>Philip Davis at The Scholarly Kitchen, in an attempt to test the reliability and integrity of open-access publishers, posed as an academic associated with The Center for Research in Applied Phrenology based in Ithaca, New York and submitted a fake paper for publication by Bentham Publishing, a company that publishes 200 open-access scientific journals. Bentham finances its journals by charging a fee to publish articles.

The Center for Research in Applied Phrenology (C.R.A.P. for short) is a bogus institution. It was created just for the purpose of submitting the paper. According to Davis, “phrenology is the pseudoscience of reading personality traits from the lumps on one’s head.”

Mr. Davis had received unsolicited e-mails from Bentham Publishing soliciting articles to be published in their journals. So, Davis, a doctoral student in communication at Cornell University, and Kent R. Anderson, The Scholarly Kitchen’s editor in chief, submitted one paper which was generated by a computer program at MIT that creates random text intended to amuse rather than inform.

This is how Davis begins explaining his experiment:

Would a publisher accept a completely nonsensical manuscript if the authors were willing to pay Open Access publication charges? After being spammed with invitations to publish in Bentham Science journals earlier this year, I decided to find out.

Using SCIgen, a software that generates grammatically correct, “context-free” (i.e. nonsensical) papers in computer science, I quickly created an article, complete with figures, tables, and references. It looks pretty professional until you read it.

You can read Davis’s paper here. What follows is an excerpt from the paper:

Compact symmetries and compilers have garnered tremendous interest from both futurists and biologists in the last several years. The flaw of this type of solution, however, is that DHTs can be made empathic, large-scale, and extensible. Along these same lines, the drawback of this type of approach, however, is that active networks and SMPs can agree to fix this riddle. The construction of voice-over-IP would profoundly degrade Internet QoS. We describe a novel heuristic for the extensive unification of web browsers and rasterization, which we call TriflingThamyn. However, this method is generally adamantly opposed. Unfortunately, this method is rarely significant. TriflingThamyn manages the compelling unification of flip-flop gates and IPv4. The disadvantage of this type of approach, however, is that consistent hashing can be made random, atomic, and “smart”. Clearly, we see no reason not to use congestion control to visualize courseware.

Bentham received the article. According to Bentham, the article was accepted for publication after a peer-reviewing process and Davis was charged a fee of $800.00. The money was to be sent to a post office box in the United Arab Emirates.

There is a lesson for academics here.

Those who work in academic institutions know the pressure that is placed on publication: “Publish or perish” is the motto that forces professors to publish. Promotion and recognition depend on the number of books or articles published during one’s career. However, when one has to pay out of one’s own pocket for the publication of a book or an article, one must question the quality of the work or the reliability and the integrity of the publisher.

The rise of publication on demand has produced a crop of new writers and the publication of new books that are worthy of the acronym of the institution created by Phillip Davis.

Recently I was asked to review two self-published books. One book was so full of historical inaccuracies and misleading interpretations that I would not recommend the book to my worst enemy. The other was based on some presuppositions that cannot be proved; thus, the suppositions make the conclusions of the book unreliable.

And yet, the two authors took umbrage with me because of my reviews. They were certain they were right and I was wrong. They criticized my reviews as the work of someone who missed the intent of their books, who did not understand their argument, and failed to see the great work they had done.

What these two writers failed to recognize was that although their books were written to inspire and to inform readers, the books had so many presuppositions in one case and so many biblical and historical misinformation in the other that I could not recommend these two books with a clear conscience to anyone.

As a professor, I stand for what is reliable information, both historically and biblically. I may not agree with the material in a book, but if the information is reliable and biblical, I will affirm the book. Unfortunately, many self-published books do not meet this criteria. Before a book is published, it should be reviewed by independent readers who could point out mistakes and misinterpretations.

Unfortunately, most self-published books are not well edited. If these writers had hired an independent editor, one who knows the Old Testament, history, and some Hebrew, these writers would know that their books were not as great as they thought.

Many self-published authors do not accept criticism because their books reflect their labor and the precious time they spent writing and preparing the books. When I review a book, I take into consideration the interest of the reader of the book, not of the author. The reader must know whether the book is informative, reliable, and historically and biblically correct. Should the reader spend money buying the book and should the reader spend time reading the book? When a book is good, I say so. When the book is not good, I also say so. Readers like that kind of honesty; authors do not.

Claude Mariottini
Professor of Old Testament
Northern Baptist Seminary

Tags: Bentham Publishing, Publishing Book, Self-Publication

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