One.Billion.Dollars.

That is how much the lawyer-shaped entity acting for OMICS Publishing Group is demanding from mild-mannered librarian Jeffrey Beall, for describing that company's business practices in such a manner as to damage it, i.e. honestly.

Srinubabu Gedela, OMICS owner [right]

Now the Riddled Library Pixies may be capricious, and unreliable, and capable of Jesuit casuistry when it comes to interpreting the small-print clauses in their contract, while their performance in areas such as "retrieving back issues of Miss Busty Monthly* from the double-secret-probation-uncataloged archives" leaves much to be desired... but they do not lack for collegiality or professional loyalty. So they have suggested that Riddled join the serried ranks of bloggerhood rallying to Mr Beall's defense. And we do not cavil or resist, especially after they turned Another Kiwi into a previously-unknown variety of pinniped.

AK does not appear perturbed and is happily playing with his Airfix HO-scale toy soldiers military models. Still, it would be good to get him back, what with it being not my turn to restock the tea-room with chocolate hobnobs. Also I am worried that the pixies -- lovable little scamps that they are -- may be working up to a joke about "Seal of Approval". Tigris and mikey are better than me at negotiating with them but they have conveniently chosen this occasion to go back travelling in the Riddled time machine to the Cretaceous era (apparently with the mission of teaching hadrosaurs how to protect themselves from time-travelling big-game hunters by disguising themselves as creatures who do not look like hadrosaurs).

Riddled has previously covered the egregious band of shysters known as OMICS Publishers. That was a while ago in interduct years, however, and their business model has evolved; now they look to eke out the meagre income they make from dunning researchers for fraudulent publication charges, with dunning researchers for fraudulent conference-attendance charges. Since the practice worked so well with junk journals, to lend verisimilitude to these spurious conferences they pad out the Organising Committees with the names of authorities in the field, without necessarily consulting the owners of those names. It is not clear whether they have added names from fictional characters yet.

We are impressed by the language of the lawyer's threatening missive, which proves to be pungent -- if not particularly coherent -- and may well provide the new Riddled masthead:

All the allegation that you have mentioned in your blog are nothing more than fantastic figment of your imagination by you and the purpose of writing this blog seems to be a deliberate attempt to defame our client [...] Our client perceive the blog as mindless rattle of a incoherent person and please be assured that our client has taken a very serious note of the language, tone, and tenure adopted by you as well as the criminal acts of putting the same on the Internet.

It may be that the OMICS group purloined the lawyer himself from a fictional character, in the same way that the Indian legal system was borrowed in its entirety from Bleak House.

As it happens, inspired by the news that the Royal Horticultural Society has relaxed its hitherto-unbending policies and will now allow the presence of garden gnomes "brightly coloured mythical creatures" in the Chelsea Garden Show, we are launching a new journal, gnOMICS. So far the only member of the Editorial Board is Srinubabu Gedela (MD) of Hyderabad. We're sure he won't mind that to save time we didn't consult him before adding his name.

* Truth be known, we're not really so interested in the backs.

UPDATED with Bonus OMICShenanigans. "Dinosaurs: Extinct or Traumatised?"