Yesterday my boss sent us all this link to a story about a
paper accepted for publication in an open-access journal. For those of you who
do not deal with academic journals regularly (unlike Lute Player, who has
already presented about this article to her students), there are a whole bunch
of them out there with technical-sounding names that will publish anything for
a fee. For example, the journal in this story is called International Journal of Advanced Computer Technology, and they
solicited the "author" (who did not actually write the submitted paper) to submit a paper. The
paper submitted is called “Get Me Off Your F—king Mailing List,” and the body
of the text is simply that same phrase, over and over. There are two graphs
labeled with the same statement (but – and this is a big failing for an academic
paper – not referenced in the body of the text), and there are two references.
The person who submitted this paper was surprised enough to have it accepted
for publication, but he was even more surprised by the reviewer report, which
stated that the paper’s appropriateness for the journal was “excellent.” It did
say it was accepted with some minor changes, but those are not spelled out.
Perhaps they wanted “f—king” changed to “fricking”? All the submitter had to do
was wire $150 to a bank account in India, and he could have this obviously
peer-reviewed paper published in this clearly prestigious journal. The point,
of course, is that these open-access journals exist only to make a profit, and
they will publish anything if you pay them. So if you are an academic and want
to be published, make sure it is in a truly peer-reviewed and highly respected
academic journal, and not one that won’t take you off their f—king mailing list
but will publish your diatribe about it.
Famous Hat
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