper that was accepted for presentation at the 2005 World Multi-Conference on Systemics, Cybernetics and Informatics (WMSCI), which charged speakers $390 to attend.

Like conferences that rely on recruiting speakers to make money, Davis argues that little-known open-access journals may be under pressure to drop their standards for accepting papers to boost their revenue. To be fair to Bentham, however, an earlier bogus paper submitted by Davis to another of its publications, The Open Software Engineering Journal, was rejected after peer review.

History of hoaxes

What’s more, it seems that even some journals that charge readers for their content may be prone to accepting utter nonsense. The SCIgen website reports another incident from 2007, in which graduate students at Sharif University in Iran got a SCIgen-concocted paper accepted by Applied Mathematics and Computation, a journal published by Elsevier (part of Reed-Elsevier, the publishing giant that owns New Scientist).

After the spoof was revealed, the pre-publication version of the paper was removed from Elsevier’s ScienceDirect website. Still, the succinct proof-correcting queries sent to the hoaxers by Elsevier, made available here by the SCIgen team (pdf), make for interesting reading.

Melvin Scott, a retired mathematician based in Ocean Isle Beach, North Carolina, who serves as editor-in-chief of Applied Mathematics and Computation, says that the paper was accepted by an editor who has since left the journal. “I’ve revamped the editorial board significantly,” he adds.