Why Call Them Back From Heaven?

Here at the Riddled Research Laboratory and Boutique Sauerkraut Manufactory we are familiar with the fact that Death brings no peace or surcease from academic labours. For the Necromantic Publishers of Naat are cruel and without mercy, and use dark arts to raise up the dead from their unquiet graves and conscript them to Editorial Boards.

So it came as no surprise to find this vile practice in use at Cellular and Molecular Biology -- from the Augean OMICS stable -- where the Editorial Board boasts of the 22 Nobel Laureates who lend it their scholarly gravitas by serving as Honorary Editors. Also the Press Release. Of these 22, Ilya Prigonine, Christian de Duve and Harold Kroto died in 2003, 2013 and 2016 respectively (although this makes them no more unaware than the remaining 19 physicists and chemists of the honour that was bestowed upon them).

Our prestigious list of Editors

There are also 19 non-Laureate members of the Editorial Board, identified only by last names, whose state of animation is therefore indeterminate; and the nonagenarian Founder and Owner, Prof. Raymond J. Wegmann, who appears to handle all the final decisions. The journal boasts of archives going back to Volume 43 in 1997, although most of the years are serving suggestions only, and actually accessible issues do not begin until Vol 60 in 2014.

It did come as a surprise, though, to find another version of Cellular and Molecular Biology with the same ISSN identifier (based in France, and non-OMICS), with only 14 Honorary Editors -- 10 living Nobel Laureates and four dead ones, i.e. a 29% postmortem exploitation rate [note Pierre-Gilles de Gennes, d. 2007]. Although there can't be much for them to do: until recent months, the journal followed a disruptive unconventional peer-review model in which the responsibility of choosing appropriately qualified and disinterested reviewers for a contribution, and of checking that any criticisms they made were adequately addressed in revisions, devolved upon the author:

The Author himself searches his own Peer Reviewers (PRs), but has to follow precise indications, staying in contact with them until the end. Each paper needs the acceptance by 2 PRs. One of these PRs should be obligatorily from USA.

There is a hybrid funding model, in which contributors are billed with a €185 processing fee, while the journal's readership can pay €35 for access to each article (or €700 for a year subscription). Though not many readers bother with the fees, since the download  link to an article is determined by its position in the publishing schedule and the corresponding author's name.

Anyway, the relationship between the rival name-sharing journals is not entirely collegial:

It has to be stated that the cybercriminal robber of my journal, named Maixent, a heavily condemned former professor, ejected from the university like a lousy dog, deprived of all his titles and functions has had the cheek to publish in my journal in an inaccurate and misleading anouncement in favour of the election of another hoodlum named CHEALLAIGH who is even not a biologist. The hoodlum Maixent will be condemned to have published this page abusively without my permission

This vituperative denunciation may have lost something in the translation from your actual French. The original, I imagine, was full of Captain-Haddock-style blistering-barnacles pictographs of hatred and contempt, or the corresponding emoji
 .
A similar theme emerges in the first paper in the OMICS recension, where the only thing missing from the title is a reference to the Inmates of the Asylum of Charenton.

It is a tale of betrayal and intrigue and usurpation, with Prof. Wegmann in the role of the scabrous Barquentine, and his nemesis Maixent cast as Steerpike. Although there is no climactic confrontation ending with them locked in an embrace, plummeting in flames from the tower window into the dark moat waters far below, chiz chiz. The script-writers will have to buck up their ideas if they want the franchise to be extended for another season, for there is stiff competition from reality, if I may grace UK politics with that term.

Evidently this is not the first attempt to wrest control of CMB from the Professor's grasp. The first occurrence of a human serpent worming its way into his confidence, only to betray him with ingratitude, made it easier for the same thing to happen again (in accordance with Sheldrake's morphogenetic field).

Abstract
It is the story of the manner with which the most dishonest publishing company of the world, Elsevier, with the help of an abominable traitor issued from my editorial board, named M.A.Q. Siddiqui, from the New York City University, as well another disgusting traitor, this time issued from the university of Poitiers, Jean-Michel Maixent have both groups stolen my journal with the most ashaming underworld tricks. I explain how they have proceeded in the perspective of exactly the same objectives : to become the owners of the terms “Cellular and Molecular Biology®”whose principles have revolutioned the biology and to earn a great amount of money from its world reputation and its uses.
Now my fight continues against Maixent, who has cheated me in an incredible manner in 2006, whereas I am still waiting for an end judgment, having been able, thanks to a young indo-american publishing company named OMICS to overcome the blockade made by Maixent and by the President of the Court of Poitiers, a female judge called Lacoste who has helped the criminal Maixent to block my web site until to-day. Maixent will finish tragically his life as well as all those implicated in the robbery of my journal.

This is what academic monkey-knife-fights used to look like in the good old days, before the pall of animal-welfare political-soundness fell across the sport, and regulatory authorities insisted on the use of sporks