Here’s a little Saturday humor for you from Inside Higher Ed.

Journal Accepts Profanity-Laden Joke Paper

The paper was written in 2005 and never meant for publication. But it appears “Get Me Off Your Fucking Mailing List” has found a potential spot in the International Journal of Advanced Computer Technology. Although the paper consists of just those seven words, over and over again, a journal review form states that the submission from Peter Vamplew, associate professor of engineering at IT at Australia’s Federation University, is “excellent.” Thing is, Vamplew didn’t write the paper; he merely forwarded a copy of the bogus article written by two other, now-associate professors of computer science, David Mazieres, of Stanford University, and Eddie Kohler, of Harvard University.

They reportedly wrote the paper nearly 10 years ago, to protest spam conference invitations. Vamplew recently used it to respond to what he thought was a spam invitation to publish in the open-access International Journal of Advanced Computer Science. In response, the Federation University professor received the aforementioned praise — and directions to wire $150 to a given account to proceed with publication.

Jeffrey Beall, associate professor and librarian at the University of Colorado at Denver, first reported the story on his blog, Scholarly Open Access. The website includes a running list of over 650 publishers of what Beall has called “predatory” journals: those of questionable quality that require authors to pay publication fees.

Via email, Beall said of the incident: “It’s clear that no peer review was done at all and that this particular journal (along with many like it) exists only to get money from scholarly authors. The open-access publishing model has some serious weaknesses, and predatory journals are poisoning all of scholarly communication.” He also said the story indicates that academics are tired of spam invites to contribute to questionable conferences and journals.