Tired of being bombarded by requests for manuscripts from predatory journals, we wrote a spoof article — on the contents of our medicine cabinets — in response to one such request from a purportedly peer-reviewed pharmaceutical journal.

Real data would have taken a while to compile, so we made it all up. We included a scatterplot (N = 2) with a nonsense caption, a map of the world showing the medicine cabinets’ locations and a table of gibberish, never expecting the manuscript to see the light of day. We openly stated in the article that it was written in response to a predatory-journal request.

The manuscript was crowdsourced in a Google Doc, and we provided the link to it on Twitter (see go.nature.com/2vz8xc6). The paper was accepted — pending page charges — ten days later, without anyone having so much as read it, let alone peer reviewed it, as far as we could discern (for example, no revisions were requested and no comments were provided). As we had no intention of paying US$1,080, that’s where our stunt ended.

This frivolous exercise adds to the alarm over the number of articles that are being published without meaningful — or even any — peer review (see go.nature.com/2yupjzc, for example). It behoves us all to be wary when choosing journals in which to publish our work (see also A. Cortegiani and S. L. Shafer Crit. Care 22, 300; 2018).