
Why I published in a predatory journal - robwwilliams
http://www.the-scientist.com/?articles.view/articleNo/49071/title/Opinion--Why-I-Published-in-a-Predatory-Journal/
======
glangdale
There's a expose like this every couple of years, but nothing ever changes. My
adviser told me entertaining stories of pranksters putting fake articles into
CS journals from "The Austrian Naval Academy". I suspect one reason things
don't change much is that the publishing game is shades of grey all the way up
to the best publications - a third-tier journal won't publish complete
gibberish, but you certainly might be able to get some pretty shallow stuff
into it and I would be very surprised if anyone, say, checked the references
or reality-tested the results.

~~~
foobarian
I know it's funny now because Austria is landlocked but back when it
controlled Croatia they did have a naval academy near Rijeka. It's where
Captain von Trapp went (from Sound of Music)

~~~
glangdale
Yes indeed, there was a substantial Austro-Hungarian Navy. I wound up reading
a decent amount about this when I went looking for an on=line account of my
adviser's story. Still, I suspect the Austrian Naval Academy was not a
powerhouse of computer science research at the time...

------
Jedd
I've spent basically zero time in academia. I've heard the phrase 'publish or
perish', and I know the evils of Elsevier, and the popularity of sci-hub - but
that's about it.

How are these guys making money? Is it just the 'editing fees' for people
trying to publish? Presumably advertisers are savvy enough to not throw money
at these types of journals? Proper scientists / researchers are (hopefully)
also not easily fooled - and whoever peer reviewed this article (assuming it
actually was peer reviewed, as claimed) won't want their name attached to the
publication.

These stories come up often enough to suggest it's a well known problem, and
the culprits are easy enough to identify. But that these stories _do_ keep
coming up suggests there's good money being made somehow, and attempts to
thwart these publications are failing.

~~~
wsxcde
Yes, it is the editing fees. Nth-tier universities in many countries are
pushing faculty members to publish more. This is all done with the best
intentions -- we all want faculty at the cutting edge of research. So many of
these universities offer financial incentives of various sorts to faculty who
publish more. For instance, they may tie pay hikes or promotions to the number
of publications. There's often grant money available for research (and
publication) to support these activities.

This has led to the inevitable unintended consequences. Most of these faculty
members do not have the resources or the ability to publish in "real"
journals, nor do they even understand what a good journal is. So they publish
in whatever venue that accepts their paper. If it requires them to pay, then
so be it. And thanks to the beauty of capitalism, a bunch of predator journals
have emerged to lighten the purses of these poor folks.

~~~
thaumasiotes
It seems odd to call the journal "predatory" in this situation. Who is it
preying on? The person who got rejected from a journal with standards but
still wanted to keep his job?

~~~
Someone
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predatory_open_access_publishi...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predatory_open_access_publishing#Characteristics):

 _" Complaints that are associated with predatory open-access publishing
include

Accepting articles quickly with little or no peer review or quality control,
including hoax and nonsensical papers.

Notifying academics of article fees only after papers are accepted.

Aggressively campaigning for academics to submit articles or serve on
editorial boards.

Listing academics as members of editorial boards without their permission, and
not allowing academics to resign from editorial boards.

Appointing fake academics to editorial boards.[34] Mimicking the name or web
site style of more established journals.

Misleading claims about the publishing operation, such as a false location.

Improper use of ISSNs.

Fake or non-existent impact factors."_

One could say they prey on society's trust in science.

~~~
thaumasiotes
Ah, then society's trust in science should be warned to watch out.

Or perhaps the metaphor is misapplied?

~~~
Angostura
> Ah, then society's trust in science should be warned to watch out.

Perhaps you've noticed an alarming rise in society's distrust in science,
perhaps partly exacerbated by an increase in poorly peer-reviewed
publications.

~~~
pjc50
No, that's mostly a result of global warming denialism paid for by fossil fuel
companies, vaccine denialism pushed by chancers like Andrew Wakefield, and the
_completely awful_ state of media pop-science.

~~~
dandelion_lover
You forgot anti-GMO horror stories paid by agriculture and "organic food"
companies.

~~~
pjc50
I'm not sure on this one; I suspect there's a lot of "media management" going
on by Monsanto, as well as a lot of activists who are under-informed on the
technology. Personally I thought that Big Ag was in favour of GMO and that
organic food wasn't big enough to fund a disinformation campaign.

~~~
literallycancer
If a local producer is getting outpriced by a foreign company with more
resources, turning it into "stop importing harmful GMOs" issue is rather
convenient.

~~~
castle-bravo
GMO is not inherently unsafe, nor is it inherently safe. Plants can be
engineered to produce additional nutrients and better withstand drought, but
they can also be engineered with insecticidal proteins that may be harmful to
humans. This is perfectly analogous to pharmaceuticals. If someone said "ban
all pharmaceuticals", we'd agree that they're crazy, but the correct response
is not "pharmaceuticals are perfectly safe". Some pharmaceuticals are
perfectly safe. Some are deadly poisons. GMOs need to go through an evaluation
process before being approved for the open market.

------
eecc
I've been drafting a P2P app to (legitimately) share publications without
intermediaries. Authenticity and traceability of all data - including metadata
such as tags to represent peer approval - are supported using PGP
cryptography. If anyone is interested to at least provide a critique to the
code (it's my pet project so it's also rife with "let me try this new
framework" syndrome) please give me a ping. If you want to contribute yay!

~~~
Mediterraneo10
Peer approval at respected journals is anonymous: the writer doesn't know who
the reviewers are. Sometimes the reviewers don't even know the identity of the
author. How does your system allow for that? PGP signatures do not permit
anonymity.

~~~
pdexter
They're anonymous but after the reviews the authors are then usually (always?)
revealed to the reviewers. Let's not kid ourselves though, academia, and
especially in smaller subfields, is made up of small communities where you can
usually guess whose paper you're reviewing unless it's a brand new
contribution in a field by someone who doesn't usually publish there. You can
often guess who the review was performed by too, since the program committee
is always public.

~~~
geofft
You could implement something like Certificate Transparency's
"precertificates" where you store a hash of the digital signature in a public
Merkle tree, so during review the reviewer's identity isn't known. But once
the paper is published, the actual signature can also be published and checked
against the review hashes in the paper. If they're missing or inconsistent,
treat the paper as unreviewed.

~~~
pdexter
Sounds like a good approach

------
lostgame
With all this hubbub about 'fake news' \- 'fake science' may be even more
dangerous.

~~~
jurie
This has got to be how anti-vaxers obtain their "peer reviewed", "scientific"
studies...

~~~
ocfnash
Unfortunately Wakefield's paper that essentially kicked off the "MMR vaccine
controversy" was published by the Lancet. They eventually retracted but
enormous damage was done (including deaths apparently).

~~~
SOLAR_FIELDS
For the unknowing, the Lancet was at the time this paper was published
considered to be a top-tier medical journal; the equivalent of Nature or
Science for medicine.

I cannot speak to its prestige now, however. I'm sure that its reputation was
somewhat damaged by publishing this paper but I imagine it's still considered
a "good" journal.

------
ayuvar
I worked for one of these outfits for a summer job. I needed the money and
they seemed alright on the outside.

There was a strange obsession regarding looking official and academically
legitimate, to the point where they would attempt to recruit professors to do
the peer-reviewing, then override what they said in the final "edit" stage of
the review and approve the submission anyway. Since it was anonymous, there
was no way to tell if "Reviewer 3" was actually bumped or just that someone
else got to that submission first.

That said, their business model was a bit different. They weren't open-access:
they made their money selling conferences (which were mandatory to attend if
you wanted your paper to actually get published in the journal).

Often, they would resell gifts from the venue such as comped hotel rooms and
airport shuttles at above market prices to the attendees as well as part of a
"package." As well, the venues usually also matched where-ever the founder
wanted to go on vacation.

Out of paranoia as much as cost-cutting, they ran the offices very lean and
centralized authority in the founder and his family. They probably would have
had a more successful operation had they gotten good lieutenants who were
better capable of maintaining the facade. My local university used to warn
people off of publishing with them by name, which I thought was a remarkable
step considering the precarious state of Canadian libel law.

Other staff was mostly early-stage "green card"-esque workers who they would
hold the threat of dismissal over their heads (forcing those workers to rush
to get a new job before they timed out and had to leave the country) and
students like myself.

The year before I got there, they had a major publicity crisis in which they
took substantial heat in academic circles for basically auto-publishing
plagiarized articles from anybody with an email address. Part of my work was
integrating one those "turn it in" style plagiarism detectors into their
submission funnel.

By the end of the summer they were in deep with the tax authorities from a
backlog of unpaid taxes; the founder bragged to me that he considered paying
corporate income tax a kind of "game" in which the penalties for losing were
insubstantial. I'm sure by now the penalties have grown in seriousness, though
the last time I looked them up they still seem to be publishing journals and
hosting conferences.

It was a good lesson for me about what to look out for in the future when
trying to select a small business/team to work for.

~~~
jopsen
> which I thought was a remarkable step considering the precarious state of
> Canadian libel law.

Taking a University to court for calling you a fraud only gives the University
a great opportunity to prove it in a public court room :)

Also you can probably interview current and former employees, like yourself.
Not to talk about the presumably long list of sketchy things published, which
should be sufficient on its own.

If you want to maintain some illusion of legitimacy, suing a University isn't
going to get you far.

------
DrNuke
Journals are flooded in a way you would never believe if not spending a day on
the other side of the desk. Many papers are presumptuous and preposterous at
best, from developing countries but also from reputed institutions. The model
is clearly flawed and the ecosystem saturated, there are a small number of
institutions being accepted by default and a lot of the other not being given
any sniff in. I am not sure how to rectify this distortion, predatory journals
being one effect more than a cause: you can't stop shit / compilative / small
incremental papers being put forward and spammed if not charging them a fee?
The more you charge, the more probable they desist. Point is such money should
be reinvested into the ecosystem, not drained out by greedy publishing corps
imho.

~~~
visarga
> you can't stop shit / compilative / small incremental papers being put
> forward

There's a place for literature review papers. They can be good starting points
or useful for catching up with recent state of the art.

------
MichailP
What people don't realize is that it is YOUR responsibility to make your
research any good. Peer review won't significantly improve your research, and
btw it is very rarely constructive criticism, and it certainly doesn't make
you feel you and reviewer are in the same team (but you should be in a perfect
world). So what the author of original article confirmed here is that he can
falsify results, his name, etc. But that's ON HIM!

------
theprop
Wow! There are multiple wars against science, exploiting "science". There
seems to be a strong need for some service that can flag fake news, fake
research, etc. in facebook, google and others.

The government which funds the vast majority of scientific research should
insist that real research is freely accessible not in these gated journals
that are ridiculously expensive (as much as $25k/year for a single
subscription)...so that there was an easy way to access real scientific
research.

Incidentally a similar stunt was pulled with a humanities journal several
years ago and the gibberish paper got published...but this was in something a
lot more like a real journal.

~~~
a_bonobo
But who gets to say what's fake news and fake journals, who gets to be the
gatekeeper?

A few years ago the Beall-list added the Frontiers journals to its list of
predatory journals, which generated quite the backlash:
[http://www.nature.com/news/backlash-after-frontiers-
journals...](http://www.nature.com/news/backlash-after-frontiers-journals-
added-to-list-of-questionable-publishers-1.18639)

There is quite a bit of 'regular' research published in Frontiers and they do
have peer review, but also a lot of crap (a similar point can be raised for
Nature's new Scientific Reports, but also for PLOS ONE, which all cost money
to publish in). The border between 'predatory' and just 'kinda crappy' journal
is hard to set. The big difference between most predatory OA journals and
Frontiers is that Frontiers at least responds to criticism.

Edit: Some similar criticism on Nature Scientific Reports:
[http://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2016/06/15/mor...](http://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2016/06/15/more-
on-scientific-reports-and-on-faked-papers)

and for PLOS ONE:
[http://www.omnesres.com/blog/plosone/](http://www.omnesres.com/blog/plosone/)

~~~
palunon
>who gets to say what's fake news and fake journals, who gets to be the
gatekeeper?

That's not how reputation works. There isn't a single institution who gets to
say "This is good science, but this isn't", but scientists as a body can.

An institution can of course choose its own standard regarding specific
journals, but it cannot impose them unto others.

------
emeraldd
I can't help but remember:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlanta_Nights](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlanta_Nights)

[https://www.amazon.com/Atlanta-Nights-Travis-
Tea/dp/14116229...](https://www.amazon.com/Atlanta-Nights-Travis-
Tea/dp/1411622987)

~~~
mrkgnao
In addition to the more well-known

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokal_affair](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokal_affair)

although that had different goals.

~~~
TuringNYC
And once you've read about that, make sure to have a laugh with the
Postmodernism Essay Generator
([http://www.elsewhere.org/journal/pomo/](http://www.elsewhere.org/journal/pomo/))

~~~
beaconstudios
but if you like the generated ones, you'll love the real, and really absurd,
ones:
[https://twitter.com/realpeerreview?lang=en](https://twitter.com/realpeerreview?lang=en)

------
lutusp
Quote: "My long-term goal—an ambitious one, I know—is to stop the production
of predatory journals altogether."

I salute your energy and your objective. Having observed individual scientists
over a period of decades and noting the degree to which a modern scientist's
professional life is ruled by "publish or perish", I think some very basic
changes would have to take place to eliminate phony journals.

On the one hand, phony journals, and corner-cutting episodes like the recent
retraction of 107 cancer research papers from otherwise legitimate scientific
journals[1], only show the desperation in the lives of many scientists and
pseudoscientists.

On the other hand, freedom of the press allows pretty much any nonsense to be
put on paper and online, and efforts to stop phony publications often collide
with a very permissive attitude toward printed expression, including those
that walk a thin line between fact and fiction.

To me, the central problem is that publishers make too much money from
technical and scientific publication -- it invites cheating and exploitation.
Maybe in the future there will be some kind of publication arrangement that is
(a) beyond reproach and (b) not undermined by absurd access prices.

1\. [http://retractionwatch.com/2017/04/20/new-record-major-
publi...](http://retractionwatch.com/2017/04/20/new-record-major-publisher-
retracting-100-studies-cancer-journal-fake-peer-reviews/)

------
osazuwa
Here is an fascinating instance of astroturfing by MedCrave on Quora, with
painfully bad "smart-people" English [https://www.quora.com/How-do-I-get-rid-
of-the-rumours-about-...](https://www.quora.com/How-do-I-get-rid-of-the-
rumours-about-Medcrave-Predatory-Publisher)

~~~
Balgair
Hoooooly Cow! I think that thread could be _the_ example of astro-turfing.
Just, wow, the brazenness of it all is really astounding.

------
dragandj
When we're here, I have to jump in with my own:
[https://www.scribd.com/doc/167706815/EVALUATION-OF-
TRANSFORM...](https://www.scribd.com/doc/167706815/EVALUATION-OF-
TRANSFORMATIVE-HERMENEUTIC-HEURISTICS-FOR-PROCESSING-RANDOM-DATA)

The whole sting is later analyzed in a serious scientific journal:
[https://sci-hub.cc/10.1007/s11948-014-9521-4](https://sci-
hub.cc/10.1007/s11948-014-9521-4)

------
19eightyfour
To complete the expose of broken peer review, there ought to be a kickstarter
/ crowd funding for the $799 fee.

Cash for publication. Sad state of science. Terribly irresponsible that this
is medical science.

I'm not emphasizing blame for the individuals involved...I think the way the
system operates incentivizes things that don't work to produce solid results.

A new peer review system that does work to reliably generate reproducible
results would be a significant technological innovation that improves basic
publicly funded STEM research.

------
chestervonwinch
The current system for publishing needs to be overhauled. This is difficult
because those early in their careers have to establish themselves, and
publications are the de facto metric for doing so. However, number-of-
publications is not necessarily an accurate surrogate for the quality of a
person's work since all journals do not have equally rigorous review processes
(or _any_ review process as shown by this article and many others).

Long term solutions for this problem often focus on (1) new systems for
reviewing/publishing scientific work as a means to make number-of-publications
a more accurate quantifier of the quality a researcher's body of work, or (2)
incorporating metrics other than publications.

What about short term solutions? What about an IMDB-like review and rating
system for publications? This way, researchers still publish wherever they
like, but could be potentially reviewed by a independent system. Would such a
system be too readily game-able?

~~~
pzs
The main challenge that I can see is that it takes real effort to review
papers. Without that effort "popular" publications may end up spreading
materially wrong results. The shortcoming of current peer review systems is
that anonymous peer reviewers are expected to put in this work without
receiving commensurate (not necessarily monetary) compensation.

------
sytelus
Can't websites like Google Scholar help here? There should be some algorithmic
way to identify such journals. One way could be to use PageRank for a paper to
create a PargeRank of journals. Then take the bottom of journals and use
either wisdom of crowd or human editors to de-list them or flag them. If
publications from bad journals stops showing up (or at least get flagged) in
search results and/or Google Scholar, they practically don't exist.

~~~
dragandj
That is irrelevant. Anyone who is remotely competent to read any scientific
article will recognize predatory journal with a quick glance. I doubt that
predatory articles have even a couple of reads. The problem is something else:
those articles are used to beef up the CV of the "scientists" who are then
promoted on their jobs over honest candidates. That may be rare in USA (but I
am not sure) but it is rampant in developing countries (of that I am sure).

------
frozenport
Nobody is suprised that there are con-artists who will take your money. The
real problem is similiar behavior from supposedly legitimate journals.

------
ma2rten
Are there journals like this for computer science?

------
GrumpyNl
Its all about greed. As long as you pay, or say you have the intention to pay
the 799, your paper will get published. The system is rotten.

------
WhiteSource1
I'm more shocked at the fact that they published the article without receiving
payment!

------
logicallee
I'm sorry, I only read the abstract[1] but this is excellently written, in a
way that only people with real scientific understanding are able to write.
This isn't a "hoax", it's simply unconscionable on the part of the author.

Let me translate this to terms people here might understand. This is like
writing an O'Reilly book entitled "Essential System Administration In Client-
Side Javascript" detailing a cookbook of the most common techniques you would
want to use to do local system administration from Angular, React,
Meteor/Ember, etc, with special attention to the pitfalls of identifying
whether the local system is a Windows,Mac, Linux, a mobile browser, tablet,
etc, and listing the various ways you can set up the local user's device to
your own liking.

Where it crosses the line is if it's written in a highly informative way
without any indication WHATSOEVER of being satire. Local system administration
from javascript frameworks doesn't exist. It's not a thing. You couldn't so
much as set the time.

But when you write with authority on how to do that and more, suddenly it does
exist. What's more, it will be interesting and useful. If you write with
authority and an overview of the subject, in the way done here (it starts by
identifying the scope of the issue - the very first words of the abstract are
"Uromycitisis is a rare but serious condition that affects over 2,000 mostly
adult men and women in the United States each year". From the moment you've
written those words -- you even say who it affects and the exceptions, since
it affects adults but mostly adults -- you are now an expert and you're not
writing a satire or hoax: you're writing fraud.

It would be as if I began the above with:

"Web-based administration of local devices with a standard browser serving as
the remote administration client is a small but growing choice of hundreds of
large companies with 5,000-50,000+ employees. Its advantages include
leveraging development practices that may already be familiar, web standards,
regular security upgrades from the major browsers, centralized distribution of
small updates while leveraging the security mechanisms (such as HTTPS and
signed certificates) already present in the browser, and cross-platform
availability across many devices. Simply put, System Administration in client-
side javascript is the closest you can come to fully controlling your user's
devices without administrative tools at all. While it has important
limitations, such as being unable to repartition hard-drives or install a
standard image while the operating system is running, in other respects it
enables all of the power of many administrative tools without many of the
downsides. In this book we will cover some of the basic functions you may want
to do, such as applying security updates, installing or removing software,
creating user accounts and setting their privileges, and, in the case of
Windows computers, setting up roaming profiles. Let's get started."

Is that a hoax? No, it's more like simple fraud. (Our author invented a
research institution, created fake gmail accounts, etc.)

Sorry. I don't support the author in how they went about this. It would be
different if what I wrote was _hilarious_ \- such as bemoaning that for the
moment Apple Watches unfortunately do not support a standard browser, so you
will have to break into them by finding and applying zero days for the iPhone,
which are unfortunately patched regularly; a list of Russian and Chinese
sources is contained in Appendix 1, and you can usually ask for a sample while
promising bitcoins - but is the above paragraph I wrote hilarious? No. It's
not hilarious and that means it's not okay.

[1] direct link to PDF: [http://www.the-
scientist.com/images/Opinion/2017/UNOAJ-04-00...](http://www.the-
scientist.com/images/Opinion/2017/UNOAJ-04-00132.pdf)

~~~
elihu
Yeah, that was more or less my impression. The implication that the reviewers
should have caught on because it was a reference to a well-known Seinfeld
episode is particularly silly. Many people who grew up in the United States
haven't watched Seinfeld. I definitely would not have gotten the joke, and I
certainly wouldn't expect a random journal reviewer (who could be from
anywhere) to be intimately familiar with American popular culture, and I
wouldn't expect them to google the author's name to figure out if they're the
target of a practical joke.

Reviewers usually have to assume on some level that those who submit articles
aren't lying. They can't verify every claim. Maybe a case could be made that
the reviewers in this case didn't do enough due diligence, but just because
they didn't get the joke doesn't mean they're doing a bad job.

~~~
logicallee
yes, thanks. Especially given that he introduces the prevalence as being 2,000
people nationwide. (That is beyond rare. Albinism for example - extremely rare
- is 5 people per 100,000 in the United States. 2,000 people in the whole
country is 0.62 per 100,000.) So when recording such an incredibly rare
disease it would be normal for no one but, for example, the _sole_ specialist
in the entire country to have even heard about it. It would be different if he
had reported that 2 _million_ people are effected. I don't like the whole
thing.

It's even worse because the report _deserves_ to be published. As written
(though I didn't read beyond the abstract and what he wrote about it), it
_deserves_ publication. This isn't like this other hoax,
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokal_affair](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokal_affair)
\-- "Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of
Quantum Gravity" which on its face does not deserve to be published.

I would publish this paper, and more than that, I would argue that papers like
this must be published despite not finding anything about it.

Integrity is important.

Requiring the standard of scholarship to be raised to "integrity isn't enough.
If I can't verify the scholarship independently then I would rather shut out
exemplary papers than allow frauds through" is not going to benefit science in
the long term.

Many important researchers did not come with ready-made citations. When
Einstein published four groundbreaking works in the Annals of Physics[1] that
tore apart the very foundations of space, time, mass, and energy, would
someone Googling have found that it almost certainly wasn't a hoax?

At some point you just have to believe the papers, and prefer to believe and
publish Einstein on the strength of _what he 's written_ than to deny him on
the strength of a paucity of corroboration.

This exercise doesn't help anyone. The paper is just too well-written.

[1] see:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Annus_Mirabilis_papers](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Annus_Mirabilis_papers)

------
jszymborski
If a paper is published after 2010 and the corresponding author's email is
from a free service (gmail, yahoo, yandex) or is not from an institution that
is a university or firm with an R&D department, you shouldn't trust the
journal or the paper.

It's a simple litmus test and while it generates many false negatives, there
are almost zero false positives.

EDIT: At least, for biomedical papers... can't speak for other fields

~~~
woliveirajr
Disagree. Sometimes the main (corresponding) author is exactly a Master or PhD
student, and will leave the institution after submitting the article but
before it is published. Or even a Professor will change the institution he is
in.

I prefer to read a paper or article by its merits. E-mail from the author had
little impact in that sense.

(Speaking for areas outside biomedical papers, for those, I don' know.)

~~~
jszymborski
The peer-review system, as very flawed as it is, protects us from a certain
level of bad and in some cases fake science.

It's not very difficult to establish a peer-review ring when you use freely
available emails, and journals are increasingly aware of this [0,1]. That's
why I'm often suspect of journals who let this slide, because it's a sign they
don't screen very well.

In 2017, in light of the widely successful and low-barrier ways to game the
peer-review system, I don't buy your "leaving an institution" argument.

Corresponding author is more commonly the professor than the main author, and
faculty at academic institutions almost always have "e-mail for life"
privileges.

[0] [https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-
mix/wp/2014/07/1...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-
mix/wp/2014/07/10/scholarly-journal-retracts-60-articles-smashes-peer-review-
ring/)

[1] [http://www.nature.com/news/publishing-the-peer-review-
scam-1...](http://www.nature.com/news/publishing-the-peer-review-scam-1.16400)

