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Comment by new299 | Hacker News Reader

"Sixteen papers are being retracted across three Elsevier journals after the publisher discovered that one of the authors, Khalid Zaman, orchestrated fake peer reviews by submitting false contact information for his suggested reviewers."

As part of their value add, journals don't seek out additional referees. Don't check that the contact information of suggested referees is correct. And no paid editor checks the manuscript has plausibly passed review. It just gets thrown through their automated system until they hit "accept with minor revision" or reject.

This is of course in addition to the following non-services:

* Requiring the authors to perform all typesetting. * No copyediting * No paid referees

For which they charge in general several thousand USD for an open access publication or extortionate subscription fees.

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Can only agree. Except they don't ask authors to do all typesetting and copyediting. Some try to provide value there by outsourcing it all to companies that make a complete mess of it. For an example see the recent IOP publication of an abstract reading "Abstract goes here" and the recent Wiley publication of citations reading "cite crappy paper here".

Actually a hands-off approach would be excusable if a) the technology systems they provide weren't truly awful and b) they charged significantly less.

Yes. A recent paper I submitted (carefully typeset in LaTeX) got subjected to all kinds of ludicrous mangling in the name of 'house style' by someone with no apparent knowledge of English.

Things like 'for example' being replaced with 'e.g.' even at the end of a sentence. Or citations beginning a sentence getting parenthesised — giving "(Smith 2003) states that ...".

I re-corrected it all through gritted teeth, but I still haven't brought myself to read what they finally published.

Ouch, I've never heard to that happening that's insane. Care to name and shame the journal?

Can e.g. not be used at the end of a sentence? It's been bugging me recently that I have to use "for example"/f.e. yet I can use e.g. in other places, and it's Latin so word order ought not to matter.

It depends on the journal perhaps. But wherever I've submitted I've had to send ages getting the paper into "journal style", reformatting references etc.

Yes they mangle it again after that, but they still put a huge amount of initial work on the author. I don't know of any journal that will for example, go through the references and put them in journal style for example. They'll just tell you to do it.

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