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/

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