There’s a hoary and slightly shady tradition of submitting for publication of papers of, shall we say, a dubious nature, and Gary Lewis recounts his successful entry into this tradition, in pursuit of the flushing out of predatory journals, on The Conversation:
I had what seemed like rather a good idea a few weeks back. Building on some prominent findings in social psychology, I hypothesised that politicians on the right would wipe their bum with their left hand; and that politicians on the left would wipe with their right hand.
Ludicrous? Yes – absolutely. But for once my goal wasn’t to run a bona fide scientific study. Instead, I wanted to see if any “journal” would publish my ass-wiping “findings”. …
My (fictional) research assistant camped outside the Houses of Parliament and essentially stalked “MPs”. She used a large folder of pictures to identify these politicians’ left vs right leaning tendencies. And when a potential participant was seen on the street, the research assistant walked up alongside the politician, indicated that she was a psychological scientist doing a study, provided a brief consent form, and then asked which hand they wiped their bottom with.
This yielded nine (fictional) participants in total, including “Boris Johnski” and “Teresa Maybe”, although one data point had to be discarded – that of “Nigel F. ‘Arage”. He, rather meanly, told my research assistant to “bog off” when asked the hand-wiping question. And so his data was necessarily excluded from the analysis.
But that didn’t matter – because the data from our sample of eight fully confirmed the theory. Politicians do indeed wipe their asses with the contralateral hand. I could scarcely believe my eyes – but of course the statistics never lie. …
Having submitted the bogus manuscript, I soon got an email informing me that the manuscript was safely received and under review. Just a few days later, I was informed that it was accepted for publication. With a request for US$581.
I told the journal I couldn’t afford any publication fees. So they dropped it to US$99 (for “web hosting charges”). I was tempted – but I’ve learned that you should never accept the first counter offer. So I went for broke. And it turns out that the paper was so groundbreaking that they agreed to publish it for free: “We do understand from you [sic] end. As per your previous conversation, I had a session with financial manager and have decided to provide complete waiver.” It must have been a truly magnificent session with the financial manager.
It’s quite the story, and a sad commentary on the disrespect certain individuals have for the importance of science in today’s society.
