Chaos, Solitons and Self-Promotion

Recently, our attention was drawn to the Elsevier Journal Chaos, Solitons & Fractals, and its Editor-in-Chief M. S. El Naschie. Over the course of the years, El Naschie himself published about 300 mostly single authored papers in this journal, with abstracts of the kind:

“Von Neumann’s continuous geometry has been considerably developed by Connes and is characterized by two fundamental concepts. First it is formulated without any direct reference to points and second it possesses a dimensional function. The present work explores the relevance of these two points to string theory as well as E-infinity theory. In particular we show that point-lessness and dimensional function implies fractality. In turn fractality leads to the concept of average or fuzzy symmetry and the elimination of gauge anomalies.”

Now neither of us in an expert in Solitons or Fractals. So we instead want to ask the completely unrelated questions whether being an editor at Elsevier allows one to circumvent peer review. In case you are suspicious about the scientific merit of El Naschie's work, you are not alone. John Baez gave it a closer look in his recent post The Case of M. S. El Naschie and finds the result wanting.

The reason we got interested in this topic is that El Naschie lists himself on his website as a “distinguised Fellow of the Physics Institute of the Johann Wolfgang Goethe University, Frankfurt” - the Institute where we both made our PhD. However, this “Fellowship” has not been awarded by the physics department, but by a private association, called the “Frankfurter Förderverein für physikalische Grundlagenforschung” (Frankfurt association for the support of basic research in phyiscs). Gossip that we would never spread says the guy has money. Zoran Škoda wrote in an earlier comment:

“I was told that there is an investigation about using this affiliation now. I contacted some of the associate editors, most of whom did not respond to my question how such a behaviour is allowed. Two of them told me that they will quit from the editorial board, and one that his name was put on the editorial page without his consent!”

It is thus good to read that Herman van Campenhout, Elsevier CEO Science & Technology, writes in the Publishing Ethics Resource Kit: “Monitoring Publishing Ethics is a major aspect of the peer-review process, and as such lies within the area of responsibility of the Editor-in-Chief [].” And, he adds, “Fortunately, the area of science publishing is reasonably good at self-correcting, albeit sometimes later rather than earlier.”