I know it was a mistake to respond to this spam but I couldn’t resist . . . For the rest of my days, I will pay the price of being on the sucker list.
The following came in the junk mail the other day:
Dear Dr. Andrew Gelman,
My name is **, the editorial assistant of **. ** is a peer-reviewed, open access journal published by **.
I have had an opportunity to read your paper, “Why High-Order Polynomials Should Not Be Used in Regression Discontinuity Designs”, and can find that your expertise fits within the scope of our journal quite well.
Therefore, you are cordially invited to submit new, unpublished manuscripts to **. If you do not have any at the moment, it is appreciated if you could keep our journal in mind for your future research outputs.You may see the journal’s profile at ** and submit online. You may also e-mail submissions to **.
We are recruiting reviewers for the journal. If you are interested in becoming a reviewer, we welcome you to join us. Please find the application form and details at ** and e-mail the completed application form to **.
** is included in:
· CrossRef; EBSCOhost; EconPapers
· Gale’s Academic Databases
· GetInfo; Google Scholar; IDEAS
· J-Gate; Journal Directory
· JournalTOCs; LOCKSS
· MediaFinder®-Standard Periodical Directory
· RePEc; Sherpa/Romeo
· Standard Periodical Directory
· Ulrich’s; WorldCat
Areas include but are not limited to:
· Accounting;
· Economics
· Finance & Investment;
· General Management;
· Management Information Systems;
· Business Law;
· Global Business;
· Marketing Theory and Applications;
· General Business Research;
· Business & Economics Education;
· Production/Operations Management;
· Organizational Behavior & Theory;
· Strategic Management Policy;
· Labor Relations & Human Resource Management;
· Technology & Innovation;
· Public Responsibility and Ethics;
· Public Administration and Small Business Entrepreneurship.Please feel free to share this information with your colleagues and associates.
Thank you.
Best Regards,
**
Editorial Assistant
**
——————————————-
**
Tel: ** ext.**
Fax: **
E-mail 1: **
E-mail 2: **
URL: **
Usually I just delete these things, but just the other day we had this discussion of some dude who was paid $100,000 to be the second author on a paper. Which made me wonder how much I could make as a sole author!
And this reminded me of this other guy who claimed that scientific citations are worth $100,000 each. A hundred grand seems like the basic unit of currency here.
So I sent a quick response:
Hi–how much will you pay me to write an article for your journal?
AG
I’m not expecting $100,000 as their first offer—they’ll probably lowball me at first—but, hey, I can negotiate. They say the most important asset in negotiation is the willingness to say No, and I’m definitely willing to say No to these people!
Just a few hours later I received a reply! Here it is:
Dear Dr. Andrew Gelman,
Thanks for your email. We charge the Article Processing Charge (Formatting and Hosting) of 100USD for per article.
Welcome to submit your manuscript to our journal. If you have any questions, please feel free to contact me.
Best Regards,
**
Editorial Assistant
**
——————————————-
**
Tel: ** ext.**
Fax: **
E-mail 1: **
E-mail 2: **
URL: **
I don’t get it. They’re offering me negative $100? That makes no sense? What next, they’ll offer to take my (fully functional) fridge off my hands for a mere hundred bucks?? In what world am I supposed to pay them for the fruits of my labor?
So I responded:
No, I would only provide an article for you if you pay me. It would no make sense for me to pay you for my work.
No answer yet. If they do respond at some point, I’ll let you know. We’ll see what happens. If they offer me $100, I can come back with a counter-offer of $100,000, justifying it by the two links above. Then maybe they’ll say they can’t afford it, they’ll offer, say, $1000 . . . maybe we can converge around $10K. I’m not going to share the lowest value I’d accept—that’s something the negotiation books tell you never ever to do—but I’ll tell you right now, it’s a hell of a lot more than a hundred bucks.
P.S. That paper on higher-order polynomials that they scraped carefully vetted for suitability for their journal . . . according to Google Scholar it has 1501 citations, which implies a value of $150,100,000, according to the calculations referred to above. Now, sure, most of that value is probably due to Guido, my collaborator on that paper, but still . . . 150 million bucks! How hard could it be to squeeze out a few hundred thousand dollars for a sequel? It says online that Knives Out grossed $311.4 million, and Netflix paid $469 million for the rights for Knives Out 2 and 3. If this academic publisher doesn’t offer me a two-paper deal that’s at least in the mid four figures, my agent and I will be taking our talents to Netflix.
Andrew asks, “In what world am I supposed to pay them for the fruits of my labor?” Is that supposed to be a trick question? The answer is any non-open-access, free-to-publish journal (i.e., most of the places Andrew publishes papers). Academics act as authors and editors, then pay for the right to access that same content through university subscriptions, open-access fees, or in the case of top predators like Nature, both.
Not so much a trick question as a joke? In this case with the added bonus of slyly getting us to reflect on the difference between fields where people really do get paid to write papers and fields where papers have what my old teacher called “no, or negative commodity value.”
Bob, Dmitri:
As a person who publishes blog comments, I can hardly complain when people give away valuable content for free!
It could be worse.
From the response, I infer that they only charge you for “formatting and hosting.” So, it seems to me that one only has to pay if the paper is accepted.
In contrast, the well-regarded, economics journal The Journal of Law and Economics charges $100 to review your paper with no promise of acceptance.
Here’s their policy:
See https://www.editorialmanager.com/jlawecon/default1.aspx.
Bob76
Bob:
Better than the journal edited by John Yoo where they torture you until you confess that you agree with all referee comments. Or the journal edited by Andrei Shleifer where they invest your submission fee in the Russian stock market. Or the journal edited by Brian Wansink where they accept your paper only on the condition that it be unreplicable: if it is successfully replicated, they retract it from the journal. Or the journal edited by Daryl Bem where they only accept papers that will have at least 100 citations in the future. Or the journal edited by Marc Hauser where they only accept papers if the data are coded by the editor and then destroyed. . . .
Don’t forget the journal edited by Matthew Walker where they only make a decision after having at least 8 hours of sleep.
Adede:
Or the journal edited by Chris Achen where acceptance of your paper is determined by whether the reviewers have been attacked by any sharks lately. Or the journal edited by Brad Bushman where acceptance of your paper depends on how many needles you stuck into your voodoo doll.
Darry Bem has a list of accepted papers that haven’t even been written yet.
I’m sure this has been discussed on here, it checks pretty much every box, but just in case not: https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2202224119
Dl:
I’d say this one’s a parody, a take off on the much publicized and later discredited research on shark attacks and voting—but they don’t cite that work at all! So I have a horrible sense that they authors are playing it straight and just don’t know any better.
In any case, right-wing voters should be pro-wolf. What could be more right-wing than an aggressive carnivore, no?
Well, a lot of right leaning ex military think of themselves as sheepdogs protecting the flock from wolves…
https://slate.com/culture/2015/01/american-snipers-wolves-sheep-and-sheepdogs-speech-has-a-surprising-history-with-conservatives-and-the-right-wing.html
I’m a fan of people protecting their fellow citizens from harm but I think the analogy is flawed by discrete/trinary/essentialist thinking. What matters isn’t who a person “really is”, but what they do. Though it’s clear that some people really are essentially psychopaths with zero empathy for people. Psychopathy is a thing that has a spectrum, and there are plenty of non psychopaths who choose violence under some conditions.
My impression is the “right wing” tends to be very essentialist type thinking. In group good, out group bad…
Anon:
Yes, I was just kidding about the right wing and the wolves, playing off the essentialism in the silly linked article.
It’s obvious, Andrew, the presence of wolves PRIMES those latent right-wing instincts you’re citing!
Really looking forward to the Netflix series Andrew will be writing, which will educate the public about statistics using superhero fiction. The pilot episode will (reportedly) feature Multilevel-man taking on the evil Dr. Dichotomous, who is hiding in his Garden of Forking Paths.
Erling:
That will be a very boring series, considering that I’m on record as opposing the scientist-as-hero narrative.
Good point! Perhaps an all-supervillain series then? Anyway – be careful about giving Netflix executives a better position to negotiate from!