How “skeptics” operate.

Stephen Knight aka Godless Spellchecker wrote a post on May 25 about the reception of the Boghossian-Lindsay “hoax” that wasn’t really a hoax but rather a not very good satire. His focus is on the pay to publish issue.

I took a look at the journals where PZ Myers, Ketan Joshi, Phil Torres (Philippe Verdoux), and Amanda Marcotte published to see if their paper had ever appeared in pay-to-publish journals. While we do not know the details of how much they paid to have their articles published, or even if they paid at all, below is a list of the journals and their fees where their articles have appeared.

To be clear: I do not know if

Scott Jaschik at Inside Higher Ed on the dud hoax:

As word about the hoax spread over the weekend, the first wave of reactions came from people who thought the hoax said something about the state of the humanities or gender studies.

New academic hoax: a bogus paper on "the conceptual penis" gets published in a "high quality peer-reviewed" journal. https://t.co/yQKydNrtOp

— Steven Pinker (@sapinker) May 20, 2017

They tried to write the craziest, most over-the-top parody possible — It still got published. https://t.co/GzCA4REVzO

— Christina Hoff Sommers (@CHSommers) May 19, 2017

But then another set of critiques started to appear, taking issue with those who produced the hoax and with those praising them. This set of critiques argued

Phil Torres wrote up the Boghossian-Lindsay hoax that flopped in Salon.

In an article simultaneously published in the magazine Skeptic, this project was loudly advertised as a “hoax on gender studies.” It primarily aimed to expose what the authors presume to be the nonsensical absurdity of gender studies, an interdisciplinary field that attempts to understand gender identity and how these identities play out in society.

Yet Boghossian and Lindsay’s prank article unambiguously failed to do this and ultimately may have harmed the skeptic community. First, the open-access journal that published their article requests that authors pay to publish. In the case of Cogent Social Sciences, the recommended fee is a whopping $1,350. I have affirmed that Boghossian and Lindsay

Henry Farrell at Crooked Timber on the dud gender studies “hoax”:

[T]he research design, if you take it at face value is fundamentally inept. The authors of the spoof claim to be both illustrating the problems of review by gender studies academics, and the problems of predatory access journals. But you can’t really do two for the price of one – if you demonstrate that a bad piece got published, you have no way of distinguishing between the two causal hypotheses that you are proposing – that gender journals will publish more or less anything as long as it has the right politics, and that predatory journals will publish more or less anything as long as you come up

Ketan Joshi on that non-hoax “hoax”:

There’s a multi-directional cacophony of gleeful back-patting ringing out across my Twitter feed at the moment. The outpouring of joy stems from an article published in Skeptic Magazine. Peter Boghossian and James Lindsay managed to submit a hoax article to a gender studies journal, and are hailing this as a profound, thermonuclear indictment on the entirety of gender studies, social science and the “academic left”. They wrote that:

“We assumed that if we were merely clear in our moral implications that maleness is intrinsically bad and that the penis is somehow at the root of it, we could get the paper published in a respectable journal”

Their article was initially rejected by

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,