Dozens of academic journals appoint fake editor

Dozens of academic titles have offered a sham scientist a place on their editorial board, according to an investigation by researchers, published in Nature. The authors of the paper conceived a sting operation and submitted a fake application for an editor position to 360 journals, including both legitimate titles and suspected predatory journals. Forty-eight titles accepted. The authors were increasingly disturbed by the number of invitations they received to become editors or to review for journals completely outside their field and they decided to examine the problem empirically.