The Difference between a Blog for Marketing and a Journal for Science
June 13, 2009
I write a blog containing opinion, ads, and old info. I get some help from Jessica, Stu, and others.I don’t pretend to be a journalist (heaven help me), a scientist (my goodness), or a very bright human (addled goose, please). When I read “CRAP Paper Accepted by Journal” on the New Scientist Web site, I did a double take. A software program generated a fake paper. The authors submitted the hoax to a publisher who charges authors to publish the article in a “respected journal”. The journal is a variant of vanity publishing. An author pays a publisher to create a book. The author has lots of books but a great birthday gift, just no sales.
The New Scientist writer offered this comment:
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.
I love the notion of publishers playing a custodial role. Custodian also means clean up. That’s what the $800 payments made by the hoaxers to the publisher. I label my Web log. No pretense here: 100 percent marketing.
Stephen Arnold, June 13, 2009
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