Experimental and Clinical Cardiology used to be a reputable journal. Now it's a trash heap piled with crap. No, literally - the Ottawa Citizen newspaper has proof, thanks to reporter Tom Spears (who's an experienced hand at this). The journal was sold last year, and the new owners will publish absolutely anything you send them, as long as you send them $1200 to their bank account in the Turks and Caicos Islands. I wish I were making all that up, but that is exactly how it goes, offshore banking and all.

Spears whipped together a gibberish cardiology paper by taking one about HIV and doing a find-and-replace to substitute "cardiology" for "HIV" wherever it occurred. I'm sure it reads just fine, if you're high on crack. He stripped out all the graphics, wrote up some captions for new ones, but didn't send any graphs or figures with his submission. No problemo, dude! Paper accepted! As soon as the money shows up under that palm tree in the Caribbean, this junk will become the latest contribution to the medical literature.

The "journal" lists an affiliation with the International Academy of Cardiovascular Sciences in Winnipeg, which organization is pretty upset about that, since there's no connection at all any more. But how to get that fixed? The phone number listed for the editorial office doesn't work. And they don't respond to any emails that they don't feel like responding to, which I'd guess are all the ones that don't involve the possibility of $1200 wire transfers.

The wonderful people behind this scam will ride it as long as a shred of reputation clings to the journal's name, or as long as people send them money, whichever comes first. The journal's web site, which I will consider linking to if they pay me twelve hundred dollars, looks legit, except for the slightly-shaky-English-style notice that "Starting from Jan 1, 2013, Experimental and Clinical Cardiology Journal will operate under new publishing group". If you click "Editorial Board", it tells you that a new one is coming soon. And this part is pretty interesting, too - they say that they provide:

. . .outstanding service to authors through a clear and fast editorial process. Review and decision will be fast and our editorial policy is clear: we will either accept your manuscript for publication or not, our editors will not ask for additional research.

All submissions will be peer reviewed, and our reviewers are asked to focus their attention to data presented in the article. Your manuscript, after the review process can be or accepted or declined. Three independent reviewers are reviewing each manuscript and if two of them accept the manuscript then your work will be published without any further corrections. Note that we will not reject a manuscript because it is out of scope or for its perceived importance, novelty or ability to attract citations: we will publish any study that is scientifically sound.

Yeah boy! But as it says under "Publication Fees", "Open access publishing is not without its costs". One of those costs should be the scientific credibility of anyone who sends a paper in to the place these days. I've looked over the most recent papers listed on the web site - there's one from a hospital in Barcelona, a university in Turkey, an institute in China, some group from Italy whose paper doesn't load well, and a bunch of people with German-sounding names whose paper appears to be two pages long and consists of one figure and no text. An erratum? Who can tell? And who would bother? You might as well copy-and-paste some old Star Wars fan-fiction; no one's going to notice. Every single one of these lead authors probably had their paper turn around within a couple of days, and sent $1200 to the flipping Turks and Caicos without batting an eye, for a journal that's supposedly based in Switzerland. For shame.

No getting around it: if you send money to any of the publishers on Beall's List, you are funding a bunch of scam artists. And if you use such a paper to pad your own c.v., then you've decided to become a scam artist yourself.