David Publishing (4)

But I think these conferences mentioned by the Guardian must be “conferences”, not real conferences?

Just as there are scam fake “journals”, and real journals (such as MCLC, Hau, etc.), there are both real and fake conferences. One can compare them and learn from the comparison, I think, but it’s a shame the Guardian forgot to put quotation marks around the fake “conference” in their headline, when they really should have. Surely there still are real conferences, not just fake ones, and if the Guardian in this way contributes to an idea that whatever scam-fake “conferences” are just the same as real conferences, they are doing a disservice to science.

The line may be blurred some times, but I think we have a duty to call out the fake ones, or bad practices that approach fakery, such as the fake open-access journals and the pretend conferences, EVEN AS we might study how the mechanisms of prestige building are similar, or at least mimicked by the scammers, as I was trying to point out.

Sometimes the line is blurred even by academics, that is by the kind of academic who’ll theorize that the world is but a game of mirrors (one horrifying example: “Constructed Reality: The reason we can’t agree on what’s factual is that “facts” don’t exist.” Quartz.com, October 1, 2016. http://qz.com/798268/presidential-debate-a-philosopher-explains-why-facts-are-irrelevant-to-donald-trump-and-hillary-clinton/ — very poor philosophy, to be sure).

This would be ivory-tower stuff if it wasn’t for how these debates over real and fake actually have consequences in the world. Take Putin’s propaganda machine which is currently investing massive amounts of money and action in line-blurring across the board, to muddy the waters for who to believe, who to take as an authority. China’s government also does its share of such purposeful line-blurring, and in terms of Chinese academia, large parts of it is, of course, a spectacle of held-up mirrors where the sanctioned form trumps content, and the official fake trumps the real.

But there are, as we know, also not a few real scholars in China who manage to survive alongside or underneath the fakery and spectacle, even as the academic system is stacked against them through corruption and not least through the awful quantitative system of evaluation, counting the number of characters academics publish, rather than the quality of what’s published — thus directly encouraging the endless publishing and republishing of whatever can pass as scholarship, real or fake, or mutated self-copying or self-mimicry.

Magnus Fiskesjö <nf42@cornell.edu>

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