One of many low-quality open-access journals.
The International Journal of Advanced Computer Technology has accepted for publication a manuscript that was first written in 2005 to protest spam conference invitations. The paper contains the F-word throughout the manuscript.
This is the paper that was sent to the journal in response to its spam.
The original paper (selection above) was written by David Mazières and Eddie Kohler and is entitled “Get me off your f—–g mailing list.” It is available here.
After receiving a spam email from the International Journal of Advanced Computer Technology, Dr. Peter Vamplew of Federation University Australia’s School of Engineering and Information Technology sent the anti-spam article as a reply to the spam email without any other message, expecting that they might open it and read it, but not that it would be considered for publication.
To his surprise, the journal accepted the paper and sent him an acceptance email that had two PDF attachments. One was a formal statement of acceptance and the second was the reviewer report.
The formal acceptance letter.
The screenshot above is from the acceptance letter. The following screenshot is from the review form, in which an anonymous reviewer indicated that the paper’s appropriateness for the journal is “excellent.”
The peer reviewer’s report.
It’s clear from examining the reviewer report that the same filled-out form is used for most or all submissions. Certainly, no peer review was completed despite the journal’s claim to be a peer reviewed journal.
The acceptance indicates that the next step for Associate Professor Vamplew is to wire USD $150 to the bank account of Tej Pal Singh, and the paper will be published, but I don’t think he’ll be doing that.
Appendix:
I don’t see the problem. I’d give this paper a fantastic review. I’m not kidding. A little humor is science is a good thing. The only problem I see is that they should have submitted it to a first tier journal. In fact, I’d be honored to OPEN review this paper, just for the fun of it!
In fact, I hereby volunteer to manage and edit an open peer review process on this paper. (Of we’re going to do this, we should stop the authors from actually publishing in the bogus journal bcs then copyright and multiple publication issues may arise. Maybe I’ll write them.)
You don’t see the problem? Have you read the draft? Figures 1 and 2 are not referenced in the main text.
But the references are consistent!
You guys have, of course, seen Sci Gen, right? If not, run, don’t walk:
http://pdos.csail.mit.edu/scigen/
There’s a phrase for this: … minor revision … :-)
Three things:
1) Beneficiary bank: State Bank of India
2) Editor In Chief: Dr Rishi Asthana, Professor, Department of Computer Science and Engineering Manglaytan Universirty, India
3) The 2005 paper has got to hold the record for the most self-plagairism within a single article.
Hmm, the journal stated that article was accepted with “minor change”. I would be curious to see the nature of these minor changes.
I think the minor edits were the fact that the F-word was capitalized. So, lower-case f had to be applied throughout.
Brilliant. Will follow suit, may reduce amount of crap landing in my inbox!
Almost worth the $150 just to get it published and then publicise the fact – I suspect the altmetrics would be good!
It hasn’t helped – IJACT spammed me again earlier this week :-(
Times are hard, can you spare 150 bucks buddy?
This deserves a kickstarter, Peter. You put it up, we’ll fund publication.
Honestly, it would probably be worth it just for the DOI, although I guess figshare could do that. :-)
I sort of wish he’d send them the money and have it published…partly to see if they do publish, partly to see if it ends up on Google Scholar, partly to let it stand in the journal’s archive as a warning to other authors!
If it was my paper I probably would pay for the publication, but I don’t think it would be ethical to do it without permission of the original authors.
I think I know who should have peer reviewed this, or at least handled its peer review….except he is dead….
I rate the appropriateness of this post to be published on the internet as: 1 – Excellent.
Thank you!
I am not sure that Warren Terra is a bona fide peer reviewer.