We Are Pleased To Publish Your Senseless Ravings. In the Pipeline:

"There's been some (justified) hand-wringing in scientific publishing circles over the revelation that at least 120 abstracts and papers out there in the literature are complete nonsense generated by SciGen. (A few previous SciGen adventures can be found here and here) Some news reports have made it seem like these were regular full papers, but they're actually published conference proceedings which (frankly) are sort of the ugly stepchild of the science journal world to begin with. They're supposed to be reviewed, and they certainly should have been reviewed enough for someone to catch on to the fact that they were devoid of meaning, but if you're going to fill the pages of a reputable publisher with Aphasio-matic ramblings, that's the way to do it. And these were reputable publishers, Springer and the IEEE. Springer has announced that they're removing all this stuff from their databases, since the normal retraction procedure doesn't exactly seem necessary. They're also trying to figure out what loophole let this happen in the first place, and they've contacted Cyril Labbé, the French researcher who wrote the SciGen-detecting software, for advice. The IEEE, for its part, has had this problem before, has had it for years, has been warned about it, but still seems to be ready and willing to publish gibberish. I don't know if Springer has had bad experiences with SciGen material, but the IEEE journals sure have, and it's apparently done no good at all. Live and don't learn. The organization has apparently removed the papers, but has made (as far as I can tell) no public statement whatsoever about the whole incident. So who went to all this trouble, anyway? That Scholarly Kitchen link above has some speculations: 'An additional (and even more disturbing) problem with the proceedings papers most recently discovered is emerging as the investigation continues: at least one of the authors contacted had no idea that he had been named as a coauthor. This suggests that the submissions were more than spoofs — spoofing can easily be accomplished by using fake names as well as fake content. The use of real scientists’ names suggests that at least some of these papers represent intentional scholarly fraud, probably with the intention of adding bulk to scholars’ résumés.' This takes us back to the open-access versus traditional publisher wars. When this sort of thing happens to OA journals, the response from some of the other publishers, overtly at times, is 'Well, yeah, sure, that's what you get when you don't go with the name brand' ..."