Professional Documents
Culture Documents
On 4 July, good news arrived in the inbox of Ocorrafoo Cobange, a subscriptions. Most of the players are murky. The identity and
biologist at the Wassee Institute of Medicine in Asmara. It was the offi- location of the journals’ editors, as well as the financial work-
cial letter of acceptance for a paper he had submitted 2 months earlier ings of their publishers, are often purposefully obscured. But
to the Journal of Natural Pharmaceuticals, describing the anticancer Science’s investigation casts a powerful light. Internet Protocol
properties of a chemical that Cobange had extracted from a lichen. (IP) address traces within the raw headers of e-mails sent by
In fact, it should have been promptly rejected. Any reviewer with journal editors betray their locations. Invoices for publication fees
more than a high-school knowledge of chemistry and the ability to reveal a network of bank accounts based mostly in the develop-
understand a basic data plot should have spotted the paper’s short- ing world. And the acceptances and rejections of the paper provide
comings immediately. Its experiments are so hopelessly flawed that the first global snapshot of peer review across the open-access
the results are meaningless. scientific enterprise.
I know because I wrote the paper. Ocorrafoo Cobange does One might have expected credible peer review at the Journal
not exist, nor does the Wassee Institute of Medicine. Over the past of Natural Pharmaceuticals. It describes itself as “a peer reviewed
10 months, I have submitted 304 versions of the wonder drug paper journal aiming to communicate high quality research articles, short
ILLUSTRATION: DAVID PLUNKERT
to open-access journals. More than half of the journals accepted the communications, and reviews in the field of natural products with
paper, failing to notice its fatal flaws. Beyond that headline result, desired pharmacological activities.” The editors and advisory board
the data from this sting operation reveal the contours of an emerg- members are pharmaceutical science professors at universities
ing Wild West in academic publishing. around the world.
From humble and idealistic beginnings a decade ago, open- The journal is one of more than 270 published by Medknow,
access scientific journals have mushroomed into a global indus- a company based in Mumbai, India, and one of the largest open-
try, driven by author publication fees rather than traditional access publishers. According to Medknow’s website, more than
The bait
The goal was to create a credible but mundane scientific paper,
one with such grave errors that a competent peer reviewer should
easily identify it as flawed and unpublishable. Submitting identi-
cal papers to hundreds of journals would be asking for trouble. But
the papers had to be similar enough that the outcomes between
journals could be comparable. So I created a scientific version of
Mad Libs.
The paper took this form: Molecule X from lichen species Y
inhibits the growth of cancer cell Z. To substitute for those vari-
ables, I created a database of molecules, lichens, and cancer cell
lines and wrote a computer program to generate hundreds of
unique papers. Other than those differences, the scientific content
of each paper is identical.
The fictitious authors are affiliated with fictitious African insti- Follow the money
tutions. I generated the authors, such as Ocorrafoo M. L. Cobange, Accepted Bank
by randomly permuting African first and last names harvested from Rejected Editor
online databases, and then randomly adding middle initials. For the
Publisher
affiliations, such as the Wassee Institute of Medicine, I randomly
combined Swahili words and African names with generic institu- Tangled web. The location of a
tional words and African capital cities. My hope was that using devel- journal’s publisher, editor, and
oping world authors and institutions would arouse less suspicion if a bank account are often
continents apart. Explore an
curious editor were to find nothing about them on the Internet.
interactive version of this map
The papers describe a simple test of whether cancer cells grow at http://scim.ag/OA-Sting.
more slowly in a test tube when treated with increasing concentra-
tions of a molecule. In a second experiment, the cells were also
treated with increasing doses of radiation to simulate cancer radio-
29
28
28
167
Peer review reviewed.
64 9
4 Few journals did substan-
7 tial review that identified
the paper’s flaws.
12
SUPPLEMENTARY http://science.sciencemag.org/content/suppl/2013/10/03/342.6154.60.DC2
MATERIALS
http://science.sciencemag.org/content/suppl/2013/10/03/342.6154.60.DC1
RELATED http://science.sciencemag.org/content/sci/342/6154/56.full
CONTENT
http://science.sciencemag.org/content/sci/342/6154/133.2.full
http://science.sciencemag.org/content/sci/342/6163/1168.2.full
http://science.sciencemag.org/content/sci/342/6163/1169.1.full
http://science.sciencemag.org/content/sci/342/6163/1169.2.full
http://science.sciencemag.org/content/sci/342/6163/1170.full
PERMISSIONS http://www.sciencemag.org/help/reprints-and-permissions
Science (print ISSN 0036-8075; online ISSN 1095-9203) is published by the American Association for the Advancement of
Science, 1200 New York Avenue NW, Washington, DC 20005. 2017 © The Authors, some rights reserved; exclusive
licensee American Association for the Advancement of Science. No claim to original U.S. Government Works. The title
Science is a registered trademark of AAAS.