Criticism of Bentham Open
The Bentham Open journals claim to employ peer review, although there have been disputes with this claim. Allegations of fake papers have circulated amongst the Bentham Open journals. One case included a fake paper that was generated using SCIgen in 2009, and was accepted for publication, though the paper was never officially published; the publisher has since contended that the acceptance was a play-along to catch the author. The author, a graduate student at Cornell University, was motivated into the submission after being bombarded with unsolicited invitations to publish in Bentham's journals and offers to serve in their editorial boards for topics beyond his expertise. In consequence, some editors quit the collaboration with Bentham. In 2013, the now-discontinued The Open Bioactive Compounds Journal again accepted a blatantly bogus paper submitted as part of the Who's Afraid of Peer Review? sting.
Bentham Open has been accused of spamming scientists to become members of the editorial boards of its journals since 2008. In a 2017 study of invitation spam by publishers, Bentham Open was noted to be a habitual offender.
In 2009, the Bentham Open Science journal The Open Chemical Physics Journal published a study contending dust from the World Trade Center attacks contained "active nanothermite", a well known 9/11 conspiracy theory. The journal's editor-in-chief Marie-Paule Pileni claimed the article was published without her authorization, and resigned. In a July 2009 review of Bentham Open for The Charleston Advisor, Jeffrey Beall accused Bentham Open of exploiting the Open Access model to make quick money, and rejected that they employed any meaningful peer-review. Beall had since added Bentham Open to his list of "Potential, possible, or probable predatory scholarly open-access publishers".
