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Pattern Recognition in Physics was an open-access journal published by Copernicus Publications which was established in March 2013 and terminated in January 2014. The editor-in-chief was Sid-Ali Ouadfeul (Algerian Petroleum Institute), and the co-editor-in-chief was Nils-Axel Morner, the latter of whom is a well-known climate change skeptic. While the idea for this journal was taken somewhat critically when Morner and Ouadfeul first proposed it, Copernicus eventually decided to publish it because Morner and Ouadfeul said that the journal's aim would be "to publish articles about patterns recognized in the full spectrum of physical disciplines rather than to focus on climate-research-related topics." Concerns regarding the journal's peer-review process were first raised in July 2013 by Jeffrey Beall, an American librarian and well-known critic of predatory open access publishing. Beall wrote, on his blog, that Ouadfeul's research has "only been cited a couple times," and went on to accuse him of self-plagiarizing from a book he had written in 2012, entitled "Wavelet Transforms and Their Recent Applications in Biology and Geoscience." Beall concluded that "This is not a good start for a journal, and the publisher ought to be concerned and take action." After a special issue of the journal was published in December 2013, which contained a paper in which the authors said they "doubt the continued, even accelerated, warming as claimed by the IPCC project," managing director Martin Rasmussen expressed concern regarding this journal; he also said that "the editors selected the referees on a nepotistic basis, which we regard as malpractice in scientific publishing.” On January 17, 2014, Copernicus Publications announced that they were going to terminate the journal, citing both the statement that questioned the IPCC's prediction of continued global warming and the "nepotistic" appointing of similarly-minded scientists to the journal's editorial board. They also said that they "wish to distance ourselves from the apparent misuse of the originally agreed aims & scope of the journal as well as the malpractice regarding the review process."

References

1. Castelvecchi, Davide (20 January 2014). "Climate comments push open-access publisher to terminate journal". Nature News Blog. Retrieved 11 February 2014.
2. ^ Stokstad, Erik (17 January 2014). "Alleging 'Malpractice' With Climate Skeptic Papers, Publisher Kills Journal". Science Insider. Retrieved 11 February 2014.
3. Beall, Jeffrey (16 July 2013). "Recognizing a Pattern of Problems in "Pattern Recognition in Physics"". Scholarlyoa.com. Retrieved 11 February 2014.
4. Morner, Nils-Axel (2013). "General conclusions regarding the planetary–solar–terrestrial interaction" (PDF). Pattern Recognition in Physics. 1 (1): 205–206. {{cite journal}}: Unknown parameter |month= ignored (help)
5. Adler, Jonathan H. (20 January 2014). "Was a scientific journal canned for disagreeing with the IPCC?". The Washington Post. Retrieved 11 February 2014.
6. Termination of the journal Pattern Recognition in Physics

• Articles needing sections from February 2014
• Publications established in 2013
• Publications disestablished in 2014
• Physics journals
• Open access journals
• Environmental skepticism
• English-language journals