Tuesday, February 3, 2015

Predatory open access journals: still keep'n it classy

As most academics are aware, there are hundreds of predatory open access journals that try to trick authors into submitting to their journals, charge exorbitant fees, and do not ensure that articles are peer reviewed or live up to basic scientific standards. The most celebrated cases are journals that embarrassingly publish non-sensical fake papers. I don't know why, but I sometimes go to the journal websites to see what they publish or who is on their editorial boards. I received such an e-mail this morning from SOJ Genetic Science published by Symbiosis, a recognized predatory publisher. This journal, unlike others, actually has a single published issue with an editorial! I thought: "wow, are they trying to be legitimate?"; then I read the editorial. The editorial is probably best described as a nonsensical diatribe about genetics, which lacks any real connection to modern genetic theory. Here is my favourite paragraph:



Predatory open access journals: still keep'n it classy.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

If you're going to say "RNA building blocks came from space," you've really got to cite that.

Marc Cadotte said...

H.G. Wells (1897)