Why the “Conceptual Penis” hoax was a bust: It only reveals the lack of skepticism among skeptics - Salon.com

lterrat's bookmarks 2017-05-23

Summary:

"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 were, for unknown reasons, asked to pay less than half of this, namely $625, but the journal apparently never got around to actually requesting the money. Boghossian has repeatedly declared on social media that he and his colleague paid “nada” for the article’s publication, which taken out of context is patently misleading.

It is, of course, in the pecuniary interest of pay-to-publish journals to accept papers regardless of quality. In fact terrible articles that should have never passed peer review are published in these journals all the time. Case in point: a 2009 fake scientific article written using nonsense-generating software ended up in the pay-to-publish, open-access, peer-reviewed publication called the Open Information Science Journal. One of the co-authors said he was curious whether the publisher would 'accept a completely nonsensical manuscript if the authors were willing to pay' — and pay he (almost) did, to the tune of $800."

Link:

http://www.salon.com/2017/05/22/why-the-conceptual-penis-hoax-was-a-bust-it-only-reveals-the-lack-of-skepticism-among-skeptics/

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Date tagged:

05/23/2017, 20:22

Date published:

05/23/2017, 16:21