As the world becomes metaphorically smaller, more and more opportunities open up for grifters of all sorts. And I’m not, at least directly, talking about a certain stable genius.
It turns out that many academics are publishing allegedly “peer reviewed” articles in fake academic journals:
The story begins with Chris Sumner, a co-founder of the nonprofit Online Privacy Foundation, who unwittingly attended a conference organized by the World Academy of Science, Engineering and Technology (WASET) last October. At first glance, WASET seems to be a legitimate organization. Its website lists thousands of conferences around the world in pretty much every conceivable academic discipline, with dates scheduled all the way out to 2031. It has also published over ten thousand papers in an “open science, peer reviewed, interdisciplinary, monthly and fully referred [sic] international research journal” that covers everything from aerospace engineering to nutrition. To any scientist familiar with the peer review process, however, WASET’s site has a number of red flags, such as spelling errors and the sheer scope of the disciplines it publishes.
Sumner attended the WASET conference to get feedback on his research, but after attending it became obvious that the conference was a scam. After digging into WASET’s background, Sumner partnered with [German journalist Svea] Eckert and her colleague Till Krause, who adopted fictitious academic personas and began submitting papers to WASET’s journal. The first paper to get accepted was titled “Highly-Available, Collaborative, Trainable Communication-a policy neutral approach,” which claims to be about a type of cryptoanalysis based on “unified scalable theory.” The paper was accepted by the WASET journal with minimal notes and praise for the authors’ contribution to this field of research.
There was just one problem: The paper was pure nonsense that had been written by a joke software program designed by some MIT students to algorithmically generate computer science papers. It was, in a word, total bullshit.
I particularly got a kick out of the undercover names they adopted when they attended a WASET conference:
The two journalists went in disguise as the fictitious academics Dr. Cindy Poppins and Dr. Edgar Munchhausen.
WASET is by no means alone and there is a real world cost to this. The article references First Immune, a drugmaker from England, that marketed an ineffective cancer treatment:
The problem is that these predatory journals gave First Immune an air of legitimacy for desperate patients with cancer. This predicament is illustrated in the autobiography of a famous German media personality Miriam Pielhau, who died of breast cancer in 2016. In Dr. Hope, Pielhau describes her battle with cancer and how she settled on GcMAF as a last resort and cited medical studies published in predatory journals as the basis of her decision.
The ease with which people can be duped into taking false medical advice was driven home by Eckert and co, who submitted a research paper to the WASET Journal of Integrative Oncology that claimed that bees wax was a more effective cancer treatment than chemotherapy. The paper was accepted and published in the journal with minimal revisions.
As detailed by Eckert and her colleagues, similar tactics are used to publish studies and host conferences funded by major corporations as well, including the tobacco company Philip Morris, the pharmaceutical company AstraZeneca, and the nuclear safety company Framatone. When the predatory journals publish these companies’ research, they can claim it is “peer reviewed” and thereby grant it an air of legitimacy.
Academics from prestigious universities, including a number of Ivy League schools, have published in these journals. The article is not clear whether the academics were in on the con or not.
This type of thing is hardly restricted to academia. Years ago I used to naively wonder why the best lawyers in Connecticut, chosen by a magazine with the word Connecticutin its name, were, to my own personal knowledge, not really all that good. That was before the days of email, so I now know the answer. In the last several years my inbox at work got, on average, a solication a day from someone offering me an award, providing I was ready to pay up. I even had the chance to be named best financial advisor in the world, which I inexplicably passed up. Well, it’s not really that inexplicable; I wouldn’t take my own financial advice and I certainly never gave any. Even Martindale-Hubbell, whose reason for being was destroyed by the internet, offers awards for a price. In the case of the legal profession, the award recipients are clearly in on the con. So, a bit of free advice: don’t go to a lawyer whose face is on a bus or who touts an award in an ad.
There’s a lesson to be learned here by the average Joe. Now, what was I saying about that genius?
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