There was also a recent Science magazine's "sting operation" where they submitted tons of shitty papers to journals across the world and found many journals actually accepted the paper:
http://www.sciencemag.org/content/342/6154/60.full
The sting was pretty controversial though as they seemed to want to use this evidence to discredit open access publishing rather than to say this is a problem with academia in general. Open access is catching on in the biological sciences (http://biorxiv.org/) and big journals like nature or science are afraid of losing money.
You can argue that they are a natural response to the academic publishing culture where the sole metric of success is the number of papers you publish.
Here is an account of a guy who attended a conference hosted by the OMICS publishing group: http://cabbagesofdoom.blogspot.co.uk/2013/07/omics-group-con...
There was also a recent Science magazine's "sting operation" where they submitted tons of shitty papers to journals across the world and found many journals actually accepted the paper: http://www.sciencemag.org/content/342/6154/60.full
The sting was pretty controversial though as they seemed to want to use this evidence to discredit open access publishing rather than to say this is a problem with academia in general. Open access is catching on in the biological sciences (http://biorxiv.org/) and big journals like nature or science are afraid of losing money.
You can argue that they are a natural response to the academic publishing culture where the sole metric of success is the number of papers you publish.