F for Fake was the film master Orson Welles’ last released film; it was a small documentary on the art forger Elmer de Hory, with a side serving of Clifford Irving (the author of the fake Howard Hughes autobiography), and explored the nature of authorship and authenticity. We now have a burgeoning ‘F for Fake’ scandal in peer-reviewed open-access scientific journals which can’t–or won’t –detect bogus research. A Science Magazine (American Association for the Advancement of Science–AAAS) journalist, John Bohannon, drafted a ‘spoof’ paper which was submitted to 304 peer-reviewed, open-access journals. It detailed the anticancer qualities of a chemical derived from lichen. Despite the complete fabrication of the discovery, the researcher and his university  (more…)