Wednesday, June 17, 2009

At least here the Editor loses his job

Following up on last week's post about the nonsensical research article that was accepted in an open access journal after being "peer-reviewed", the editor of the journal has resigned his position.

What really gets me is the gaul of the publisher to state "In a statement, Mahmood Alam, director of publications at Bentham Science Publishing, told Nature in an e-mail that "submission of fake manuscripts is a totally unethical activity and must be condemned.""

But it appears that I am too quick to judge. Alam was actually the good guy here, actively purusing the criminals: "Alam claims that those behind the fake paper "had also tried to do this earlier [sic] in a different journal, but failed in their attempt due to our peer review system. Our suspicions were aroused this time and in an effort to unmask their identities the normal publication process was carried out on the second fake article. When they received repeated requests from us for more information and their credit card and other payment details they withdrew this paper.""

Way to go! A publisher trying to out the fakes, tracking them by their credit cards numbers. Too bad that the general public doesn't know about this stuff; I'd love to see the talk show hosts get some mileage out of this situation (and Conan needs a lot of mileage).

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