Vanity press
If you are a bogus scientist who wants to publish a fake scientific article, I’d like to recommend SCIRP, Scientific Research Publishing. They’d be happy to have you as a customer. They’ve just published another unscientific epidemiology article.
About a year ago I wrote here about a fringe science article on the Fukushima nuclear fallout that SCIRP published. Despite protests from legitimate scientists, SCIRP refused to consider retracting the article or to publish a free response. The junk science article remains published.
Now the same authors, both anti-nuclear activists, have published another article in the journal — they are repeat customers for SCIRP, and SCIRP aims to keep its paying customers happy. The journal is the Open Journal of Pediatrics.
Swedish physicist Mattias Lantz, Ph.D. has written an entry in his blog explaining the scientific flaws in the new article, which was published on March 15.
Dr. Lantz’s blog is called Numbers and opinions, and in his blog post entitled “Another take on S&M – congenital malformations” he also documents that SCIRP’s editorial practices are unsound. [“S&M” refers to the authors of the questionable article, Sherman and Mangano].
Lantz is gathering information from the journal’s editorial board members and has sent an inquiry to each of the journal’s 23 editorial board members. So far, he reports receiving replies from 15. Summarizing the responses received so far, Lantz found:
5 of them have performed some sort of editing or peer reviewing of one or a few articles
2 can not remember if they ever did anything for this journal
6 have never been asked to perform any of the duties expected
2 were not aware of that they are on the list, thus their names were put there without their consent
He also sent an inquiry to the journal’s Editor-in-Chief, Carl E. Hunt, of George Washington University, who replied,
I am listed as the editor-in-chief, but as it has turned out, I have no substantive responsibilities and am not involved in editorial decisions. I therefore plan to resign my “in name only” position.
I recommend reading Lantz’s blog post, which provides further confirmation that SCIRP is a predatory publisher that willingly accepts and publishes junk science just to increase its revenue. Scientific Research Publishing (SCIRP) does not follow standard, scholarly publishing editorial practices to ensure scientific integrity.
