SoylentNews

An Anonymous Coward writes:

From the Skeptic Magazine [skeptic.com] via Brietbart [breitbart.com] via the Roosh V Forum [rooshvforum.com]:

Assuming the pen names "Jamie Lindsay" and "Peter Boyle," and writing for the fictitious "Southeast Independent Social Research Group," we wrote an absurd paper loosely composed in the style of post-structuralist discursive gender theory. The paper was ridiculous by intention, essentially arguing that penises shouldn't be thought of as male genital organs but as damaging social constructions. We made no attempt to find out what "post-structuralist discursive gender theory" actually means. We assumed that if we were merely clear in our moral implications that maleness is intrinsically bad and that the penis is somehow at the root of it, we could get the paper published in a respectable journal.

There is no way around the fact that the publication of this paper in such a journal must point to some problem with the current state of academic publishing. The components of the problem are, it seems, reducible to just two: academic misfeasance arising from pay-to-publish, open-access financial decision-making; and unconscionable pseudo-academic inbreeding contaminating, if not defining, the postmodernist theory-based social sciences.

On the other hand, no one is arguing, nor has any reason to argue, that respectable journals like Nature and countless others have adopted a peer-review process that is fundamentally flawed or in any meaningful way corrupt. Much of the peer-review system remains the gold-standard for the advancement of human knowledge. The problem lies within a nebula of marginal journals, predatory pay-to-publish journals, and, possibly to some degree, open-access journals - although it may largely be discipline-specific, as we had originally hoped to discover.

NORMA: International Journal for Masculinity Studies rejected the paper but, for only US$625, Cogent Social Sciences [cogentoa.com] were happy to publish content from the Postmodern Generator [elsewhere.org] mixed with nonsense claims about manspreading and penises being the "conceptual driver behind much of climate change."

Original Submission