How predatory publishing houses: masquerading as a statistics journal chased my AI preprint, gave me a Doctorate and clearly never read a word of it.
I received an email last week, a polite follow up chasing a submission I had never made. It came from Hazell, editorial manager of a journal of statistics and mathematics, and it opened “Dear Dr Samantha Maeer.” I have collected a fair amount of names in thirty years across three continents, but Doctor is not one of them, although if anyone’s giving out an honorary one drop me an email!
The paper Hazell was so keen to see was mine, a preprint called The Feed Loop - How AI-Generated Governance Documents Amplify the Patterns They Were Designed to Suppress, which is not, by any measure that I am aware of, either statistics or mathematics.
So we have a maths journal, an AI paper, and a doctorate that does not exist, all in one short message. As I am curious by nature, I made a cup of tea, sat down and read it again.
On closer reading it became obvious that this was not a compliment, or a genuine offer, and after a quick search it was obvious that this was a scrape, or scam. Nobody at the journal had read the paper, because nobody at the journal had read anything at all. A template had gone out, fired by something that harvested the preprint’s metadata off a public repository, stitched my name into a greeting, and invented a title to go with it. The “Dr” is the tell. A person who had read even the first page would have known I make no such claim, and a person who cared about statistics would have noticed the paper is not about statistics. There was no person either, as I also found out after a little dig.
Little of this is rare, it is a well documented phenomenon, certain companies have a reputation for it, in fact it’s a whole new industry I knew nothing about until last week. Addressing someone as “Doctor” when they hold no doctorate, and inviting them to publish in a field nowhere near their own, are among the most reliable signs of a predatory journal, the kind university libraries now catalogue on a page for their own staff [1]. The publisher behind the one that wrote to me appears on Beall’s List, the reference archive of potential predatory publishers [2]. The pattern is common enough to have been studied at length, including a year-long observational study named after the very greeting these emails use, “Dear Doctor, greetings of the day,” which tracked hundreds of such invitations to a single researcher, the large majority from publishers already on the blocklists [3]. The wrong-field problem is measurable too. When one academic urologist’s inbox was audited across a year, 422 solicitations produced 214 predatory journals from 75 publishers, and only 7.35 per cent were even in the recipient’s own field [4]. A maths journal chasing an AI paper is one unremarkable data point inside that number.
As for the peer review these journals claim to run, the clearest test was done for us over a decade ago. In 2014 a researcher, worn down by the spam, submitted a paper to a journal on Beall’s List that consisted of a single sentence, “Get me off your fucking mailing list,” repeated across ten pages, with a figure or two built from the same words. It was accepted, rated excellent, and returned with a request for a publishing fee [5]. The reviewers, if any existed, had read exactly as much of it as Hazell’s journal read of mine.
My preprint, unlike the doctorate, is real, and anyone can check it exists [6]. The journal that wanted so badly to publish it could not have. It is amusing, and disturbing in equal measure. I sussed it quickly, being the cynical Yorkshire lass I immediately marked it spam. I did get another couple over the next few days but the filter did its job and they went in the bin where they belong.
I did find it fascinating though, the systems built to validate knowledge are filling up with material that no human ever checked, generated and circulated by machines and landing in the inboxes of people who never solicited it. A predatory journal is only a small instance of that, in my case it wasn’t a problem, I just binned it but there have been many instances of people being hounded for money and a few nasty legal cases, so it’s not as benign as it may at first look.
The one thing that still separates the signal from the noise on whatever level you are discussing, be that maths, AI or whatever else, is a person deciding what gets through, which is most of what contAIn™ is.
I have decided to keep the doctorate. It was awarded by a journal that never read me, for a paper about what happens when nobody reads anything, and on those terms it feels entirely earned.
Sam
Sources
[1] Scholarly Publishing and Citation Guide, “Predatory Journals,” MGH Guides, Massachusetts General Hospital. https://libguides.massgeneral.org/scholarly/predatory
[2] Beall’s List of Potential Predatory Journals and Publishers (archived). https://beallslist.net/
[3] “Dear Doctor, greetings of the day! A 1-year observational study of presumed predatory journal invitations.” National Library of Medicine (PMC). https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10315365/
[4] Vo, et al. “Financial barriers in urology publishing: an analysis of legitimate and predatory journals.” ANZ Journal of Surgery, 2025. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/ans.70019
[5] “Journal Accepts Paper Titled ‘Get Me Off Your F*cking Mailing List’.” ScienceAlert, 2014. https://www.sciencealert.com/journal-accepts-paper-titled-get-me-off-your-f-cking-mailing-list
[6] Maeer, S. “The Feed Loop: How AI-Generated Governance Documents Amplify the Patterns They Were Designed to Suppress.” Zenodo, 2026. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.20474271