"... Such thoughts got me to wondering about Frontiers in Psychology which is part of the Frontiers’ group of Open Access Publisher and Open Science Platform journals.
Doing some research it didn’t take long to realize they are another example of the devil being in the details of a noble effort when dedication to earning profits and bonuses gets prioritized above meeting their organization’s stated mission. Something that seems to be more common than not. ..."
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Students’ Resource
Introduction to Predatory Scientific Journals
(selections from the following articles are under the fold)
Predatory publications in evidence syntheses
J Med Libr Assoc. 2019 Jan; 107(1): 57–61.
How do journals in the Frontiers series have such a (relatively) high impact factor?
@Reddit_U.Lamaksha
My collapse of confidence in Frontiers journals
Posted by deevybee , June 7, 2015
Why I do not trust Frontiers journals, especially not @FrontDigitalHum
Melissa Terras - July 21, 2015
Backlash after Frontiers journals added to list of questionable publishers
Mollie Bloudoff-Indelicato, October 23, 2015
Is Frontiers a potential predatory publisher?
Leonid Schneider - October 28, 2015
Is Frontiers in Trouble?
MICAH, January 15, 2016
What I learned from predatory publishers, by Jeffrey Beall
Jeffrey Beall - June 2017 - BiochemiaMedica
Frontiers: vanquishers of Beall, publishers of bunk
Leonid Schneider, September 18, 2017
Why Beall’s blacklist of predatory journals died
Paul Basken, The Chronicle of Higher Education, September 22, 2017
Is Frontiers Media a Predatory Publisher?
DH Kaye - December 20, 2017- Flaky Academic Journals
Frontiers 2020: 1/3 of journals increase prices 45x inflation rate
Heather Morrison, June 2020, SustainingKnowledgeCommons.org
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Editorial: Where is scientific publishing heading?
Jens Nielsen, November 2017, https://doi.org/10.1093/femsyr/fox075
Staggeringly profitable scientific publishing bad for science?
Stephen Buranyi - June 27, 2017 - TheGuardian.com
There are new frontiers for academic publishing but scholarly associations and faculty must seize the opportunities
August 24, 2017 - London School of Economics and Political Science
Vanity and predatory academic publishers are corrupting the pursuit of knowledge
Michael J. I. Brown, August 2, 2015, TheConversation.com
How the open access model hurts academics in poorer countries
Brenda Wingfield, Bob Millar, April 10, 2019, TheConversation.com
Increasing open access publications serves publishers’ commercial interests
Shaun Khoo, June 16, 2019, TheConversation.com
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Reading through Hoffman’s Frontiers in Psychology 2014 paper it occurred to me the published journal article helped lay the foundation for his claim to scientific legitimacy and ultimately his book “The Case Against Reality - Why evolution hid the truth from our eyes.”
That had me thinking about the scientific process and these philosophical musings that Hoffman sculpted into this paper that makes no scientific case against reality and “Physicalism,” despite his bold, yet hollow, claim.
Instead, the authors rely on rhetorical fancy dancing to simply dismiss realism outright, along with enlisting mathematical sleight of hand to conjure all pervading “conscious agents” that he suggests does all of our perceiving and thinking for us.
It begs the question, who would publish such dressed up pipe dreaming as a scientific journal worthy science paper?
Then I remembered, this was “Frontiers of Psychology” - A pay to publish journal dedicated to psychology. In other words, we're back to priorities and the pursuit of profits.
Don’t get me wrong, psychology and philosophy are fine and good for what they are, but objects of our mind is not the point here. Hoffman dismisses spacetime and physical reality as we understand it - that's going over the edge and deserves being called out.
Hoffman's paper dismisses scientific realism and physicalism, the stuff of natural sciences, Earth sciences, but he does so in a journal dedicated to the study of our mind and thoughts.
That is, our Human Mindscape, a soft science full of competing lines are arguments based on ideas and conviction, driven by ego, and resulting in endlessly dog-chasing-tail debates over inventive word games. Seldom getting anywhere. About as soft a science as there is. (Yes, rather melodramatic, but so is the situation, when observed from the outside looking in.)
Hoffman's stunt is worth calling out as scientifically sleazy behavior - rather than being heralded as 'provocative, worth reading, even if far fetched.' What makes it worth reading? What sort of clarity does it offer?
I myself am baffled at why anyone would want to tell people to imagine that spacetime is doomed and that the structure of our day to day world isn't at all what it seems.
There's something nasty, disrespectful, predatory even, cynically taking advantage of the under-informed and gullible - filling their heads with utter nonsense, when there's so much about our real world that people ought to be learning about and opening up their eyes and minds to.
Willful ignorance, along with belligerent ignorance, is a national menace that has received a free pass for way too long. This "Case Against Reality," and such, is where the disconnect begins, destroying our own government and life support system is where it leads.
A stand for honesty and facing down to Earth physical facts and the 'laws of nature' needs to be made.
My point is that Hoffman's thesis has little, if anything, to do with serious natural sciences and the physical reality we are embedded within. Instead, he dismisses it and by extension realistically appreciating evolution with entertaining alacrity.
Such thoughts got me to wondering about Frontiers in Psychology which is part of the Frontiers’ group of Open Access Publisher and Open Science Platform journals.
Doing some research it didn’t take long to realize they are another example of the devil being in the details of a noble effort when dedication to earning profits and bonuses gets prioritized above meeting their organization’s stated mission. Something that seems to be more common than not.