This case of institutional failure makes me wonder how well peer review can play its vaunted role in the practice of science. All quotes below come from this article:
"Get Me Off Your ****ing Mailing List" is an actual science paper accepted by a journal
The paper .. titled "
Get me off your ****ing mailing list," was accepted by the
International Journal of Advanced Computer Technology.
The journal, despite its distinguished name, is a predatory open-access journal,
as noted by io9. These sorts of low-quality journals spam thousands of scientists, offering to publish their work for a fee.
In 2005, computer scientists
David Mazières and
Eddie Kohler created this
highly profane ten-page paper as a joke, to send in replying to unwanted conference invitations. It literally just contains that seven-word phrase over and over, along with a nice flow chart and scatter-plot graph:
According to the blog Scholarly Open Access, this PDF made the rounds, and an Australian computer scientist named Peter Vamplew sent it to the
International Journal of Advanced Computer Technology in response to spam from the journal. Apparently, he thought the editors might simply open and read it.
Instead, they automatically accepted the paper — with an anonymous reviewer rating it as "excellent" — and requested a fee of $150.