Saturday, October 27, 2012

Philip Henry Gosse, thou art vindicated!

Jeffrey Beall is an acknowledged expert in the field of vanity-publishing scammery who follows the world of pop-up rip-off journals so that you don't have to, and even now I am spamming him with invitations to contribute a paper on the subject to the prestigious and high-impact International Journal of Open-Access Predatory-Publishing Inquiries.

Via Beall's research, behold the glory that is the International Journal of Engineering Sciences and Research Technology!
A multilingual journal;
Editors fluent in Lorem Ipsum
What raises it above all the other grifters is the creation of a fictitious past. Like Adam created with a navel, the proprietor has created one current and six previous issues for his spurious journal; and to add verisimilitude and further bolster the impression of an established publication, he has generated corroborative detail in the form of contents for these issues... a total of 65 fake papers, each with its non-existent authors, references and plausibly nonsensical technical jargoon.


Labour for these endeavours is reduced by the existence of content-free paper-generating software (written to ridicule bogus CS conferences and expose their absence of standards). Suspicion also turns to the JanusNode experiments of one Substance McGravitas.

We hope to see more of this form of creativity. When one constructs a simulacrum the least one can do is to endow it with memories -- borrowed or generated -- of a normal past. It must be a tradition, or an old charter or something.

7 comments:

ifthethunderdontgetya™³²®© said...

Bookmark this post!
~

ckc (not kc) said...

...hey, I did my minor in miasmology! (I think...it was hard to tell.)

Substance McGravitas said...

I wonder if the Gnoetry people have seen this.

H. Rumbold, Master Barber said...

Author Yadav does not cite him/herself. Turing test FAIL. Reject.

mikey said...

"Thou art vindicated"?

Michael Valentine Smith Fail...

Narad said...

The referee's report for the Mathgen paper accepted by Advances in Pure Mathematics. (Passes the self-citation test, as well.)

Smut Clyde said...

The referee's report for the Mathgen paper
From the Author's Response:
This omission admittedly represents a slight flaw in the manuscript.

This sounds similar to having a slight flaw in one's character.

Michael Valentine Smith Fail...
More intended as a Templar shout-out. It never hurts to ingratiate oneself with the Illuminati.