National Geographic: A cancer drug discovered in a humble lichen, and ready for testing in patients, might sound too good to be true. That's because it is. But more than a hundred lower-tier scientific journals accepted a fake, error-ridden cancer study for publication in a spoof organized by Science magazine.
The fake study points to a "Wild West" of pay-to-publish outlets feeding off lower tiers of the scientific enterprise by publishing studies without any appreciable scrutiny, say research ethics experts. (See...