From Wil:
Fake research paper accepted into hundreds of online journals
by Lindsay Abrams
Salon.com
October 4, 2013
A “sting” operation found that open-access journals will accept anything — for a price
The dream of open access to scientific knowledge has come up hard against the truism that you can”™t trust everything you read on the Internet.
A fabricated “” and highly flawed “” research paper sent to 304 online journals by John Bohannon, a science journalist at Harvard, was accepted for publication by more than half of them. The paper, about a new cancer drug, included nonsensical graphs and an utter disregard for the scientific method. In addition, it was written by fake authors, from a fake university in Africa and, as a final flourish, had been changed through Google Translate into French and back to English. Collaborators at Harvard helped him make it convincingly boring. Continue reading “Fake Facts for Free”