A fake scientific report was recently accepted for publication in 157 journals throughout the world Discovery News reported Thursday.
The fake paper proved how imperfect some open access publications can be. As part of his plan, John Bohannon a paper using the fake name of Ocorrafoo Cobange, who was a biologist at the non-existent Wasee Institute of Medicine in Asmara
Although the biologist's name, and educational institute might sound real, Bohannon put noticeable errors and contradictions about science in the journal, which experts in the field should have picked up Discovery News reported.
"Any reviewer with more than a high-school knowledge of chemistry and the ability to understand a basic data plot should have spotted the paper's short-comings immediately. Its experiments are so hopelessly flawed that the results are meaningless," Bohannon told the journal Science where he contributes, Salon.com reported.
Bohannon also changed each version of the paper prior to sending it out to various scientific journals. He did this by randomly combining Swahili words, and African names with generic institutional words and African capital cities.
"Submitting identical papers to hundreds of journals would be asking for trouble," Bohannon told Science. "My hope was that using developing world authors and institutions would arouse less suspicion if a curious editor were to find nothing about them on the Internet."
In addition, he translated the paper into French using Google translate, and then re-phrased the result back into english, editing the worst mistranslations.
"Journals without quality control are destructive especially for developing world countries where governments and universities are filling up with people with bogus scientific credentials," Paul Ginsparg, a Cornell physicist, told Bohannon Discovery News reported. Ginsparg also founded a publishing platform for physics.
