MY alarm bells went off a few months ago when my research student received two "no changes required" reviews, only three weeks after she had made her first submission to a refereed journal.

 

A short and flattering review is usually a case of a lazy referee. In this case it was more sinister: fake reviews.

 

The editor's letter also asked for a $200 submission fee.

It is easy to start a phony journal in the internet jungle, a great playground for scammers of all sorts. But the journal in point, International Journal of Business and Social Science, was listed on the Australian Research Council's 2012 ERA list of refereed journals.

 

The fake reviews, containing grammatical errors, were signed by a professor of economics from Radford University, US. On inquiry, he told me he did not sign the editorial decision and that his academic identity was used by the scam journal without his permission.