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ocschwar | 6 months ago

Problem #3 is relatively easy to address: shift from journals to conferences. Organizing fake conferences is a lot harder than setting up paper mill journals.

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lisper|6 months ago

I can tell you from personal experience that organizing a "fake" conference is beyond trivial. All you need is a topic that is narrow enough that all of the attendees know and like each other. I was an attendee at several such conferences back when I made my living publishing papers, and I was astonished at how easy it was to publish bullshit as long as it was the right venue, and how borderline impossible it was to publish anything that I considered to have actual value. (In my career I published dozens of conference papers, but only one journal paper and one book chapter.)

In actual practice what I found was that the principle driver of publishing success has absolutely nothing to do with the quality of the work, it has to do with how much your reviewers think that you might some day be in a position to review a paper of theirs. This is the fundamental problem with peer review when: career success is measured by quantity of papers published, the resulting dynamic is governed by game theory, not scientific merit.

SJC_Hacker|6 months ago

Conferences aren’t double blind. They aren’t even single blind. Fundamentally they can’t be

Peer review should be but sometimes isn’t. It always can be though, unlike conferences

arp242|6 months ago

I get "invited" to fake or semi-fake conferences all the time. Also fake or semi-fake "awards". I just have a programming blog. I would not expect any other field to be any different.

kergonath|6 months ago

Not really. I see many, many fake conferences adjacent to my field each year. I don’t really see why setting up one would be harder than creating a fake journal.