AnonTechie writes:
"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.
Over the past two years, computer scientist Cyril Labbe of Joseph Fourier University in Grenoble, France, has catalogued computer-generated papers that made it into more than 30 published conference proceedings between 2008 and 2013. Sixteen appeared in publications by Springer, which is headquartered in Heidelberg, Germany, and more than 100 were published by the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE), based in New York. Both publishers, which were privately informed by Labbe, say that they are now removing the papers.
(Score: 1) by photong on Tuesday March 04 2014, @07:04AM
As someone who proofreads engineering papers for a living, this is not surprising. Reviewers range from being really thorough and helpful to just plain silly. One paper can have one reviewer state "I strongly recommend this paper for publication as the findings are novel and useful" and another state "This paper cannot be published in its current state" followed by a long list of problems. Reviewing papers is just not sexy enough for most people to care enough.