I think the unofficial Favorite Journal of ScienceBlogs has got to be the journal, Medical Hypotheses. It used to be, you could take two different approaches if you wanted to publish in Medical Hypotheses. 1– Smash your face into your keyboard for 15 minutes. Submit for publication. Or, the less expedient 2– Leave your laptop open on your bed and let your cat walk/take naps/play on the keyboard for a couple of days. Submit.
See, Medical Hypotheses had no peer review step in its publication process, so the kookiest, most dumbdiddilous crap could get published there, from anti-vax idiocy to HIV Denial.
Well, another SciBlog fave, HIV Denier Peter Duesberg, literally broke Medical Hypotheses when he published an HIV Denial screed there. Elsevier yanked the article, canned the journals editor, and implemented a peer review stage in the publication process at Medical Hypotheses.
Now, while having one of your articles cause such a fiasco might give a normal, sane scientist pause, we are talking about Peter Duesberg here. Dude *will not* give up his failed hypothesis from 30 damn years ago that HIV doesnt cause AIDS (what does? I dunno. Aliens?)
So he just turned around and submitted his article to, apparently, 4 or 5 journals, and one of them accepted it: Italian Journal of Anatomy and Embryology
Wow, here I am working on a degree in Microbiology and Immunology like a sucker, when REAL HIV/AIDS research goes on in the Anatomy and Embryology department! OF COURSE!
Hey, somebody tell Judy Mikovits that all is not lost– she can just resubmit her crap paper to Italian Journal of Anatomy and Embryology too! I bet they will also accept all her SUPER SECRET autism data! XMRV, HIV, autism, epidemiology, embryology, all the same thing, amirite?
Jackasses…
I am just rolling my eyes at this (to quote Max Essex, “It is just so far out that it is hard to respond in an intelligent way”), but Blog Brother Mark Hoofnagle is blogging again at one of my old favorites, Denialism Blog, and has got this shit covered.