Academia Obscura Read online

  Highlights: Jar Jar Binks as the ‘low-hanging fruit of psychopathology’, a uniquely academic (over)analysis of Luke’s familial relations.

  3. Evolving Ideals of Male Body Image as Seen Through Action Toys7

  Abstract: ‘We hypothesised that the physiques of male action toys . . . would provide some index of evolving American cultural ideals of male body image . . . We obtained examples of the most popular American action toys manufactured over the last 30 years. We then measured the waist, chest, and bicep circumference of each figure and scaled these measurements . . . We found that the figures have grown much more muscular over time…’

  Highlights: The accompanying image showing how buff Hans and Luke became between 1978–1998; concludes that they’ve grown from average blokes to bodybuilders over the last 20 years, with impressive, if unsightly, gains in the shoulders and chest.

  4. The Skywalker Twins Drift Apart8

  Abstract: ‘The twin paradox states that twins travelling relativistically appear to age differently to one another due to time dilation. In the 1980 film Star Wars: Episode V – The Empire Strikes Back, twins Luke and Leia Skywalker travel very large distances at “lightspeed”. This paper uses two scenarios to attempt to explore the theoretical effects of the twin paradox on the two protagonists.’

  Highlights: Luke is 638.2 days younger than Leia.

  5. That’s No Moon

  Abstract: ‘This article aims to investigate the first “Death Star” from the Star Wars film series and how much energy it would require to destroy a planet.’

  Highlights: You need 2x1027J to blow up a simplified planet; the Death Star could destroy small- to medium-sized planets, but would not be able to destroy stars.

  Notes

  For the love of trees, I have opted to keep this bibliography (relatively) short. For more details, please go to AcademiaObscura.com/buffalo, where I plan to concoct a multimedia extravaganza containing links, photos, and videos. If I get distracted and don’t get around to doing this (highly likely), I will at the very least provide full references and PDFs (where I can do so legally).

  * A footnote to Krugman’s name says that the research was supported by a grant from the Committee to Reelect William Proxmire, a US Senator that, to put it mildly, was not a huge fan of NASA. He was particularly opposed to space exploration, cutting it from NASA’s budget entirely, and effectively ended NASA’s nascent ‘search for extra-terrestrial intelligence’ (SETI) efforts. Proxmire inevitably drew the ire of space advocates and science fiction fans, and Arthur C. Clarke attacked him in the 1960 short story ‘Death and the Senator’. Proxmire issued his trademark ‘Golden Fleece Award’ once a month between 1975 and 1988 to focus media attention on projects he considered self-serving or wasteful. Scientists even began using his name as a verb, meaning to obstruct scientific research for political gain (e.g. ‘Our project has been proxmired’). Proxmire was also a fitness buff and wrote a book entitled You Can Do It!: Senator Proxmire’s Exercise, Diet and Relaxation Plan (1973). The cover is predictably hilarious.

  1 Blackawton Primary School et al., ‘Blackawton Bees’ (2011) Biology Letters; Maloney & Hempel de Ibarra, ‘Blackawton Bees: Commentary on Blackawton, P. S. et Al.’ (2011) Biology Letters.

  2 Shea et al., ‘Pathology in the Hundred Acre Wood: A Neurodevelopmental Perspective on A.A. Milne’ (2000) Canadian Medical Association Journal.

  3 Miner, ‘Body Ritual Among the Nacirema’ (1956) American Anthropologist.

  4 Krugman, ‘The Theory of Interstellar Trade’ (1978).

  5 Feinstein, ‘It’s a Trap: Emperor Palpatine’s Poison Pill’ (2015).

  6 Friedman & Hall, ‘Using Star Wars’ Supporting Characters to Teach about Psychopathology’ (2015) Australasian Psychiatry: Bulletin of Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Psychiatrists.

  7 Pope et al., ‘Evolving Ideas of Male Body Images as Seen Through Action Toys’ (1999) International Journal of Eating Disorders.

  8 Griffiths et al., ‘The Skywalker Twins Drift Apart’ (2014) Physics Special Topics.

  The academic publishing model is insane. Academics, often funded by the taxpayer, write papers and submit them to journals, which recruit other academics to peer review the work (for free). The publisher lightly edits and formats the paper and posts it online. They then charge the same academics that write and review the papers upwards of 20 quid to read them. Researchers get no royalties or payment, and generally have to sign over copyright as a condition of publishing.

  But it wasn’t always this way. The first publication resembling the journals we now know and love (to hate) was the Journal des sçavans, first published on Monday, 5 January 1665.* Contents included obituaries of famous men,♀ church history, and legal reports. The journal Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society followed a few months later on 6 March 1665.

  In those early days of enlightenment, people were growing increasingly curious about the natural world and the laws that governed it. It was fashionable for the aristocracy to be interested in science and, as a result, science was becoming cool.* The Royal Society, for example, was formed during the mid-1660s when a group of (yes, old white-haired) men got together to talk about how the world worked. One of them, presumably in a moment of wine-fuelled inspiration said something like, ‘Hey, is anyone writing this stuff down?!’ and academic publishing was born.

  Thus journals began as a way for scientists to share their observations and anecdotes with the world. This was the first time that the weird and wonderful (two-headed calves and the like) were woven into an academic discourse, instead of simply being held up for entertainment.

  Figure 6: Cover of the first issue of Philosophical Transactions

  The subsequent proliferation of journals has been unrelenting, particularly in the internet age. There are somewhere in the region of 30,000 journals in circulation,1 and around 50 million articles have now been published.2 Some journals, like Nature, Cell, and Science are famous beyond their fields. Most, like the American Journal of Potato Research, are not.

  While journals were initially driven by an organic curiosity and desire to collaborate (and compete), beginning in the 1960s, commercial publishers began to selectively acquire top-flight journals previously published by not-for-profit academic societies. Because demand for top journals is moderately inelastic, the publishers lost hardly any market share when they jacked up prices. The profitability of these journals drove further consolidation, and now just five companies now account for half of all academic articles published.*3

  These companies have eye-watering profit margins (no surprise given that their two primary inputs, the papers and peer review, are provided free of charge) and, while publishers argue that they add value, a 2005 analysis by Deutsche Bank concluded: ‘If the process were truly as complex and costly as the publishers claim, 40% margins wouldn’t be available.’4 A 2016 study compared the final published versions of papers to the preprint versions posted online to see if the publication process had changed anything.†5 The majority of the papers were exactly the same, so the obvious question is: what are we paying for?

  MONEY FOR NOTHING

  In what initially appeared to be a brazen example of publishers raking in unearned profits, an accident of digitisation led publishers to charge £20 for ‘papers’ consisting solely of a single page with the text ‘This page is intentionally left blank’. Once the mistake had been spotted, a flurry of tweets ensued, and two days later I and four other procrastinating academics had written an in-depth analysis of the phenomenon.

  The paper ‘This Study is Intentionally Left Blank: a Systematic Literature Review of Blank Pages in Academic Publishing’ became the third most read paper on Figshare in 2014 and was later published in the Annals of Improbable Research.

  We studied 24 of the 56 Individual Blank Pages (IBPs) found on ScienceDirect, finding only one that was truly blank. The rest all contained the stock phrase, furnishing the reader with 31 characters at a cost of approx
imately $1.33 per character.

  While the paper was really just an opportune moment to have a dig at the publishers, blank pages do present an interesting philosophical conundrum: the purpose of the text is to indicate that the page is purposely bereft of content, yet the inclusion of the text means that the page is no longer truly blank.*

  Graham Steel, one of the co-authors, brought the paper to the attention of Elsevier’s head of open access during the 2014 UKSG Annual Conference and Exhibition.†6 The representative said they had not seen the paper but would take a look. The blank pages soon disappeared, but we uploaded them, making them publicly available to ensure that future research into IBPs can take place unencumbered.‡7

  [This page is intentionally left 99.855% blank.]

  [The page on which this statement has been printed has been intentionally left devoid of substantive content, such that the present statement is the only text printed thereon.]

  I have since found another publisher willing to rent you a blank page at $6 for 48 hours, and another charging $40 for access to its ‘Instructions for Authors’ page. They better be some damn good instructions.

  THE REBELLION

  Slowly but surely, academics are beginning to challenge the insanity of academic publishing. The open access model, whereby anyone can read the paper without having to surmount a paywall, has rapidly been gaining ground in recent years.

  If you’d never heard of open access, you’d be forgiven for thinking that the idea of allowing researchers to access research is so obvious that there shouldn’t need to be a movement to support it. Yet academics, afflicted with Stockholm syndrome, have long acquiesced to the status quo. While some publishers are tentatively trying out new models, perhaps aware that popular opinion is turning against them, the majority have understandably been reluctant to engage with anything antithetical to their profitable business model.

  Against this backdrop, websites like SciHub are surreptitiously making papers available for free on a massive scale, and researchers are posting their publications online in huge numbers (‘Even though technically it’s in breach of the copyright transfer agreements that we blithely sign, everyone knows it’s right and proper’).8 As academics move to reclaim publishing, publishers are scrambling to claw it back. Elsevier started asking Academia.edu to take down posted publications, and has sued the creator of SciHub, Alexandra Elbakyan, for copyright infringement.

  RECOMMENDED JOURNALS

  If the end of academic publishing is nigh, you may wish to get your career-defining papers published before the journals go extinct. Here are eight that you might consider:

  The American Journal of Potato Research*

  In addition to the usual full-length articles, AJPR welcomes ‘short communications concisely describing poignant and timely research’. The only poignant thing about the journal is its social media presence: just 80 Twitter followers.†

  Rangifer: Research, Management and Husbandry of Reindeer and Other Northern Ungulates

  The ‘world’s only scientific journal dealing exclusively with biology and management of Arctic and northern ungulates, reindeer and caribou in particular’ – still going strong after 37 volumes.

  Journal of Negative Results in BioMedicine

  Called ‘the world’s most boring journal’ by the Washington Post,9 the JNRBM is one of the few journals offering scientists a chance to publish the research that didn’t work, combating the ingrained tendency to publish only positive results. As a result, the journal contains lots of false starts and failed hypotheses, such as ‘False rumours of disease outbreaks caused by infectious myonecrosis virus in the whiteleg shrimp in Asia’ and ‘The female menstrual cycle does not influence testosterone concentrations in male partners’.10

  The Journal of Universal Rejection (JofUR)

  The JofUR removes all doubt from the submission process: your paper will be rejected. Sometimes rejection will ‘follow as swiftly as a bird dropping from a great height after being struck by a stone’, other times it may languish in the editor’s inbox, but ‘it will come, swift or slow, as surely as death. Rejection.’11

  JofUR’s website suggests some reasons why you might want to submit anyway:

  • No submission anxiety: you know 100% that it will not be accepted.

  • No publication fees.

  • One of the most prestigious journals (as measured by acceptance rate).

  • Authors retain complete rights over their submitted work.

  • A decision is generally reached within hours of submission.

  • You can submit whatever you like, however you like (‘You name it, we take it, and reject it. Your manuscript may be formatted however you wish. Frankly, we don’t care.’)

  Proceedings of the Natural Institute of Science (PNIS)

  In the likely event of rejection by the JofUR, PNIS might take the manuscript (‘We’ll Publish Anything!’ exclaims the website).12 Claiming to be part serious (I am not sure which part), this satirical journal publishes science funnies in two streams: PNIS-HARD (Honest And Reliable Data) and PNIS-SOFD (Satirical Or Fake Data). Recent publications include a paper investigating whether prayer can help academics attain statistical significance (it can’t)*13 and a paper entitled ‘Effects of climate change, agricultural clearing, and the sun becoming a red giant on an old growth oak-hickory forest in southeastern Iowa’.†14

  Answers Research Journal (ARJ)

  The ARJ is the only journal I know that openly declares that it will only publish articles that accord with a pre-established hypothesis. The journal, whose moniker masks its ulterior motive, publishes research that: ‘Demonstrates the validity of the young-earth model, the global Flood . . . and other evidences that are consistent with the biblical account of origins.’ Highlights include a series of articles attempting to estimate the number of various species types aboard Noah’s Ark,* and extensive guidance on how to reference religious texts properly.†

  Nursing Science Quarterly

  Rosemarie Parse established Nursing Science Quarterly twenty-five years ago and remains the editor today. This is not especially unusual. However, Parse herself also appears to be the main topic of the journal, as the majority of published papers cover her own ideas and theories. Parse also founded an eponymous international society and yearly conference, and you can even buy a Parse pin badge. Not many journals boast their own complementary line of jewellery.‡

  DODGY OPEN ACCESS

  Journals publishing open access articles sometimes charge authors a fee to publish, partly in a bid to offset the costs of running a well-oiled journal machine,* and partly (read: largely) to maintain those all-important profits.† The fact that there is money to be made is finally drawing traditional publishers toward open access, but it has also been exploited by unscrupulous actors, turning the model into a potential source of hoaxes and hijinks.

  Dear Editor,

  It is not clear why a cover letter is required except to fulfil the silly British preoccupation with letterhead and other emblems of status.

  Please accept my correspondence.

  Sincerely,*

  Internet scams used to be something of a blunt instrument: wealthy widows with tax avoidance schemes or wealthy Nigerian princes seeking to surreptitiously shift some cash under the radar. Then came ‘phishing’ – using social engineering techniques to con people into voluntarily handing over valuable information. When the scammers hit academia, they started to get smart(ish), producing journals and organising conferences to exploit academics eager to add the next line to their CV.

  Such journals are generally of extremely low quality, publishing papers with little or no editing or review, deceiving authors about the fees involved, and falsely claiming that high-profile scientists are on the board of editors. They regularly send emails to researchers to solicit manuscripts, often offering generous discounts on the processing or publishing fees and promising a tantalisingly rapid turnaround (without peer review and proofreading, they ge
t the articles out instantaneously).

  Junk journals are not a huge problem in and of themselves because the vast majority of experienced academics see them for what they are and refrain from submitting their work or sending money.‡15 Sadly, the small number of academics sending their work to such journals tend to be young and inexperienced researchers from developing countries.16

  Aware of the increasing number of invitations arriving in his inbox, Jeffrey Beall, an academic librarian and a researcher at the University of Colorado in Denver, started scrolling through the websites of these unknown journals. He quickly realised that many of them, despite sporting grandiose names, were not as scientific as they sounded. Beall started a list of so-called ‘predatory’ journals in 2010 with 20 entries; the list now runs to 4,000 entries.

  Some of the publishers on Beall’s list, including the Canadian Center of Science and Education and OMICS, have threatened to sue him for defamation and libel. The threat from the latter was about as exaggerated as the claimed quality of the scientific products being churned out: OMICS said it would seek $1 billion in damages and that Beall could be imprisoned for up to three years under India’s Information Technology Act. In a lengthy letter, OMICS argues that Beall’s list is ‘the mindless rattle of a incoherent person’ that ‘smacks of literal unprofessionalism and arrogance’, and accuses him of racial discrimination. For their part, OMICS recently had many of its journals delisted from a leading publication database, while the US Federal Trade Commission is charging them with deceiving academics and hiding publication fees.17