Vanity publishing
Justin Weinberg at Daily Nous reports on an “attempted hoax” in the manner of the Sokal Hoax.
…the isomorphism between the conceptual penis and what’s referred to throughout discursive feminist literature as “toxic hypermasculinity,” is one defined upon a vector of male cultural machismo braggadocio, with the conceptual penis playing the roles of subject, object, and verb of action.
That’s a line from the intentionally nonsensical “The Conceptual Penis As A Social Construct,” submitted as a hoax to, and then published by, the “multidisciplinary open access” and, as it turns out, “pay-to-publish” journal Cogent Social Sciences. The essay is by Peter Boghossian, an assistant professor of philosophy at Portland State University and James Lindsay, who holds a PhD in math and writes about atheism.
The part about pay to publish is why it’s only an attempted hoax, not a real one. To be a real hoax the essay has to be accepted by an actual editor for a journal that rejects submissions as well as accepting them. Pay to publish=all are welcome, all shall have prizes.
The authors take themselves to be perpetrating a new version of what’s now known as the Sokal Hoax, in which physicist Alan Sokal successfully published, in the journal Social Text, a nonsense article parodying postmodern writing about science. Here, Boghossian and Lindsay are taking aim at a different target,what they take to be “the moral orthodoxy in gender studies”:
[W]e sought to demonstrate that a desire for a certain moral view of the world to be validated could overcome the critical assessment required for legitimate scholarship. Particularly, we suspected that gender studies is crippled academically by an overriding almost-religious belief that maleness is the root of all evil.
Ah yes, that’s a very reasonable and well-stated suspicion.
Over at Bleeding Heart Libertarians, James Stacy Taylor (College of New Jersey) provides a potent critique of the project:
[I]t turns out that the joke’s on the hoaxers themselves—both for failing to spot some very obvious red flags about this “journal,” and for their rather bizarre leaps of logic…
[The paper] was accepted after what seems to be very cursory peer review, and, from this, they’re claiming that the entire field of Gender Studies “is crippled academically by an overriding almost-religious belief that maleness is the root of all evil.”
It might be. But their hoax gives us absolutely no reason to believe this. First, let’s look at the “journal” that they were accepted at. Like all the digital, open-access journals run by Cogent (a house most people have never heard of before now) it charges authors fees to publish. No reputable journal in the humanities does this. Worse yet, it allows authors to “pay what they can”. This appears to signal that this journal publishes work from authors who can’t get institutional support to publish in it. (Or, if they could, don’t seek this as they would prefer it not be widely known that they’re paying to publish.) The journal boasts also that it is very “friendly” to authors (a clear sign of a suspect outlet) and notes that it doesn’t necessarily reject things that might not have any impact. (!) It also only uses single blind review. The whole thing just screams vanity journal.
Now, the hoaxers are aware of all of this. But they try to duck the “facile” objection that they submitted to a junk journal by noting that it’s part of the Taylor and Francis group, and that it’s “held out as a high-quality open-access journal by the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ)”. Yet even a quick perusal of the journal’s website makes it clear that it operates entirely independently of Taylor & Francis, and that its publishing model is utterly different to theirs…
Having managed to pay for a paper to be published in a deeply suspect journal the hoaxers then conclude that the entire field of Gender Studies is suspect. How they made this deductive leap is actually far more puzzling than how the paper got accepted…
You can read the rest of Professor Taylor’s critique of this “big cock-up” here.
Jerry Coyne wrote a gloating post about the “hoax” yesterday.
Now we have another hoax: a piece on the “conceptual penis” published in the journal Cogent Social Sciences, self described as “a multidisciplinary open access journal offering high quality peer review across the social sciences: from law to sociology, politics to geography, and sport to communication studies. Connect your research with a global audience for maximum readership and impact.”
Here’s the article; click on the screenshot below to see it in the journal (though it will probably be removed very quickly!). The paper has, however, been archived, and you can find it here.
Several academics in the comments point out that it’s not a hoax because it was published in a vanity “journal” but Coyne brushes them all off.
Nested hoaxing, I guess you could call it.
Uh, one thing about pay-to-publish: it does not always equate to junk journal. The article on Bleeding Heart Libertarians did mention that this is not done in the humanities, so that’s fine, but we need to avoid automatically equating pay-to-publish with bad work. Science journals routinely charge authors to publish, and the more reputable the journal, the more they charge. In fact, my first published paper wouldn’t have been published at all because of the cost (I was a graduate student working 3 jobs and raising a kid on my own – I could pay the page charge) if my major professor, who was my co-author, hadn’t footed the bill.
I agree there are a lot of red flags there, but we have to be careful about cavalierly making broad, generalized assertions about pay-to-publish. That’s one of the arguments creationists routinely use against scientists, that they paid to have their paper published.
I think at some point I may have coined the term “autosokalia” for when attempted hoaxes backfire and out the would-be hoaxer as having proceeded from false assumptions. I’m not without issue with gender studies, mostly stemming from my issues with critical theory/cultural studies, but this attempt at a hoax says more about the authors than anything else. Pseudo-rationalist show-ponies the pair of them.
Not even the original Sokal hoax is considered to have overturned an entire field; one journal from the field was disgraced and the rest of the field was a tad embarassed. Boghossian sure thinks highly of himself.
I giggled at this last night, but it seemed off.
I said it on Facebook just now; I’ll say it again here: this could have been SUCH a good thing.
But it was Boghossian, so it wasn’t.
Somebody who really understands the assumptions of gender theory arglebargle (and has a sense of humor, and isn’t full of themselves,) could have made a good job of it. I’d love to go Sokal on trans theory in particular.
BTW boys, “maleness is the root of all evil”–I don’t know if that was ever really a thing in Gender Studies–for all I know it was, but–nowadays it’s old hat. As a matter of fact, nowadays the penis isn’t even a male organ.
To do good satire–or effective hoaxing–you really have to understand your subject. Sokal did. You don’t.
@ Holms
He and Shermer are peas in a pod.
From the comments at Nous —
–Matt Wiener
Lloyd Bentsen
You, sir, are no Alan Sokal.
/Lloyd Bentsen
iknklast #1: Uh, one thing about pay-to-publish: it does not always equate to junk journal. The article on Bleeding Heart Libertarians did mention that this is not done in the humanities, so that’s fine, but we need to avoid automatically equating pay-to-publish with bad work. Science journals routinely charge authors to publish, and the more reputable the journal, the more they charge.
That is also a bit of an over-generalisation, from my perspective. Some of the highest-ranking, most prestigious science journals that exist do not have publication fees, and some serious but minor ones do. It really depends on the philosophy behind the journal – are the people who run it more concerned about the incentive structure under pay to publish, or are they more concerned about making research accessible?
What I really note a lot in the last few years is that an increasing number of high impact, print journals (e.g. Nature) have created online-only, pay-to-publish satellite journals (e.g. everything that goes “Nature (field of research)”). The idea being that if you don’t get into the main one, you can fork over $2K to have your paper appear in a less exclusive journal while still basking in the reflected glow of a certain prestigious name. They still have serious peer review, but care less about the paper being of ‘outstanding importance’; still I cannot help but feel slightly uncomfortable about the whole thing.
—
I am not yet 100% sure what to make of the present case but lean towards the interpretation that it was a dud. A bit of internet research seemed to show that Cogent might be a relatively more serious open access publisher, with a professional-looking website and no grandiose, hyperbolic language; but once I looked into articles they have accepted in my own area, I was struck by the poor quality of some of those papers. I would tentatively conclude from that observation that the ‘hoax’ paper may not have shown more than the problems of pay to publish: once the publisher earns money per accepted article, they may be willing to accept stuff that would never be accepted by a reader-pays journal in the same field.
There’s an update at BHL:
D’oh. If I would’ve just read the next post first.
‘…we need to avoid automatically equating pay-to-publish with bad work…’
Why on Earth should we do that? Pay to publish is a Bad Thing, even if it has become so deeply established.
In this instance, the would-be hoaxers invalidated their own attempt by shilling it to a vanity house.
John, because the pay-to-publish of professional journals is a bad things doesn’t mean it’s bad work. Many scientists have been stuck with that, publishing extremely good work and paying to do it. I think pay-to-publish should go away, at least in peer-reviewed reputable journals, but I refuse to assume that ALL who pay to publish have done bad work. In this case, the journal is not reputable, it is a vanity journal, so the criticism stands. But to equate all who pay to have their work published in journals with bad science is simply bad critical thinking. Each case may need to be evaluated on its own merits.
One of the worst things about Pay to Publish is that it tends to stifle student voices. As a graduate student, I could not afford the (rather low by science journal standards) fees to publish my work. If you don’t publish your work, you have no hope of getting a science job in academia. I was fortunate that my co-author paid the fees.
I suspect part of the idea behind pay-to-publish is keeping out the “riff-raff” – those who can’t afford to pay. It’s one way of ensuring that high powered scientists aren’t being challenged by working class geniuses. But that’s just my paranoia talking, I suppose.
Pretty much all of the top journals in areas of science that I work in (which is an intersection of physics, chemistry and biology, so I see a fairly broad swath of journals) have publication fees. These include a basic per page charge with extra charged for color figures. I budget this into every grant application I submit, and so does everyone else I know of in academic science. The main exceptions are some society journals, which will wave the fees if you’re a member of the society in question.
AcademicLurker,
That is not my experience, except for the colour figures. Also, the funding agencies I am dealing with in my country of residence do not allow you to budget publication fees into grant proposals.