As if we haven’t got enough fake news around on social media, now comes word that some of Canada’s most prominent medical journals may also be publishing nonsense. The new owner of two of Canada’s most prominent medical journal publishers has been caught in the act of publishing fake science. As an experiment, Ottawa Citizen reporter Tom Spears submitted “an unintelligible and heavily plagiarized piece of writing” to the Journal of Clinical Research and Bioethics, run by OMICS International.

A screencap of Ottawa Citizen reporter Tom Spears' fake science article at OMICS' Journal of Clinical Research and Bioethics. Even Spears' fabrication of a fake university didn't stop the publication from running it. Spears’ gibberish research report is now live at the journal’s website. “And it’s awful,” Spears said in a column Wednesday. “OMICS claims this paper passed peer review, and presents useful insights in philosophy, when clearly it is entirely fake.” This journal is not one of the Canadian ones under the OMICS umbrella, but is now part of the same organization. A joint investigation by CTV News and The Toronto Star this fall uncovered that two of Canada’s largest medical science publishers — Andrew John Publishing and Pulsus Group — had been bought by OMICS, an India-based company with a reputation for publishing junk science. News of the purchase sent “shock waves” through Canada’s medical research community, and put a dozen Canadian publications at risk of being delisted from PubMed, an authoritative database of medical research, The Toronto Star reported. U.S. sues OMICS The U.S. Federal Trade Commission filed a lawsuit against OMICS in August of this year. It alleged that, since 2009, OMICS has run publications “styled as academic journals” that claim to be serious, peer-reviewed journals, but actually publish un-reviewed articles solicited for cash. The suit also alleges that OMICS gets attendees to its conferences by pretending that prominent researchers will be there.