Derek Lowe, writing in the In the Pipeline blog, find joys in the depths:
Scam, Scam, Scam, Scam, Scammity Scam, Wonderful Scam
You know, it’s really hard to explain just how ridiculous the bottom end of the scientific publishing world is. I’ve mentioned formerly reputable journals that now want you to wire money to a bank account in the Turks and Caicos Islands and long lists of people who will “review” and “publish” outright gibberish as long as the checks clear. Note that the money is the only real thing in that transaction, but note also that some reputable publishers have fallen for random nonsense under the traditional publishing model as well. And there are people who will add your name to a paper for a fee, or even whip up some reasonable-looking data and write the whole thing up, for a somewhat larger fee. Don’t have a journal to send it to? They’ll fake one up for you. It’s just an endless garbage heap….
So that leaves us with a journal-rating website, itself apparently a scam, which rates piles of obscure journals, many of them scams of their own. And it in turn has been infected by still more scamsters. It’s a long way down, that’s for sure, and the bottom is nowhere to be seen.
(Thanks to Yoko Tahara for bringing this to our attention.)