The latest sting: Will predatory journals hire “Dr. Fraud”? - Retraction Watch at Retraction Watch

"From time to time, academics will devise a 'sting' operation, designed to expose journals’ weaknesses. We’ve seen scientists submit a duplicated paper, a deeply flawed weight loss paper designed to generate splashy headlines (it worked), and an entirely fake paper – where even the author calls it a 'pile of dung.' So it wasn’t a huge surprise when Katarzyna Pisanski at the University of Sussex and her colleagues found that so-called 'predatory' journals – which are allegedly willing to publish subpar papers as long as the authors pay fees – often accepted a fake editor to join their team. In a new Nature Comment, Pisanski and her team (Piotr Sorokowski, Emek Kulczycki and Agnieszka Sorokowska) describe creating a profile of a fake scientist named Anna O. Szust (Oszust means 'a fraud' in Polish). Despite the fact that Szust never published a single scholarly article and had no experience as a reviewer or editor, approximately one-third of predatory journals accepted Szust’s application as an editor. We spoke with Pisanski about the project."