I imagine that the experience of the team vetting Papers Please was a little like the Fox censor character from the Simpsons.
About 6 months after the fraud came to light early this year, Science asked six individuals to collectively examine how the faked data made it past peer review, whether the journal had followed its own procedures for vetting papers, and whether it might have done anything differently.
Journals take too long to vet papers for publication, grumble some researchers, and can reject papers outright without having to justify themselves.
If you see anything odd with your cat that is not mentioned above or on your vets paper, call the vet.
Frontiers's peer-review policy ("Free-for-all", May 4th) is to vet a paper's accuracy, but not its significance.
News that Peter Chen, an engineering researcher in Taiwan, managed to game the peer review system and sneak into print at least 60 publications in a single journal is certain to raise serious questions about the integrity of the process by which scientific publishers vet papers.
Just a few minutes with Google or with Turn It In, a service that enables teachers to vet student papers, revealed that every single paragraph of the essay was borrowed from material already floating on the Internet or in Nexis.
As guest editors of this special issue, we are grateful to the 45 reviewers who helped rigorously vet the papers and helped us select the contents of this issue.
"My reporters and editors had no way of finding out... (and believe me, we tried)... Just as a point of comparison, the New York Times spent three months vetting the Pentagon papers," he said.
We then further vetted each potential paper based on a detailed examination of its content, and rejected those articles for which the topics of biodiversity or climate change constituted only a minor component, or where these were only mentioned in passing (despite appearing in the abstract or key words).
