'Penises Cause Climate Change’; Progressives Fooled By Peer-Reviewed Hoax Study

[MMA IAN]

"Cogent Social Sciences" is a pay-to-publish, open access journal covering any social science from Law to Sport, Leisure and Tourism.


Not exactly a lofty target.

You mean they charge for publication, which is hardly unusual. While the journal itself is not as high status as others, a publication fee is quite normal and implying otherwise is disingenuous.

 

[Ruprecht]

Pretty embarrassing for Cogent and their meticulous peer reviewers.

Deeper concern, indeed.

As a matter of deeper concern, there is unfortunately some reason to believe that our hoax will not break the relevant spell. First, Alan Sokal’s hoax, now more than 20 years old, did not prevent the continuation of bizarre postmodernist “scholarship.” In particular, it did not lead to a general tightening of standards that would have blocked our own hoax. Second, people rarely give up on their moral attachments and ideological commitments just because they’re shown to be out of alignment with reality.

I'm not convinced that's true. Going from their letter on skeptic.com their submission was rejected by Norma and they only managed to get it published in a pay-to-publish vanity journal.

 

[Ruprecht]

You mean they charge for publication, which is hardly unusual. While the journal itself is not as high status as others, a publication fee is quite normal and implying otherwise is disingenuous.

No, I mean their business model relies entirely on publishing fees and their standards are dropped to match. A vanity journal.

In 2014, Harvard scientist Mark Shrime wrote an article titled "Cuckoo for Coco Puffs? The surgical and neoplastic role of cacao extract in breakfast cereals" using a random text generator and submitted it to 37 vanity journals, of whom at least 17 journals accepted the article for publication pending a fee to be paid by the author. Many of these vanity journals have names that sound professional and similar to real journals, e.g. International Journal of Pediatric Otorhinolaryngology is a real journal but Global Journal of Pediatric Otorhinolaryngology is a vanity journal. Vanity journals do not have a peer-review process, or they only have the veneer of one. It should be noted that some legitimate peer-reviewed journals have sometimes charged authors a publication fee, usually to partly-defray excessive publication costs (e.g., to print color images).

 

[dontsnitch]

I'm not convinced that's true. Going from their letter on skeptic.com their submission was rejected by Norma and they only managed to get it published in a pay-to-publish vanity journal.

"This problem should have rendered it unpublishable in all peer-reviewed, academic journals."

 

[Devout Pessimist]

This type of thing has been done before. The Sokal Hoax. A physics professor got some nonsense paper published in a humanities journal.

The article, "Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity",[3] was published in the Social Text spring/summer 1996 "Science Wars" issue. It proposed that quantum gravity is a social and linguistic construct. At that time, the journal did not practice academic peer review and it did not submit the article for outside expert review by a physicist.[4][5] On the day of its publication in May 1996, Sokal revealed in Lingua Franca that the article was a hoax.[2]

The hoax sparked a debate about the scholarly merit of humanistic commentary about the physical sciences; the influence of postmodern philosophy on social disciplines in general; academic ethics, including whether Sokal was wrong to deceive the editors and readers of Social Text; and whether Social Text had exercised appropriate intellectual rigor.

[Sokal]: The results of my little experiment demonstrate, at the very least, that some fashionable sectors of the American academic Left have been getting intellectually lazy. The editors of Social Text liked my article because they liked its conclusion: that "the content and methodology of postmodern science provide powerful intellectual support for the progressive political project" [sec. 6]. They apparently felt no need to analyze the quality of the evidence, the cogency of the arguments, or even the relevance of the arguments to the purported conclusion.[9]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokal_affair

 

[Ruprecht]

"This problem should have rendered it unpublishable in all peer-reviewed, academic journals."

See above. Vanity and predatory journals are nothing new, although the internet has allowed for an explosion of them.

 

[dontsnitch]

See above. Vanity and predatory journals are nothing new, although the internet has allowed for an explosion of them.

I'm just quoting your own source. This necessarily points to a problem in academic publishing.

Cogent Social Sciences has the trappings of a legitimate peer-reviewed journal. There is no way around the fact that the publication of this paper in such a journal must point to some problem with the current state of academic publishing. The components of the problem are, it seems, reducible to just two: academic misfeasance arising from pay-to-publish, open-access financial decision-making; and unconscionable pseudo-academic inbreeding contaminating, if not defining, the postmodernist theory-based social sciences.

 

[Ruprecht]

I'm just quoting your own source. This necessarily points to a problem in academic publishing.

Cogent Social Sciences has the trappings of a legitimate peer-reviewed journal. There is no way around the fact that the publication of this paper in such a journal must point to some problem with the current state of academic publishing. The components of the problem are, it seems, reducible to just two: academic misfeasance arising from pay-to-publish, open-access financial decision-making; and unconscionable pseudo-academic inbreeding contaminating, if not defining, the postmodernist theory-based social sciences.

That's their excuse. The same as they said the fact that Taylor and Francis mentioned Cogent means that no Gender Studies Journals are reputable.
The fact is that they tried a relatively obscure Gender Studies journal (Norma) and still were rejected (you can google the most established ones).
So they had to resort to a vanity journal and then talk the results up.
Utterly transparent.

 

[Lead]

God gave me the inches where it counts homie.

@senri

 

[MMA IAN]

No, I mean their business model relies entirely on publishing fees and their standards are dropped to match. A vanity journal.

They are not alone in that and are joined by plenty of journals in good standing who fund their accessibility by charging fees instead of the subscription based model.

If your problem is with pay-to-publish then you have a problem with all open access journals. I would suggest focusing on the journal as opposed to the payment process which could leave readers with the impression that any journal which accepts payment that way is a vanity journal.

 

[dontsnitch]

That's their excuse. The same as they said the fact that Taylor and Francis mentioned Cogent means that no Gender Studies Journals are reputable.
The fact is that they tried a relatively obscure Gender Studies journal (Norma) and still were rejected (you can google the most established ones).
So, they had to resort to a vanity journal and then talk the results up.
Utterly transparent.

That's not what happened as per your own source. They were referred to Cogent by Norma, they didn't approach Cogent themselves.

You can question the validity of this journal all you like, but this still highlights a problem within academia. This should never have been published in any journal, especially not one that is peer reviewed. This is a symptom of a greater problem that is not erased by simply downplaying the specific publication at hand.

 

[Ruprecht]

That's not what happened as per your own source. They were referred to Cogent by Norma, they didn't approach Cogent themselves.

You can question the validity of this journal all you like, but this still highlights a problem within academia. This should never have been published in any journal, especially not one that is peer reviewed. This is a symptom of a greater problem that is not erased by simply downplaying the specific publication at hand.

The problem is the explosion of vanity journals as facilitated by online publishing.
This isn't news to anyone in academia, so it's obvious who their target audience is with this transparent propaganda.
Taylor and Francis are not Norma, they are just their publisher. Cogent is their own open access product.

Cogent OA is part of the Taylor & Francis Group, benefitting from the resources and experiences of a major publisher, but operates independently from the Taylor & Francis and Routledge imprints.

Taylor & Francis and Routledge publish a number of fully open access journals, under the Taylor & Francis Open and Routledge Open imprints. Cogent OA publishes the Cogent Series of multidisciplinary, digital open access journals.

Together, we also provide authors with the option of transferring any sound manuscript to a journal in the Cogent Series if it is unsuitable for the original Taylor & Francis/Routledge journals, providing benefits to authors, reviewers, editors and readers.

 

[dontsnitch]

The problem is the explosion of vanity journals as facilitated by online publishing.

That's not the problem.

 

[Ruprecht]

They are not alone in that and are joined by plenty of journals in good standing who fund their accessibility by charging fees instead of the subscription based model.

If your problem is with pay-to-publish then you have a problem with all open access journals. I would suggest focusing on the journal as opposed to the payment process which could leave readers with the impression that any journal which accepts payment that way is a vanity journal.

The pay-to-publish, open access journals are rife with these problems because they are so cheap, easy and potentially profitable to create.
The fact that Taylor and Francis has their own strictly digital, pay-to-publish open access journal series (independent of their Taylor and Francis OA and Routledge OA journals), just shows you what traditional publishers are facing due to the challenge of adapting to the internet.

 

[Islam Imamate]

That's not the problem.

Certainly seems to be the problem based off this story. What do you think the problem is?

 

[dontsnitch]

Certainly seems to be the problem based off this story. What do you think the problem is?

I've lost interest in discussing this topic and I've said everything I set out to.

No offense to you, I just don't want to leave you hanging.

 

[RhinoRush]

It wasn't that long ago that even my most liberal professors laughed at gender studies. Judging from @Ruprecht's posts ITT that isn't the case any more.

 

[Metusalemi]

A penis in a wrong climate can certainly change it dramatically.

 

[KONE]

After completing the paper, we read it carefully to ensure it didn’t say anything meaningful

 

[sangreporsangre]

How is it really any different than of the other postmodernist claptrap coming out of the "gender theory" field? Go check out @RealPeerReview on Twitter and you'll see shit even crazier that wasn't done as a hoax. The whole discipline resembles the concept of ideological totalism as described by Lifton rather than a legit science.