70: Doubling-blinding dog balls

Dan and James discuss the recent "grievance studies" hoax, whereby three people spent a year writing twenty-one fake manuscripts for submission to various cultural studies journals. They also discuss a new proposal to shift publication culture in which researchers pledge to publish exclusively in community-run journals but only when a pre-specified threshold of support for this commitment by the research community has been met. Here's an overview of the episode: It’s fat bear week! The new proposal to fix the stranglehold of commercial publishers in academia Flipping journals to open access The ‘grievance studies’ hoax When James first came across the “dog rape” paper What if you were to design the dog study properly? Should we systematically try and hoax journals? Astronomy already injects fake data, can we learn from this? Should these new hoaxes all be associated with Sokal? Links Brian Resnick’s fat bear week story: https://www.vox.com/science-and-health/2018/10/9/17955432/fat-bear-week-katmai-national-park-409-747-salmon https://freeourknowledge.org Paywall the movie: https://paywallthemovie.com The ‘grievance studies’ hoax: https://areomagazine.com/2018/10/02/academic-grievance-studies-and-the-corruption-of-scholarship/ James’ thread on the “dog-rape” study: https://twitter.com/jamesheathers/status/1048313273563668486 The proposal for systematic hoaxing: https://twitter.com/Meaningness/status/1047507838493499392 A tweet from one of the reviewers of the dog paper: https://twitter.com/dwschieber/status/1047497301021798400 Fake (a.k.a. blind) injection in astronomy: https://www.ligo.org/news/blind-injection The original Sokal paper: http://www.physics.nyu.edu/sokal/transgress_v2/transgress_v2_singlefile.html Dan on twitter: https://www.twitter.com/dsquintana James on twitter: https://www.twitter.com/jamesheathers Everything Hertz on twitter: https://www.twitter.com/hertzpodcast Everything Hertz on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/everythinghertzpodcast/ Music credits: Lee Rosevere freemusicarchive.org/music/Lee_Rosevere/