Philip Davis, recently revealed in a blog post on "the scholarly kitchen", that an open access journal produced by Bentham Science accepted a completely nonsensical manuscript he submitted - if he would pay the 'Open Access' publication charges.

Over a period of two weeks earlier this year, Davis received three email messages from Bentham Science, an open access publisher. One promised him a position on their “prestigious” editorial board, another asked for a submission to a journal outside his field, and the third was seeking any submission remotely related to the social sciences.

Fed up with the spamming, Davis decided to see how "credible" this publisher was and submitted a completely bogus manuscript for "peer review". Davis used a program called SCIgen (http://pdos.csail.mit.edu/scigen/), to generate a "grammatically correct, context free (i.e. nonsensical) paper on computer science", titled "Deconstructing Access Points", and submitted it to The Open Information Science Journal (TOISCIJ), a journal that claims to enforce peer-review.

The manuscript was given two co-authors, David Phillips and Andrew Kent, from the fictional institutional affiliation: The Center for Research in Applied Phrenology (CRAP) based in Ithaca, New York. Bentham Science confirmed receipt of the submission the very next day (January 30, 2009). Nearly four months later, he received the below response:

"This is to inform you that your submitted article has been accepted for publication after peer-reviewing process in TOISCIJ. I would be highly grateful to you if you please fill and sign the attached fee form and covering letter and send them back via email as soon as possible to avoid further delay in publication."

The letter was written by a Ms. Sana Mokarram, the Assistant Manager of Publication. She included a fee schedule and confirmation that Davis would pay the $800 usd fee, to be sent to a post office box in a tax-free complex in the United Arab Emirates. He subsequently retracted the manuscript with an email to Ms. Mokarram stating "I’m afraid that we have to retract this article. We have discovered several errors in the manuscript which question both the validity of the study and the results."

He has received no further responses from Ms. Mokarram nor Bentham.

Read more about it here: http://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/author/pmd8/