As I wrote earlier this year, there was a new study for the HumanCharger device done which appears now first under “Research” on Valkee’s marketing website humancharger.com.

Yesterday I got a confirmation from the official body responsible for scientific journal classification (the Publication Forum of Finland’s learned societies):

I asked for evaluation of this obscure HumanCharger journal – Journal of Neurology Research – which wasn’t even in the classification database, although it seems to exist since 2011. The professors of the JuFo panel 13 agreed with me and assigned the journal a Zero classification, i.e. it does not meet the basic criteria for scientific publication.

Therefore the institute at the University of Oulu will get 90% less funding for this particular publication. Additionally,  the first author cannot use it for his article-based thesis, for which he got a 24.000€ grant. He will have to explain why the research was dumped into a non-publication.

There would have been better uses for the grant money than the HumanCharger “research”, I’m sure.

(added) Bonus:

The journal in question sails already for a long time without Editor-in-chief, i.e. the person/scientist responsible for accepting or rejecting papers. That’s the most straightforward way to announce “acceptions aren’t done on scientific grounds”.