The editor-in-chief of an open-access journal is to resign after claiming that its publisher, Bentham Science Publishing, accepted a hoax article without his knowledge.

Bambang Parmanto, an information scientist at the University of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and editor-in-chief of The Open Information Science Journal, said he had not seen the computer-generated manuscript, accepted by Bentham on 3 June.

The fake paper was submitted by Philip Davis, a graduate student in communication sciences at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, and Kent Anderson, an executive director at The New England Journal of Medicine. Davis says he wanted to test if the publisher would "accept a completely nonsensical manuscript if the authors were willing to pay". He retracted the paper after being notified that it had been accepted, and that he should pay US$800 to Bentham's subscription department.

Mahmood Alam, director of publications at Bentham Science Publishing, told Nature that "submission of fake manuscripts is a totally unethical activity and must be condemned", adding that "a rigorous peer-review process takes place for all articles that are submitted to us for publication".