Here are the followup articles that the Boston.com piece mentions

http://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2009/06/10/nonsense-for-dollars/

Open Access Publisher Accepts Nonsense Manuscript for Dollars

Would a publisher accept a completely nonsensical manuscript if the authors were willing to pay Open Access publication charges? After being spammed with invitations to publish in Bentham Science journals earlier this year, I decided to find out.

Using SCIgen, a software that generates grammatically correct, “context-free” (i.e. nonsensical) papers in computer science, I quickly created an article, complete with figures, tables, and references. It looks pretty professional until you read it. For example:

In this section, we discuss existing research into red-black trees, vacuum tubes, and courseware [10]. On a similar note, recent work by Takahashi suggests a methodology for providing robust modalities, but does not offer an implementation [9].

The manuscript, entitled “Deconstructing Access Points” was submitted on January 29th, 2009, to The Open Information Science Journal (TOISCIJ), a journal that claims to enforce peer-review.

The manuscript was given two co-authors, David Phillips and Andrew Kent. Any similarity to real or fictitious, living or dead academics is purely coincidental, as was their institutional affiliation: The Center for Research in Applied Phrenology based in Ithaca, New York. If the acronym didn’t reveal the farce right away, phrenology is the pseudoscience of reading personality traits from the lumps on one’s head.

Bentham confirmed receipt of my submission the very next day (January 30, 2009). Nearly four months later, I received a response — the article was accepted. The acceptance letter read:

This is to inform you that your submitted article has been accepted for publication after peer-reviewing process in TOISCIJ. I would be highly grateful to you if you please fill and sign the attached fee form and covering letter and send them back via email as soon as possible to avoid further delay in publication.

The letter was written by a Ms. Sana Mokarram, the Assistant Manager of Publication. She included a fee schedule and confirmation that I would pay US$800, to be sent to a post office box in the SAIF Zone, a tax-free complex in the United Arab Emirates. The manuscript was subsequently retracted:

Dear Ms. Mokarram,
I’m afraid that we have to retract this article. We have discovered several errors in the manuscript which question both the validity of the study and the results.

I have yet to receive a response. What is surprising is that the assistant manager claimed that the article went through peer-review although there is no evidence that it actually did. Anyone with English proficiency — with or without a degree in computer science — would recognize that this manuscript makes absolutely no sense. Had it gone through peer review, I should have received reviewer comments. If you are skeptical that I might be misreading the response of someone whose first language is not English, I clarified the decision in a previous email with the simple question, “Does this mean that our manuscript was accepted for publication?” Her answer was the above quote.

From this one case, we cannot conclude that Bentham Science journals practice no peer review, only that it is inconsistently applied. Earlier this year, I reported on a case in which a nonsensical article submitted to another Bentham Science journal was rejected after going through peer review [1].

While one should be careful not to generalize these results to other Open Access journals using similar business models, it does raise the question of whether, at least in some cases, the producer-pays-to-publish model may unduly influence editorial decision-making. One may also question whether publishers like Bentham see a lucrative opportunity from the OA movement, considering that academic libraries are establishing author publication funds to pay Open Access charges.

Notes:

[1] Adventure in Open Access Publishing (March 12, 2009). The first manuscript, “A Study of Wide-Area Networks” was submitted to the Open Software Engineering Journal. No other submissions to Bentham journals were made.

http://www.the-scientist.com/blog/display/55759/

The editor-in-chief of an open access journal has stepped down from his post after learning that the journal accepted a fake, computer-generated article for publication. So has an editorial advisory board member of a second journal published by the same company, Bentham Science Publishers.

Image: Jupiter Images
Bambang Parmanto, a University of Pittsburgh information scientist, resigned from his editorship at The Open Information Science Journal (TOISCIJ) after reading a story on The Scientist's website yesterday (June 10) that described a hoax paper submission to the journal. Editors at journal claimed to have peer reviewed the article and slated it for publication pending the submission of $800 in "open access fees."

"I didn't like what happened," Parmanto told The Scientist. "If this is true, I don't have full control of the content that is accepted to this journal." Parmanto said that he had never seen the phony manuscript that was accepted by TOISCIJ. "I want to lessen my exposure to the risk of being taken advantage of."

Parmanto, who became editor-in-chief of TOISCIJ when Bentham launched the journal last year, said that he had reviewed manuscripts for inclusion in the journal previously, but that he made up his mind to resign from his volunteer position "because of the potential for abuse," of the kind uncovered by the hoax.

Parmanto did add, however, that the perpetrators of the hoax -- Cornell grad student Philip Davis and Kent Anderson, executive director of international business and product development at the New England Journal of Medicine -- were also guilty of some degree of unethical behavior. "This is a process based on trust," he said. "An author should submit something legitimate, and the process on the review side should decide if a paper is worth publishing or not. In this case, the process was broken on both sides."

Parmanto isn't the only one to react to the news of Bentham's ignominy by terminating his association with the publisher. Marc Williams, an immunologist and stem cell researcher at the University of Rochester School of Medicine & Dentistry who served on the editorial advisory board of The Open Stem Cell Journal (OSCJ), another Bentham publication, resigned as well. After reading the story of Davis and Kent's "little experiment" yesterday, Williams "immediately requested my name to be removed from the journal's editorial board."

"What upset me was the fact that this happened at all, in any of [Bentham's] journals," Williams told The Scientist. "It really informs us that it may be a company policy that this is permitted in general."

Williams, who had served on the OSCJ editorial advisory board since the journal's inception last year, said that in his 15 or 16 months on the job he has not reviewed a single manuscript submitted for publication, though the journal has only published one volume containing five articles since its inception.

Both Parmanto and Williams said that they support the idea of open access journals. "The open access system is definitely the way forward," said Williams. "At face value, it is an extremely valuable way of making scientific data widely available."

But Parmanto, though he said that he "believes in the open access system," noted that the business model of charging authors fees to publish in OA journals might become problematic. "I see that [Bentham would] have the incentive to maintain the credibility of the journal, but I also see the potential for abuse."

Parmanto said that upon reading the story about Davis and Andrew's hoax on our website yesterday, he contacted the publisher of TOISCIJ to ask what was going on. Parmanto said that he was told that "someone on the editorial board reviewed" the fake paper. I contacted Parmanto yesterday in reporting the original story, but the researcher told me today that he wanted to hear from TOISCIJ's publisher before getting back to me.

Obviously a coordinated effort to discredit Bentham thanks to the 9/11 truth movement.

Bentham Science publishes a large number of journals, a quick google search gives this info:

"Bentham Science Publishers Ltd. Home Page
"A major STM journal publisher of 92 online and print journals, 200 plus open accessjournals, and related print/online book series, "

Each journal has an a different editorial board, as far as I can see. So an error by someone on ONE of 200-plus journals has very close to zero bearing on what is published in the other 200 journals. The problem was not in the Open Chemical Physics Journal.

Further, our paper was reviewed prior to publication by the Physics dept. chair at BYU -- and he approved it for publication. His peer-review was NOT under the auspices of Bentham. (This peer-review was done because two of the authors are from this dept. at BYU... and Dr. Farrer requested the review.)

I think debunkers will look for any way to criticize the Active Thermitic Material paper without actually dealing with doing experiments or papers themselves. Our results are based on experiment, not on who published the results.

BTW, experiments continue, and future results will certainly be published in a non-Bentham journal next time. Note that the Ryan-Gourley-Jones paper was published last year in the Environmentalist, peer-reviewed and NOT a Bentham publication.

but there is no stopping us.

Center for Research in Applied Phrenology.

C R A P.

I didn't notice that part until today. At least they added some humor to their sting operation. That was a nice touch.