That same article was then cited by French member of parliament Martine Wonner as being sufficiently peer reviewed and having the same value as a paper published by Lancet, with intent to let doctors prescribe hcq as they see fit.
It's a predatory journal, so what else would you expect?
There is a reason why these are ignored in Academia or might even get you into trouble with your university and/or funding authorities if you publish in one of those. They prey on postdocs who are under insane publication pressures - the amount of high quality publications that used to ensure you're getting tenure nowadays barely manage to get you a temporary follow-up postdoc grant. I've personally been in committees for crappy short-term postdoc calls in which the majority of candidates should have been assistant professors.
These journals will publish anything, they are only in it for the money. Nobody reads them and if they are in your CV they count against you. Academics are bombarded with "invitations" to those predatory journals, I'm getting several mails a day and sometimes even have to check carefully because they tend to have almost the same title as highly reputable journals. To be fair, it's quite easy to recognize them once you see their "publication fees".
I'm personally more worried about the many non-predatory crap journals that reside in some grey zone, since many colleagues successfully overinflate their CVs with the help of those and in some countries universities are relying way too much on mere indicator counting in their hiring policies. Quality research takes time and there is a race to mediocrity at some places in some disciplines. (Arguably, this does not apply to the top universities but most universities are not top, of course.)
The most hilarious bit is that it genuinely does appear to have gone through some sort of peer review involving academically qualified people actually reading the paper and giving feedback on how to improve it.
Not, this is not funny stuff, absolutely unacceptable behaviour. Is making the life of scientists miserable for profit and shepherding naive people to behave dangerously:
Things can be very serious and funny at the same time.
Come now, one of the authors is the President’s dog, and most of the other authors have names that are plays on words. And the entire article satirizes Didier Raoult’s ridiculous prediction.
This “stunt” speaks to a very serious problem, but it does so in a very funny way. That isn’t new, either. Comics often use humour to address deeply serious problems. Eddie Murphy made a legendary Saturday Night Live skit called, “White Like Me” that spoke to white privilege by positing a secret, hidden agreement amongst white Americans where everything is free for whites, it’s only non-whites who have to pay for goods or qualify for bank loans.
Serious? Very, just ask the people protesting racial injustice in America. Funny stuff? Also very.
I am sad that when the article explains the joke names and affiliations they missed that one of the authors is apparently based in Ankh Morpork. The Unseen University needs to pump up that impact factor!
Do you really think anybody would read that publication and then proceed to take medication to ride a scooter?! The people sharing made-up cures on Facebook won't be decimated by this.
Yesterday 2500 people joined together in Madrid to march saying that coronavirus does not exist, that there is a "right to drink bleach" (sic) and that is all Bill Gates fault.
No matter how ridiculous a paper is, this people can still cite it to move further their agenda; spread doubts and make more poor people die for fun and profit. This people has been "lobotomised" basically, will not act in a reasonable way.
> A fake paper is fabricated research, which falls under the definition of misconduct. So should the authors of such spoof papers, who write those with the intention to expose flaws in the peer-review process of predatory journals be accused of misconduct themselves? There have been many discussions about that, such as in the case of the Sokal Hoax, where the author of the fake paper was accused of deceit.
Another professor, Peter Boghossian, who did something like this was actually banned from further research by Portland State University.
From skimming the PSU story, it looks like there might be a political factor in that one. I wonder if the same objections would have been raised had his research goal been to expose sexism in acceptance rates of science journals or somehing, rather than expose gender studies as nonsense.
>> A fake paper is fabricated research, which falls under the definition of misconduct.
I think it's the same argument as with satire. The goal is not to defraud but to make a legitimate point. There is no mens rea.
The whole affair seem to thoroughly politicized. The results are presented as if "grievance studies" should be particularly prone to publishing hoax papers, but there is no control used as far as I can tell, so who knows if other studies or disciplines or better or worse? Medicine certainly also seems to be vulnerable. Maybe the whole of academia and research has a problem with peer review and bad-quality journals?
Science is different from satire. It is great satire to get a passage from Mein Kampf accepted by a feminist journal - but is it valid scientific research?
I'd say his goal was clearly to make a political point, not a scientific discovery. But making political points is not unethical behavior.
As for the difference between science and satire, I think you missed my point. Which is that the argument is the same (i.e. mens rea, meaning intent to commit a crime), not the actual act.
Obviously "making a point" or "satire" is not a valid justification for scientific fraud. Otherwise anyone caught in plagiarism or whatever could just use that excuse to avoid consequences.
But if fraudulent or manipulated articles were used as part of legitimate research to study failures in the scientific system itself, it could be justified. But obviously it would have to be handled as serious research, itself peer reviewed and so on.
> Obviously "making a point" or "satire" is not a valid justification for scientific fraud. Otherwise anyone caught in plagiarism or whatever could just use that excuse to avoid consequences.
This is not good logic. Of course anyone they can make the excuse. Just like they can claim they made a editing mistake. Just like a person committing murder can claim self-defense. It doesn't mean the defense is true or holds. Establishing whether some behaved unethically is just hard sometimes.
I love the fake papers. I think it is necessary, like a Snowden move, to expose how bad publications are at weeding out bad data and conclusions. It only serves to make the publishers look bad, not the writers.
This is about a predatory open access journal that isn't even indexed on Pubmed. Scientists will never see papers from that journal anyway.
And anyone publishing in it is either hopelessly naive and without support from an experienced researcher, or just publishing there to put publications on their CV, knowing that the paper will likely accept anything you throw at them.
>> This is about a predatory open access journal that isn't even indexed on Pubmed.
I have read very few strange things on Pubmed, but still some seems out of place in a medical/biology publications repository [0-2], so I have a question about indexation on Pubmed, is it possible to tweak this indexation to make it more stringent?
Sadly people can now believe anything and cite a paper (or, a random blog) to prove said belief. That Didier Raoult basically got exposed and his reputation torn apart (1) (imo justifiably, his drug trial showing the effectiveness of the drug was dodgy), but I've seen a Facebook contact from France defend him saying he was being tarnished by "the elite/MSM".
Another contact I know shares "Bill Gates did it"/"wants to kill us all starting with the Africans using 'vaccines'" stories, and she claims she's not the one being brainwashed, but mainstream media readers are, because MSM are controlled by the Rothschilds and Rockerfellers...
That specific journal was targeted because they published an article in favour of Hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin back in July by a team of French doctors (https://www.journalajmah.com/index.php/AJMAH/article/view/30...)
That same article was then cited by French member of parliament Martine Wonner as being sufficiently peer reviewed and having the same value as a paper published by Lancet, with intent to let doctors prescribe hcq as they see fit.
Details (in French): http://www.mimiryudo.com/blog/2020/08/le-meilleur-article-de...