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.

Below: Miasmology, dogfooded

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.