‘Get Me Off Your F*cking Mailing List’: Sham paper accepted by science journal

A dummy research paper worth an honorary Ig Nobel and titled ‘Get Me Off Your F*cking Mailing List’ has been accepted for publication by an open-access science journal.

The paper, written by US researchers David Mazières and Eddie Kohle in 2005, revolved only around these seven words repeated over and over again. The 10-page mantra, which also boasted some useful diagrams, was the Stanford and Harvard professors’ ironic response to a stream of unwanted spam invitations.

Another computer scientist, Australian Dr. Peter Vamplew, decided to submit ‘Get Me Off Your F*cking Mailing List’ to the International Journal of Advanced Computer Technology (IJACT) after receiving a whole series of unwanted spam from it and other similar journals.

It seems a number of ‘predatory’ journals spam scientists, offering to publish their work. Once an article is accepted, the journal asks for a fee.

The IJACT says it "does not compromise with quality of research" informing on its website that it welcomes the submission of manuscripts that meet the "general criteria of significance and scientific excellence."

Much to Vamplew's surprise, the IJACT gave ‘Get Me Off Your F*cking Mailing List’ an excellent review, saying it would publish the paper for a fee of $150.

"I received a dozen of these sorts of academic spam messages one day and I snapped and sent them all as a response. It made me feel better for a few minutes, but I didn’t even expect it would get me off their mailing list, let alone have the paper accept it," Vamplew told RT.

Other "professional" journals have been subject to practical jokes from the science community.

In April a reporter for the Ottawa Citizen wrote a plagiarized nonsense paper tackling soils, cancer, and Mars. His ‘masterpiece’ entitled ‘Acidity and aridity: Soil inorganic carbon storage exhibits complex relationship with low-pH soils and myeloablation followed by autologous PBSC infusion’ was nonetheless accepted by eight ‘predatory’ journals, which asked from $1,000 to $5,000 from him to publish it.

Last year, another science reporter submitted a flawed paper about cancer to some 340 journals, and got it accepted by 60 percent of them. Using IP addresses, he discovered that the journals that accepted his paper were located in India and Nigeria, vox.com reported.