Kay Cunningham's List: Hoaxes

Expose of James Frey's memoir and Oprah book club selection.

"News last week that a hoax article was accepted by a purportedly peer-reviewed Open Access journal published by Bentham Science has led to a resignation by the journal’s editor-in-chief as well as a call for ethical practices by the Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association (OASPA), which does not count Bentham as a member."

"While the paper they accepted was laughably nonsensical and there was no evidence of peer-review, the most salient communication we received from them around the paper they accepted was the invoice.
And this invoice begins the real story here.
It’s important that everyone in academic publishing realize there is a feeder issue at play — the swelling pools of author-pays funding, how they’re being managed, and policies around their use."

'In an Open Access (OA) version of the 1996 Sokal affair, when a hoax article was accepted by an academic journal, Cornell University librarian and graduate student Phil Davis successfully submitted a manuscript full of gibberish and credited to pseudonymous authors at The Center for Research in Applied Phrenology to The Open Information Science Journal (TOISCIJ), which “claims to enforce peer-review.”'

'Since word of Elsevier's publication of a "fake" journal sponsored by pharmaceutical company Merck spread last week, the company acknowledged the publication of five more journals with similar undisclosed sponsorship between 2000 and 2005. (This publication and Elsevier have the same parent company, Reed Elsevier.)'

"It's a safe guess that somewhere at Merck today someone is going through the meeting minutes of the day that the hair-brained scheme for the Australasian Journal of Bone and Joint Medicine was launched, and that everyone who was in the room is now going to be fired. "

"The sociology major's obituary-friendly quote -- which he added to the Wikipedia page of Maurice Jarre hours after the French composer's death March 28 -- flew straight on to dozens of U.S. blogs and newspaper Web sites in Britain, Australia and India. They used the fabricated material, Fitzgerald said, even though administrators at the free online encyclopedia twice caught the quote's lack of attribution and removed it."