Transcriber: Chelsea He-Chen Reviewer: Larisa Esteche
We’ve all gotten scam emails.
Those emails that usually start by saying something convincing, like,
“Dear sir, I’m the admiral of the Spanish Navy”
or “I am your brother,” “the long lost Duchess of Moldova,”
or even “Hello, I recently came into the acquisition
of a valuable barrel of turbine lubricant.”
Those emails that are usually as full of murky promises of gold bullions
and emeralds as they are spelling errors,
creative punctuation, and demands for a wire transfer via Western Union.
Well, last spring, I was the proud recipient of one of those emails,
from a man named Sunny.
Except, my email from Sunny didn’t sound like your typical scam email.
Sunny didn’t have any gems or emeralds for me.
He didn’t even introduce himself as a foreign prince.
Instead, this is what Sunny said to me, “Dear Bradley,
The journals of the US-China Education Review A and B, two award-winning
peer-reviewed, multidisciplinary periodicals published in English by
David Publishing Company, etc., etc.,
welcome you to submit original manuscripts
reporting innovations or investigations in the Education area.
We are very interested in your research.
If you have the idea of making our journal a vehicle
for your research interests,
please feel free to send the electronic versions of your papers or books to us.
Sunny H., Assistant Editor.”
Sunny didn’t want my money. At least not yet.
Sunny wanted a research manuscript.
I have to say, I was intrigued.
As a scientist, it’s my job to publish my work in academic journals like this one.
Imagine the longest, most heinous book report you ever did in high school.
That gives you a pretty good idea of what it is that scientists like me choose to
voluntarily spend every day of our lives doing.
Conducting experiments, performing research, and reporting
the results of our studies in scientific journals.
Except, the US-China Education Review didn’t seem
like your normal academic journal.
There were the spelling errors and the weird punctuation in the email.
There was the name of the journal itself,
the US-China Education Review A and B,
an academic journal with apparently a varsity and a JV squad.
And there was the fact that Sunny had, inexplicably,
attached a one hundred page hospital protocol
describing the precise mechanisms for disinfecting sewage and
sealing the dearly departed in leakproof corpse wrapping sheets.
I’m not kidding.
I was beginning to suspect that Sunny’s operation might not be totally aboveboard.
But I had to find out for sure.
So I did what any self respecting academic who cares about their future
and reputation and the research community would do.
I made up a seven page paper, complete with fake figures,
fake tables, and 44 fake citations to submit to the journal
just to see what happened.
The general theme of my paper followed the plot of the TV series Breaking Bad.
The TV show, which, if you’ll remember, is about a
high school chemistry teacher who uses his science knowledge
to make and sell drugs.
In my case, Walter White, this chemistry teacher, was my co-author.
The primary finding from our research was that, and I quote,
“Low achieving students may particularly benefit from this new model of teaching
chemistry in the secondary education setting
through the ‘hands-on’ process of manufacturing
and distributing methamphetamine.”
Essentially, enlisting your students to help you make and sell drugs is
an effective way to teach science in high school.
I was submitting to an education journal, after all. That's just the start.
In my methods, I dig deep into the geography of
the New Mexico desert where the study took place.
A region which, as we all know, is tropical,
with 13 feet of rainfall a year covered in magic trees
and situated within the Galapagos Islands.
I go on to espouse the
educational benefits of instructor nudity, well known from the literature,
and discuss my choice for statistical analysis of the data.
Namely, those statistical techniques named after Pokémon that can be conducted
using the powerful statistical software Microsoft Paint.
In my results, I graphed the relationship between taking Walter White’s chemistry
class and learning valuable skills in chemistry like, well,
like making drugs and using firearms.
In my discussion, I pushed back on
the idea that this new pedagogical style might be
a little hard to implement in your typical high school setting.
After all, it can be so funny.
Essentially, I did everything I could to make this the worst paper
ever written in the history of education research.
Any legitimate academic reviewer asked to review this article would have
immediately thrown it in the trash, or maybe called the police.
So you can imagine my surprise when, a few weeks after
I sent this paper to Sunny, he got back to me.
Letting me know that my paper—and once again, I just want to stress this,
my paper about the educational value of students going in the desert and using
and making drugs—had been accepted to the US-China Education Review A.
That's right. A. I didn't make the varsity squad.
I was floored, but I wasn’t surprised.
You see, from the start, I had suspected that Sunny was
a representative from what is known as a predatory scientific journal.
In the niche world of academic publishing fraud,
these groups pose as legitimate sources of scientific information,
sending mass emails to scientists like me
in the hopes that we will send them our research,
which they will then publish online without reviewing its validity.
These groups make money by charging
the scientists that publish in these journals hundreds of dollars in
processing fees after the article gets published.
It's a devious scheme because it can be incredibly hard to tell whether or not
a scientific journal is real.
Predatory journals have all the trappings of a real academic journal.
They have slick websites that can look like the real thing.
Their emails, in more capable hands than Sunny, can look legit.
And it doesn’t help that real scientific journals, like Science and Nature,
also charge scientists to publish in those journals.
So, it’s understandable that it can be confusing.
In the same way that normal email scams prey on elderly people
or people less familiar with technology,
predatory scientific journals prey on inexperienced researchers
or those who might not speak English as their first language.
But there’s just a small problem with this
because the difference between a real journal and a predatory journal is huge.
Real journals actually go through the essential legwork of
reviewing scientific studies before they’re sent out into the world.
This ensures that only high quality research makes it to publication.
But that’s just the start. You see,
the problem with predatory journals goes much deeper than this,
to the heart of how we know what is true.
You see, right after I published my fake paper in the US-China Education Review,
at first I was elated. I thought it was hilarious;
a fake journal posing as a legitimate source of scientific information
had published a bunch of nonsense,
and anyone that read my paper would recognize that.
I had proven that they were a predatory journal.
But, after my little stunt, a knot really started to form in my stomach.
It no longer seemed so funny
because at the same time I was writing this silly paper last spring,
something much more serious was going on in the world.
A deadly new coronavirus had started a pandemic.
Thousands of people were dying every day.
And doctors had few tools to battle the outbreak.
In response, scientists like me were rushing to publish our work
in real academic journals, like the New England Journal of Medicine,
sharing new treatment options for treating the disease.
But, something very different was going on
in the underworld of academic publishing, in predatory journals.
In July of 2020, one predatory journal published
an article claiming that 5G radio signals can spontaneously lead to
the creation of the coronavirus.
Essentially, cell phone towers caused COVID-19.
Now, this sounds ridiculous.
And it is! I mean, there’s no possible mechanism for a radio wave
to make a virus.
But, you’d be forgiven if you saw this study floating around online,
flipped through a couple of pages, and thought it might be legit.
I mean, look at this page! Look at those equations; that looks like science!
It’s total gibberish, but it looks like science,
and thousands of other people thought so too,
and this article was shared across every corner of the internet: Twitter, Facebook,
Instagram, even made the front page of some conspiratorial news sites.
If this paper had been submitted to a real academic journal,
it would have been immediately rejected.
But, by bypassing the scientific review process, bad actors were able to spread
disinformation online under the guise of something that looks like science,
and this wasn't the only time this happened.
A recent study published in a real scientific journal
found that more than 300 papers related to COVID-19
had been published in predatory journals since the start of the pandemic. 300.
A family member of mine even sent me one of these articles,
this one claiming that the virus had been deliberately manufactured
in a Chinese lab.
It was later uncovered that the authors behind this article
were tied to a group of people, one of whom has since been banned from Twitter
for calling for various prominent public health officials to be beheaded.
Maybe not the kind of people we want to be getting our science from.
You see, this is the difference between a normal email scam
and predatory academic journal scams. In a normal email scam,
They're stealing your money.
In predatory journal scams,
they’re stealing your money, and they’re stealing our ability
to discern the truth.
This should scare you. There's people out there deliberately misusing
the system of scientific publishing to spread disinformation online.
I, for one, refuse to stand for this.
My job as a scientist is to find out things that I know are true
because that knowledge enables us to make decisions and to
progress socially as people in society.
Scientific data informs the creation of new technology,
informs how governments make decisions,
even just helps us delight in a better understanding of the world.
But, I now think that part of my job as a scientist lies
almost in doing the opposite,
in deliberately publishing things that I know are not true
in order to root out sources of disinformation, and I’m not the only one.
Scientists all over the world
are standing up against predatory publishers and getting them taken offline
by deliberately publishing nonsense in the journals.
One researcher from Washington has published a number of articles
as their dog: their Staffordshire Terrier.
Including on such doggish topics as the importance of
asking for written permission from the dogs before we take them to the vet
to get neutered.
Another researcher in Australia successfully
published an article in a predatory journal that consisted,
I kid you not, entirely of the phrase “get me off your f-ing mailing list” repeated
over and over and over again.
And this is funny, but I think it’s also really important
because there are people and groups out there
that deliberately want to deceive us
using disinformation. Disinformation is a means of social control.
Disinformation leads to cynicism, and cynicism leads to apathy,
and apathetic people, the easiest people in the world to control.
But, we don’t have to stand for this,
and so I think it is incumbent upon each of us to do everything we can to stand up
against disinformation,
whether that means deliberately publishing nonsense in predatory journals
to root out sources of disinformation, supporting high quality journalism,
or even just being a skeptical consumer of the news you read on social media.
We can do this.
And, actually, to that last point,
if your uncle or somebody is like sharing
an article online about educational benefits of kids going in the desert
and making d- just please ignore that. Thank you.
(Applause)