Fake paper tests peer review at open-access journal

They chose that journal because its publisher had been intensively seeking submissions from authors, even outside their areas of specialty, Anderson said in an interview today.

"They were claiming peer review, and something about how aggressive they were struck us as unusual," he said. "It seemed like a worthwhile experiment."

The open-access model arose to speed publication and make scientific papers more widely available by making them accessible online at no cost. Such journals typically charge authors a fee, in contrast to subscription-only journals, including the New England Journal. The sham authors were asked to pay $800 before they retracted the article.

Davis wrote on the blog about a previous instance in which a different computer-generated article he submitted was rejected by another open-access journal as "incomprehensible."

"While one should be careful not to generalize these results to other Open Access journals using similar business models, it does raise the question of whether, at least in some cases, the producer-pays-to-publish model may unduly influence editorial decision-making," Davis concludes about the more recent case.

Anderson of the New England Journal said it's not the open-access model that's at fault, but lax oversight of the money authors are paying in a publish-or-perish atmosphere.

"A lot of institutions are creating budgets to pay author fees. Money that is not carefully managed is easy to take advantage of," he said, calling for more accountability from librarians, administrators, and companies involved in scholarly communications and not just publishers.