Logo

Fake Out

Jun 19, 2009

Bambang Parmanto resigned as the editor-in-chief of the Open Information Science Journal after a fake paper was accepted by the journal for publication, reports the Guardian. The paper 'Deconstructing Access Points' was computer-generated and submitted by Philip Davis, a graduate student at Cornell University, and the New England Journal of Medicine's Kent Anderson under false names; they gave their affiliation as Centre for Research in Applied Phrenology, or CRAP. After the paper was accepted, Davis revealed that it was a hoax to test the editorial standards at the journal. "I never saw the paper," Parmanto tells the New Scientist. "It's a breakdown in the process."

Breaking News
The Scan

Germline-Targeting HIV Vaccine Shows Promise in Phase I Trial

A National Institutes of Health-led team reports in Science that a broadly neutralizing antibody HIV vaccine induced bnAb precursors in 97 percent of those given the vaccine.

Study Uncovers Genetic Mutation in Childhood Glaucoma

A study in the Journal of Clinical Investigation ties a heterozygous missense variant in thrombospondin 1 to childhood glaucoma.

Gene Co-Expression Database for Humans, Model Organisms Gets Update

GeneFriends has been updated to include gene and transcript co-expression networks based on RNA-seq data from 46,475 human and 34,322 mouse samples, a new paper in Nucleic Acids Research says.

New Study Investigates Genomics of Fanconi Anemia Repair Pathway in Cancer

A Rockefeller University team reports in Nature that FA repair deficiency leads to structural variants that can contribute to genomic instability.