Citable Garbage

Experimental and Clinical Cardiology used to be a reputable journal. Now it's a trash heap piled with crap. No, literally - the Ottawa Citizen newspaper has proof, thanks to reporter Tom Spears (who's an experienced hand at this). The journal was sold last year, and the new owners will publish absolutely anything you send them, as long as you send them $1200 to their bank account in the Turks and Caicos Islands. I wish I were making all that up, but that is exactly how it goes, offshore banking and all. Spears whipped together a gibberish cardiology paper by taking one about HIV and doing a find-and-replace to substitute "cardiology" for "HIV" wherever it occurred. I'm sure it reads just fine, if you're high on crack. He stripped out all the graphics, wrote up some captions for new ones, but didn't send any graphs or figures with his submission. No problemo, dude! Paper accepted! As soon as the money shows up under that palm tree in the Caribbean, this junk will become the latest contribution to the medical literature. The "journal" lists an affiliation with the International Academy of Cardiovascular Sciences in Winnipeg, which organization is pretty upset about that, since there's no connection at all any more. But how to get that fixed? The phone number listed for the editorial office doesn't work. And they don't respond to any emails that they don't feel like responding to, which I'd guess are all the ones that don't involve the possibility of $1200 wire transfers. Th...
Source: In the Pipeline - Category: Chemists Tags: The Scientific Literature Source Type: blogs