Access for all

Our peer reviewer was thrilled. He called our article ‘excellent’ and gave it top marks for originality, described it as ‘a significant contribution to the field of research’, praised it for its clarity and for the deep insight into the research field that the text reflected. However, one cannot fully understand the reviewer’s enthusiasm when considering the content the article. It consists of several pages of incomprehensible rubbish, spiced up with references to the research’s great scammers like Milena Penkowa and Jan-Hendrik Schön. All literature references in the article are for works written by scholars who have been caught for scientific dishonesty. One would think that the clues we had laid out in our text were enough for the alarm bells to ring at any editor. But to wear the straps and harnesses, we further provided the article with a method section that detailed how it came about. The method section explains how we had generated a basic text using the web-based tool ‘Scigen – An Automatic CS Paper Generator’. It also explain how we changed the RQ to ‘The purpose of this article is to investigate whether we can get a journal that scientifically calls itself to accept a paper like this?’. And we end the method section with the words “This text is completely meaningless. If any professional is asked to review this, they should immediately reject the article and refrain from reading more ”. Over the past few months, we have every time we received a particularly annoying ‘Nigeria letter’ – that is, an email in which a magazine editor praises one for the clouds and suggests that one should submit his articles to his particular journal – then we have submitted our text. The first time we sent it, it took less than 24 hours to get accepted. We had submitted to a predatory journal. [In danish]

Open Access fulltext (PDF)