Hoax highlights the pitfalls and perils of open access publishing

"Science, the widely respected magazine of the American Association for the Advancement of Science recently commissioned a sting operation aimed at revealing serious abuses within the world of open access publishing. John Bohannon, a journalist and visiting scholar at Harvard University, concocted a set of fake African personas located in a series of invented African institutions, and produced a paper filled to the brim with preposterous science ..."