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A spoof paper concocted by Science reveals little or no ... open-access journals.
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A spoof paper concocted by Science reveals little or no scrutiny at many open-access journals.
On 4 July, good news arrived in the inbox of Ocorrafoo Cobange, a biologist at the Wassee Institute of Medicine in Asmara. It was the official letter of acceptance for a paper he had submitted 2 months earlier to the Journal of Natural Pharmaceuticals, describing the anticancer properties of a chemical that Cobange had extracted from a lichen.
In fact, it should have been promptly rejected. Any reviewer with more than a high-school knowledge of chemistry and the ability to understand a basic data plot should have spotted the paper's short-comings immediately. Its experiments are so hopelessly flawed that the results are meaningless.
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<div class="section precis" id="abstract-1" itemprop="description"><p id="p-1">A spoof paper concocted by <em>Science</em> reveals little or no scrutiny at many open-access journals. </p> </div> <div class="mini-toc-wrapper"><div class="mini-toc"><div class="mini-toc-inner" style="background: #e2e8ec; padding: 0px; border: none; font-size: .9em;"><a href="http://www.sciencemag.org/site/special/scicomm/index.xhtml"><img src="/site/special/scicomm/scicomm-minitoc.gif" style="border:none;"></a></div></div></div> <p id="p-4">On 4 July, good news arrived in the inbox of Ocorrafoo Cobange, a biologist at the Wassee Institute of Medicine in Asmara. It was the official letter of acceptance for a paper he had submitted 2 months earlier to the <em>Journal of Natural Pharmaceuticals</em>, describing the anticancer properties of a chemical that Cobange had extracted from a lichen. </p> <p id="p-5">In fact, it should have been promptly rejected. Any reviewer with more than a high-school knowledge of chemistry and the ability to understand a basic data plot should have spotted the paper's short-comings immediately. Its experiments are so hopelessly flawed that the results are meaningless. </p> |
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