Spoof research paper is accepted by 157 journals.

A spoof medical paper full of easily detectable flaws was submitted in a sting operation to 304 open access journals and accepted by more than half of them. The results, reported in Science by journalist John Bohannon, reveal “an emerging Wild West in academic publishing,” he says, with mushrooming numbers of new journals profiting from the open access model, in which authors rather than readers pay the cost of publication. Bohannon invented the names of authors and affiliations—such as Ocorrafoo Cobange of Wassee Institute of Medicine—and submitted in their names variations of the same basic paper claiming to have found anticancer properties in a molecule extracted from a lichen. The paper contained obvious flaws, such as claiming to have demonstrated a dose-response relationship when the data showed nothing of the sort. To simulate the poor English of some developing world authors, the text was translated into French by Google Translate, then back into English. The paper written by “Cobange” was accepted by the Journal of Natural Pharmaceuticals, with only superficial changes sought, while other versions were accepted by journals hosted by well known publishers such as Sage and Elsevier. “Acceptancewas the norm, not the exception,” writes Bohannon. It was even accepted by journals in completely alien fields, such as the Journal of Experimental and Clinical Assisted Reproduction.