Cracked.
An article in the website of the British newspaper the Mirror is based on an apparently withdrawn article published earlier in the OMICS Publishing Group’s journal Epidemiology: Open Access.
The article, “Miscarriages and Congenital Conditions in Offspring of Veterans of the British Nuclear Atmospheric Test Programme,” was authored by British anti-nuclear activist Christopher Busby and one other person.
A sick journal.
While a page for the article still exists at the journal’s website, the PDF is currently unavailable there. However, the article is available on someone’s Google Drive.
OMICS Publishing Group, based in Hyderabad, India, is included on my list of questionable open-access publishers. I think it is essentially a scholarly vanity press, a vanity press that also entraps authors.
I regularly receive reports that the publisher quickly accepts submitted manuscripts without subjecting them to any peer review and then demands payments of several thousand dollars from the victimized authors.
Clueless Reporter
A newspaper report apparently on Busby’s paper appeared on the Mirror website on October 18, 2014. Entitled, “Britain’s nuclear test veterans ARE the victims of a genetic curse, new research reveals,” the story was written by Susie Boniface.
Referring to Busby’s paper, Boniface reports,
Research – first reported by the Sunday Mirror in 2007 – which shows that their offspring have 10 times the normal rate of birth defects has finally been accepted by the scientific community.
Boniface is naively claiming that the now-missing paper that briefly appeared in an OMICS Publishing Group journal indicates acceptance “by the scientific community.”
It is common for activists seeking to influence science to exploit the vanity press nature of predatory journals to publish their pseudoscientific ideas. Upon publication, they often try to shop the scholarly articles around to various media outlets, hoping for coverage.
In this case, the strategy worked successfully.
Despite the disappearance of the article from the OMICS journal, the poorly-sourced story still appears on the newspaper’s website.
This video examines some of Busby’s recent work:
