The famous internet RFC 2795 (The Infinite Monkey Protocol Suite) states that a monkey hitting keys at random on a typewriter keyboard for an infinite amount of time will almost surely type a given text, such as the complete works of William Shakespeare.

A modern variation of this monkey-fed typewriter consists of programs outputting random text sequences from a words database and a set of rules called grammar. Such programs are nicknamed generators.

Examples of generators in the area of science are SCIgen who produces meaningless computer science papers, or Mathgen who creates nonsensical math papers. The latter provides even the source code to generate full-size random e-books featuring custom-named authors, which can then be printed out at Lulu.

One can think that target journals for publication of such gems should be world-class journals such as the Journal of Irreproducible Results or the Journal of Universal Rejection, where no failure is to expect.

But it happens that from time to time so-called random papers are accepted in real-world publications. For example, a paper entitled Deconstructing Access Points has been accepted in The Open Information Science Journal, whereas Independent, Negative, Canonically Turing Arrows of Equations and Problems in Applied Formal PDE has been accepted in Advances in Pure Mathematics. As far as conferences are concerned, the talk Rooter: A Methodology for the Typical Unification of Access Points and Redundancy has been accepted at the WMSCI2005 and the talk Towards the Simulation of E-Commerce has been accepted at the 2008 International Conference on Computer Science and Software Engineering.

This highlights that some slimy journals or conferences are ready to accept fees to publish irrelevant non-peer-reviewed papers while it may be deduced that some authors are ready to pay (institutional) money in exchange for easy CV bullets.

It also reminds of Georges Perec's Experimental demonstration of the tomatotopic organization in the Soprano (pdf) and of the Sokal affair[1], which was more of a critic of post-modernism.

Update (March 2015): a more recent hoax in sociology has been ployed and unveiled by Arnaud Saint-Martin and Manuel Quinon after their postmodern-funny-gibberish paper entitled Automobilités postmodernes : quand l'Autolib' fait sensation à Paris has been accepted and published in Sociétés, a journal whose editor-in-chief is the French iconic sociologist Michel Maffesoli.

Note

[1] In 1996 Physics professor Alan Sokal managed to publish his manuscript Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity in the Social Text Spring/Summer "Science Wars" issue. The text included jokes such as: Just as liberal feminists are frequently content with a minimal agenda of legal and social equality for women and 'pro-choice', so liberal (and even some socialist) mathematicians are often content to work within the hegemonic Zermelo–Fraenkel framework (which, reflecting its nineteenth-century liberal origins, already incorporates the axiom of equality) supplemented only by the axiom of choice.