Academic Publishers Retract More Than 120 Papers After Learning They Were "Computer-Generated Nonsense" - Hit & Run : Reason.com

"'The publishers Springer and IEEE are removing more than 120 papers from their subscription services after a French researcher discovered that the works were computer-generated nonsense.' The researcher is Cyril Labbé, a computer scientist who 'has catalogued computer-generated papers that made it into more than 30 published conference proceedings between 2008 and 2013' ... Retraction Watch notes that this story undercuts some of the conclusions people have drawn from a feature that Science published last fall. In that report, a researcher posing as a scholar at an imaginary African institute managed to publish nonsense papers in 304 open-access journals, a result touted in some quarters as showing a link between theopen-access world and crappy quality control. (Open-access publications allow anyone to read their papers online, while conventional academic outlets charge high fees.) But Bohannon didn't submit his faux study to any traditional journals, so his results don't really allow you to compare the old and new models.  All of the outlets that Labbé exposed were subscription-based. The problem is evidently more extensive than some people thought."