The fake journal trend

It's really easy to set up a completely fake peer-reviewed journal, which is a great boon to pseudoscientists, quacks, creationists, and con artists. They can be tripped up, though, since they aren't aware of all the inside jokes and strange habits of scientists. Here's one, a journal called "Molecular Biology", that was exposed because they were a little to eager to recruit "editors"…editors who would never be called upon to edit anything, but would just provide a name for window dressing.

I'm delighted to inform you that Peter Uhnemann from the⨠Daniel-Duesentrieb Institute in Germany was just appointed⨠editor of the OMICS journal "Molecular Biology":â¨â¨
http://www.omicsgroup.org/journals/editorialboardMBL.phpâ¨

For those of you who don't know Peter Uhnemann: he is a fake⨠person invented by the German satirical magazine Titanic.⨠They created an FB account for him to make fun of social⨠networks (he soon befriended on FB with various German⨠politicians).â¨â¨

For those of you who don't know Daniel Duesentrieb: this is⨠the German name of the Walt Disney comic figure Gyro Gearloose.â¨â¨

For those of you who don't know the OMICS journals: these⨠are junk journals spamming around invitations to join their⨠editorial boards.

On their web page they say thatâ¨â¨ "election of the "right" editor for a journal is one of the⨠most important decisions made by OMICS Publishing Group ...⨠Editors, Executive Editors & Editor-in- Chief of journals⨠must be senior researchers, e.g. chaired professors."â¨â¨ As it looks, Peter Uhnemann from the Daniel-Duesentrieb⨠Institute meets these criteria.

If you accepted an offer to join the editorial board of this journal and are on this list, you might want to get off of it fast — you're being associated with a spammy bit of fraud. I'm looking at you, Peter Duesberg.

(Also on FtB)