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Inside the Fake Science Factory

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Inside the Fake Science Factory
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Fake News has got a sidekick and it's called Fake Science. This talk presents the findings and methodology from a team of investigative journalists, hackers and data scientists who delved into the parallel universe of fraudulent pseudo-academic conferences and journals; Fake science factories, twilight companies whose sole purpose is to give studies an air of scientific credibility while cashing in on millions of dollars in the process. Until recently, these fake science factories have remained relatively under the radar, with few outside of academia aware of their presence; but the highly profitable industry is growing significantly and with it, so are the implications. To the public, fake science is indistinguishable from legitimate science, which is facing similar accusations itself. Our findings highlight the prevalence of the pseudo-academic conferences, journals and publications and the damage they can and are doing to society.
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Transcript: English(auto-generated)
Who is excited for the last two-hour talk of the day? These guys have some awesome things they're going to show. And, and, girl. So, with no further delay, please give a warm welcome to Svetail and Sugi,
presenting at DEFCON 26, Inside the Fake Science Factory. Oh yeah, and if one falls over the other one because of the live mics,
I'll help them up, but, yeah, let's, let's get you guys untangled first. All right, give them another round of applause.
Thanks for having us. This is amazing. This is such an honor to speak in front of such a great audience here. My name is Till, Till Kraus. I'm a reporter and investigative journalist from the Züdeutsche Zeitung, Germany. Züdeutsche Zeitung magazine, a big magazine from the German newspaper.
And we're glad to be here today. My name, thanks. My name is Svetail. I'm also an investigative reporter from Germany's biggest broadcaster, ARD. And the reason why, or one reason why we are here and why we are really excited to be here is that the whole research you're going to see now started right here at DEFCON.
So, this is for us also kind of a way of saying thank you, DEFCON, because of what this conference makes possible. And it started because last year I had a talk here and I met Chris.
Hello? How about now? I had that same thing last year, I should learn. I'm Chris, also answer to Sugi. I work for the Online Privacy Foundation and I'm also a member of the DEFCON CFP Review Board. I didn't vote on my own talk, honestly.
So, to get you started, I mean, this is a really long talk, but it's basically divided into two parts. So, what we're going to do now is give you the presentation and have a little bit of time for questions and answers. And then you're in for a treat, because we're going to go show you a documentary film
that we made about the subject matter that we're not talking about. So, you'll be well entertained, I think, I hope. And after this documentary, we will still have some time for questions and answers. So, if you guys want to know anything more that we're talking about, we're here to answer your questions. And before we totally dive into this fake science factory,
what does it even mean, right? So, we will talk today about something that pretends to be science, but in fact is just bogus or you could even call it bullshit sometimes. So, and in order to understand how important it is, let's think a little bit about what science means for society, right?
So, when you talk about science, it's not just academics working in ivory towers doing research. The results really influence the world, how we see the world, our perception of the world, what kind of things we buy, what medications we take, how political decisions are influenced. A lot of this is based on science,
and this makes it really important that science is actually working, the whole process of scientific publication. So, about a year ago, I was fairly far along with some research, and with the research, I wanted to present an abstract and some preliminary findings at a conference.
So, I found this one, the 19th International Conference on Political Psychology, submitted an abstract. It got accepted. We were pretty delighted with that. And that's a fairly standard thing to do in academia so that you can discuss your results with peers,
and that forms like the rest of your decision on how you write the rest of the paper. So, off I went to Copenhagen in Denmark in October last year, excited about the conference, you know, kind of bricking it about the presentation. And this was the conference. Not a room in the conference. That's the conference.
And all the attendees, except me. I just thought, well, maybe that's like an admin error or something. But then the talks started. And bearing in mind I submitted on political psychology, the talks before mine were on urban planning, advanced Islamic finance.
I'm not even sure what that really is. Robotics, farming, all sorts of things. You know, get there. They say, okay, you've got five minutes to present. Five minutes. You know, before they said it was 20 minutes, so you get those five. It's like all of a sudden you're thinking, this is a little bit weird.
What the fuck? So, this sort of shenanigans has actually got a name, as I found out. I'm the sort of schmuck that goes to these sort of places, apparently. And it's called predatory publishing. And Tim's going to talk to us a little bit more about that.
So, predatory publishing. What is this? So, we tried to nail it down to some sort of a formula based on Albert Einstein. Euro is MC square. So, this means that what predatory publishers are doing is they take something that is either scientific, like your talk, or something that is utterly non-scientific.
They mix it all together to make a lot of money. And there's a definition for this, of course. So, this is kind of a broader sociological problem, where you see that those meetings are set up to appear as if they are science, but they're not because nobody's actually really looking at that,
what people are publishing there. So, my question to you guys would be who here is either scientist or has a scientific background and knows a little bit about that? Let's have a show of hands. All right. That's quite a few people, but for the rest of us, I'll just give you a very brief tour of how publications in the scientific world usually work.
So, in a good academic journal, you have an idea for a paper, you submit it, an editor checks it, and could either reject it straightaway or sends it to a process that is called peer review. So, peer review is something where other scientists, other researchers, who have some knowledge in that field look at your manuscript and make suggestions.
They look, is the mythology okay? Is the data set okay? Are the conclusions in any way coherent? And they read the paper, they make suggestions, and they can, again, reject it straightaway if they say, nah, this doesn't make any sense, or they have it for revision. And a friend of mine who's a scientist, he calls the peer review a big pain in the ass, basically,
because people always have some suggestions, and it's a very, very long and painful process. It can take months, so it goes back and forth. You can have to resubmit it, another peer review, another possibility of rejection. But then, in the end, after a long time, it gets objected. So, a little disclaimer here, the peer review process,
as we know it from the big journals that we know of, either open access journals on the internet or printed journals, it is not a perfect process. Sometimes weird papers slip through the companies who run those big publications. There's a big monopoly here, a lot of money to be made. So, this is not a perfect system,
but the whole idea of other scientists reviewing manuscripts still is kind of like the gold standard for academic publishing. So, when we look at those predatory journals, things look quite a bit different. So, the only thing they have in common is there is a submission, so somebody submits a paper there.
Then you've got some superficial comments, if at all. Then you have to make a payment, and then it's accepted. So, quite easy, right? So, in order to understand what we're talking about here, we have to make clear there are hundreds, if not thousands, of predatory publishers out there. They're a little bit like this Nigerian email scam
that you guys probably know a lot about. They send out emails in bulk trying to recruit authors, people to send their manuscripts there. We looked at the five major companies behind that. One of them is Wazit, where you presented. Omics is another one from India. So, those are the ones where a lot of journals are published.
They have a lot of conference going on. So, these are the major players in this field. So, after finding out about this whole predatory publishing thing, I wanted two things. I wanted the 450 euros back. The 450 euro thing is pretty standard.
If you've been to an IEEE conference, you have to pay for a tendency. So, I didn't spot anything there. But more importantly, I wanted my intellectual property back. If anybody's written an abstract, it's kind of a pain in the ass, and it takes a long time. So, having to rewrite it so it doesn't fall prey of some sort of plagiarism engine is a bit of a frustrating thing.
So, I asked Wazit for my money back and them to withdraw the paper, and they were like, no, you signed the forms. Here they are. So, I had to then go to the credit card company
and explain what a prejudice conference was, and that's not that easy. So, you went to a conference? Yes, but it wasn't really a conference. Right, but there was a conference, sort of. So, I had to write a detailed description for that and also to send to the UK fraud authorities to kind of explain what was going on so I could get my money back.
I took all the information I'd written up and I just put it on a WordPress site, wazitwatch.wordpress.com. I also found all the authors that were going to be attending in the next 12 months and emailed all of those folks that were from universities and said, hey, you might be going to a shitty conference. I also created a Twitter account, wazitwatch,
to warn people who were talking about Wazit, and I also pinged Svea here, who I met last year at DEF CON, and said this. Yes, this is exactly the message I received, and I would say don't mess with him because he knows me.
I'm badass on Saturdays. And this is where the story begins with the whole investigation. So, we decided as a media organization to dive into it and to go on research this as deep as we could
and to really kind of rip them apart. So, I teamed up with Till and also with another good colleague of mine, which together we are quite a big investigator of research cooperation in Germany, and one of the first things that we thought we should do was we needed some help.
And I don't know who saw my talk last year, knows that I love to dress up. So, we needed some help, and my alter ego was Isabella Stein, and we decided to become scientists.
And Isabella Stein, she was from a small university, the University of Himmelforten. Himmelforten, it's a village in Germany, and I know a couple of hundreds of people living there, and we believe that Santa Claus is coming from there. So, it was Isabella Stein from this pictures university,
and also together with my good colleague, we submitted a fake paper. This paper was randomly generated by a computer algorithm.
There's more. I'm sure you all get that, right? This is a very neat program. You can find it on the web. It's called SciGen, and some MIT students invented this program.
You just have to type in your name, your picture's name, and then a paper jumps out. And this was the one when we typed in our picture's name. This was the paper which came out. So, fake paper number one, a sting operation. We decided to go to the same conference people where Chris was.
They call themselves the World Academy of Science and Technology, and we hardly believed ourselves when they invited us for the conference. So, we went to London.
This is not this one. We went to London in January and presented there, and yeah, let's see how Isabella Stein and Christian Schreiberma, how they did. And we really, we read it out loud.
Let's see if we get that running. Yes, the first one. It's edited a little bit. Introduce us shortly. It's my colleague, Isabella Stein. Also from our University of Applied Sciences.
So, here now is the relationship between our solution and the analysis of the memory bus. This is memory bus. And here on the bottom and here on the top. And all of this is a case where you would need a theory of rat-like trees, but we proposed another solution.
We used the 90s Nintendo Game Boy. Which means the more pressure you give on the system, the higher the scalability you get, and that's what we wanted to achieve. How would our system behave? I don't know this particular reflection on potentialities
between philosopher and author. Thank you.
Introduce us shortly. It's my colleague, Isabella Stein. Also from... Sorry, user error. Thank you, guys.
The hardest part was really not to laugh. And I have to admit, after our little theater, we nearly ran out the room in the next room and we couldn't stop it for a while. So, but, I mean, it's funny, but on the other hand,
it's sad at once. And everybody applauded and I think there were very polite people, polite scientists, but also there were no computer experts. So there was probably a chemist or biologist or a film critics person.
So they couldn't know about what we were speaking. And this is also a reason why these conferences are so shitty. Oh, I didn't want to spoil that one.
So this one is the organizer. This was the only person there who was from the World Academy of Science and Technology. And I asked him, who are you?
What's your name? And he barely, he did not want to answer and he mumbled something like, I'm only a student from Cyprus and I don't know anything about this. And so we kind of, it stopped here in London because we, yeah, we could not find out who is that guy and who is behind was it.
And this was also a time when we needed some help more from a hacker person to dive deeper. So I called a friend of mine, Andrew MacPherson, and Andrew MacPherson is like employee number one of Perturver,
who make Maltigo. I don't know if you've not heard of Maltigo. It's kind of a tool for exploring relationships and technical and non-technical context and it's pretty awesome. And the creator of Maltigo created this graphic for us because he was pretty excited by the talk too. So in order to try and find out a little bit more about
who's behind this wasit.org organization, we put this into Maltigo, rather Andrew did on this occasion. And we run a transform that shows entries from who is and we found out that wasit.org was using Cloudflare, which is a little bit of a pain because it's a bit of a dead end, but not really a pain because what we found with wasit.org
is that it was using the same tracking cookie as ios.org, ias.org and wasit.com. Then if we look at the IP ownership for those guys, we see it links to a guy called Borat Ardil. Borat Ardil is the guy and the student there,
the student there, that Svea met in London. Borat Ardil also posts on PHP Freaks under the name or the alias of Plobus. And you can get some interesting information about the sort of the structure of the wasit organization
by some of his posts on PHP Freak. So back to Maltigo and looking at the whois information, we also see there that if we look at the ios.org, practiced this a million times, it references a gentleman called Kemal Ardil.
I'm not sure if I'm pronouncing that right, but this is the guy here. Kemal is really sort of the top of the tree for wasit.org. It's a family business. He's Borat's father and there's another Ardil as well involved, three of them, we think. If we look at Borat, he's also registered
a ton of other conference-y type DNS names, 83 in total, like conference university and scientific conference and stuff like that. So in total, wasit host about 13 events in 13 different cities each month. So they're quite busy. 5,000 conference titles a month a year.
That's 157 events, 48 cities, 35 countries, and 53,467 conference titles in total. Anything you can think of, and if it's not there, there's an opportunity to suggest one.
So we estimated based on about 20 to 25 submissions per event that they're making, or the annual revenue is about 3.8 million euros a year or about 4.5 million U.S. dollars. Even if there are overheads for the hotel rooms, and they don't necessarily need to book the hotel conference rooms all day,
my conference lasted two whole hours. So even if it cost them 2 million, that's quite a lot of revenue, of profit that they're making from this. And this is just wasit. Oh yeah, another video. Yeah, we of course tried to speak with them about this.
So we went to another conference in Berlin, but this time not Isabela. German Radio and TV, and Süddeutsche Zeitung. We have several questions to you. Is this science? Is this science? Why was this? You called this a scientific conference. So what is scientific about this conference?
Matika, was it of the IRC? Let me call the lawyer. Just let me call the lawyer. No, no, no. No, no, no. You will face it. General police. German Radio and TV and Süddeutsche Zeitung. This was the end of it, so we got thrown out.
We got thrown out, and we didn't get any answers from them until today. So the only answers or the only information we have are the information we have from Chris. Okay, so after this encounter with these weird people and these weird conferences, we really thought,
okay, let's look deeper into what's going on there. We know that a lot of those conference organizers also have a big publication arm where they publish journals and scientific articles. So we thought, okay, if they accept any computer-generated nonsense, and you had a good laugh at that because you obviously were able to see what kind of crap that was,
let's try to put this on the next level, right? Let's try to have a scientific article published in one of their journals. So we really tried to think, what would the bad guys do, right? So we invented a cancer cure, complete nonsense,
and had the goal to have it published in one of their journals so that we could say, well, this is a scientifically proven medication that we could then sell, for example, over the Internet because who would buy just some random medication on the Internet when you can buy one that says, this is proven by scientists in a peer-reviewed journal. So what we did, we, for some reason, we like bees
because bees are awesome. Can bees heal cancer? Probably not. But who knows, right? In the world of scientific publications that are fake, anything's possible. So we invented another institution, the eFABIR Institute. We made a Twitter account and a website. The Twitter account logo actually is the German symbol for recycling,
so this was a little hint for the, for the trash that we're going to put out to the world. And the CEO of this is Dr. Richard Funtin, which in Germany means Erfuntin, which means invented. So the whole thing was, was, was, was pretty bad. And we submitted a paper to one of the journals from Omics,
which is one of the biggest companies in that field, the Journal of Integrative Oncology looks legit at the very first glance. So we wrote a paper saying that the wax that bees produce can have a better effect on cancer treatment than chemotherapy.
So we just, we just said that, right? There was no proof. We said, oh yeah, we had some patients and we basically asked them as long as we wanted until they actually said, yeah, we feel better. This was our mythology. And we, we made some other outrageous claims. For example, we said, well, one of the reasons why bees may be a good,
you know, therapy option for cancer patients is because bees don't get cancer. Right? Makes perfect sense. The other argument we had was that, well, the general nature of bees, you know, how they fly around and those are really happy animals, that pretty much suggests that they're probably a good way to treat cancer.
And we even, because we're scientists, we quoted a book. You know, we just didn't say that bees have a very, very happy nature. We looked it up in a book and we quoted it in a reference section. The only problem is, it's a children's book. Right? We really, we really tried to make it low stakes
so that anybody, not, not, not like a Nobel Prize winning scientist is needed to find out that this is utterly nonsense. Right? But guess what happened? After a couple of days, we got review comments back from the publisher and they said, oh yeah, this provides important experimental and preclinical evidences.
There was no evidence at all. It was just completely invented. They had some minor corrections that they didn't understand and abbreviation what SITF means, which is not hard that they didn't understand because we just made it up. So we said, oh yeah, SITF stands for Signal Infrared Transfer Protocol. And they said, oh sure, yeah, okay.
And we got an email about ten days after we handed in the manuscript and the paper was accepted and published. They wanted to have 2,000 euros, so 2 point something thousand dollars publication fee, which we never paid and they still published the paper. So it was online there and it doesn't stop there.
So after a while when the paper was online, we received several emails from other predatory publishers inviting us to be editors at cancer journals and one email that I put up on the screen here. We got invited to be keynote speakers at a breast cancer conference in Paris. So what a career, right? We just invented this whole operation
and within two weeks we had a scientific publication that we could put on the website and saying this is officially peer reviewed. We were able to speak at a conference and we're editors of journals. So if we really had the plan to sell this fake medication, we would have some arguments now. And this sounds funny at first, and believe us, we had a lot of fun doing this,
but it's actually really serious because this is not something that we just made up. This is something that is really happening. So there are various medications or alleged medications out there which are proven in these journals. For example, it did not took us a long time
to find GCMAF. GCMAF is supposed to help against last stage cancer and a variety of other illnesses you may have. And it is something that you take it and then your immune system
gets so strong that cancer is beaten. And they advertise with these studies really quite often. So we just want to show or give you a short glimpse of what you can do with these studies. It's particularly relevant for the drug Oxyalanine.
300 scientists from 8 nations have written 150 scientific research papers on GCMAF. 200 scientists, but we have written 32 of them. Yes, this is advertisement. Go on, let it play. You will see now testimonials from this company.
I took the GCMAF twice a week and after three weeks I started to feel less tired. It isn't something that is just quackery, it is scientifically backed. So we will now have a short look into the studies.
300 scientists from 8 nations have written 150 scientific research papers on GCMAF. 200 scientists, but we have written 32 of them.
He wants to stay with us. I took the GCMAF twice a week and after three weeks I started to feel less tired. It isn't something that is just quackery, it is scientifically backed. There we go. It is a good advertisement. You can see it a couple of times.
300 scientists from 8 nations have written... Make it stop. I think you are getting the idea. This is what makes this whole fake science operation so dangerous that people can actually sit in front of a camera and say this is not just quackery, it is scientifically backed.
Let's be honest, who really has the background to double check those studies? Yes, and here you see some of the studies from this company. These studies, one of them is in the journal where Till submitted the Bwax paper.
Others are in journals where we submitted a computer generated fake paper. So you have no peer review or you have some kind of fake peer review because this is the only reason why these papers get published. So what we did was we showed these studies to quite a well-known oncologist in Germany
and she reviewed these studies for a second time and she said these studies are really terrible and that she thinks that a normal person can't see it and even a doctor, if he is not very familiar with it, even a doctor can't see it
because these studies, they only take care about single cases, for example. They are not scientifically at all and they should not have been published in any real journal. So her conclusion was that these studies only exist, that these internet pages where these products are sold can link to these scientific articles
and this is quite bad, especially for the patients when they are very, very ill and when they are searching hopelessly for some miracle or for some cure and this is also the way how these studies are spreading over social media or over other media, over articles in media.
So it also took us not long to find somebody who also spread the word. This is a very beloved TV host from Germany. She died in 2016 because she was severely ill. She had breast cancer in the last stage and she wrote a book and in this book,
she really spoke very advertising and well about GC math and that this is her last hope. We also spoke to her best friend and she told us that this was her last hope, this medication and she was nobody who believed in some wonder healer or something.
She believed in the studies because she read them by herself. So she died and on this case, you really can see that this is a business with last hopes and that these people who are publishing these failed studies,
that they are making money with the hopes of dying people. So usually there are no consequences. In this case, luckily there are. So the one company who is selling that stuff is going to go on trial in London in November and the files allege that they illegally sold GC math as a cancer drug based on failed studies.
We also tried to reach out to them but our questions were ignored. So what's the matter with all this? Many snake oil sellers, they can use this and then they can sell their stuff. We found plenty of other medications like some stem cell therapies which can't be working
or some bioenergy healer who has 150 studies who heals with his energy. So there's plenty of them out there and they can sell their products because of these predatory publishers.
So this was another reason for us to build a bigger picture. We wanted to know who else is there and the first step was to write as many fake papers as we could and get them accepted at I think in the end 12 different publisher.
This one was mine. It got accepted. We've got a real scientist here, right? Thank you. To be honest, two or three papers did not get accepted so that works as well. One wrote back to us, this is meaningless, do something better in the next future.
So we felt some kind of didn't accept it but the absolute majority accepted the paper without any comments. After we asked this publisher why did you accept this or you are predatory, most of them said no comment.
Some said no, we are not predatory publisher even if they accepted two papers from us or this one I like the most, they said we are a platform so we are not responsible. But yeah, we wanted to go and to dig deeper.
Yeah, so to gather some information from the various predatory journals, we did some scraping and analyzing or spidering, scraping and analyzing, one of those. We start off with scraping which we divide into two sections. The first is we want to look at the abstract and papers that have been submitted and all of the information that goes with those
and the other thing we wanted to do was look at all of the conferences and where they are and how frequently. So the first step we did is I do some sort of site recon and in this example we just look at Wasit real quick. We get some ideas of the site layout and what we want to set our spiders to and what we want to scrape in a later part.
So you see the papers and the abstracts are listed here and are linked to more detail and here you get things like the author name, the journal title, things like that and also you get this like unique identifier for the abstract and they range from about zero to 100,000. So you can write some or I wrote some messy Python to just loop through all of those
and download the HTML files of which there are 53,069 for Wasit and then pulled out the metadata, the title, author, date, journal name, stuff like that
and piped that all to a CSV file. There's no real magic there. It was quite straightforward. The resultant abstract .CSV file had all of the things we just saw, the paper ID, had the author, stuff like that and a direct download link to the PDF which would either be the PDF version of the abstract
or the paper and those PDFs contained more information such as the institutions authors were at and their email addresses. So we pulled down the PDFs, used PDF to text and piped some of that information into abstracts .CSV as well.
Others on the team preferred a slightly more elegant approach using Scrapy, for example, where you're really doing your sort of spidering and parsing all in one and you get a new sort of JSON file out of it. Next, moving on to conferences real quick. There are 50 different conference areas within WASA
and each of them linked to hundreds together, collectively thousands of conference titles. So 50 subject areas and here we see one subject area and that's just a small snippet of the different conferences in that subject area in August 2018.
And the reason why they all have those abbreviations, you see like ICI something, that's done on purpose because legitimate scientific conferences usually go by those acronyms. So what WASA did is they just changed one of the letters around so that it almost sounded like the original conference but not quite.
And so this tricked people into believing, oh, I'm going to this very reputable conference whereas it was just as valuable as a Gucci bag written with one C. So you could have been at this conference but you chose to come to DEFCON.
Just finished in Vancouver and apparently they had scenes when a lot of the attendees, the penny dropped for them. So there was a bit of a backlash there apparently. So all together there are 44,476 different conference titles you can select. There's going to be one for you. And if you're the kind of person that likes to plan in advance,
DT take note and look at all of the wonderful cities you could travel to. You'll get a receipt and an attendance voucher and all of that sort of stuff. 2031. So we take what we did there with WASA but we applied that to all of the five predatory publishers that we looked at.
We get the JSON files, the CSV files, and we use a collection of tools to do various different analysis depending on who we were and what we were looking for. So Excel, Tableau, which is you can get a 15-day free license or trial license for that, Neo4j for graph visualization, Linkurious,
and of course like R and Python as well. So I want to analyze the data that we downloaded. Yes, it felt like lowering a curtain, like looking behind the scene because after the scraping process we could finally say,
okay, this is how big you are. This is how many abstracts you have. So we wanted to know how many authors. So we found nearly 180,000 abstracts and around 400,000 authors contributing to this scam worldwide.
And this maybe some people would say, oh, my God, science in danger. So no. So this is if you compared to the total number of scientists which are nearly 8 million scientists worldwide, this is still a very small proportion.
So most of the scientists are publishing in regular journals, open access journals or paper journals, and only a very small proportion fell for this scam. But the development is quite interesting. You see here that especially with the big ones,
Omics and Wazit, that they have had quite an increase, especially in the last three to five years. They are getting bigger and bigger, making more money. And many people out there are saying that this is a problem from lower income countries. No, it's not.
The U.S. is the second biggest contributor to this conferences, especially Omics with nearly 10,000 abstracts. And what is interesting if you dive deeper into the data when you are searching for universities or when you are looking for who is contributing to them, this goes in every field.
There's nearly no university you won't find there. So even elite universities have published there over the past 10 years, I have to admit, so probably one can say, okay, this is not too much. But anyway, these are the numbers we pulled out
of the metadata from the paper. I also did here for DEF CON, especially top U.S. institutions list, also out of interest because I wanted to know which universities are on top of this list. Here it is an institution. It's the Mayo Clinic. I think it's a pretty well-known institution.
University of Michigan, Wayne State University. I wrote all of the universities you can read here. I wrote all of them, e-mailed, asked for their comment. Most of them did not comment on the issue. Some did. So one here I want to read. So they are really dismayed about this.
They were really kind of concerned when I talked to them on the phone. They were like, oh, my God, we did not know this and we don't like this that our scientists are publishing there. And they want to take care and they want to take action to stop this and to warn and to inform their people about this.
So most interesting is what are the reasons why scientists do this? So first of all, scientists got scammed. We were talking about the Nigeria scam. So this is they're sending spam e-mails and you fell for it accidentally. Then you go there once and then you see, okay, this is crap.
You won't go there twice. Also there's the publish or perish pressure in academia. So probably some people choose the easy way because it's just fast to publish there. And the third case I want to go a little bit deeper because this is for us it was the most interesting case
when scientists are taking advantage of this predatory publishing. So we were lucky to find one case where there is an investigation ongoing. So this is from CUNY University, City University of New York.
And there are quite some professors who really like predatory publishers. So they don't publish there once or twice. No, no, no, no, no. They publish there quite many times. So what you find in these papers when you print them out, you find that there's some kind of office filing.
You find there are nine to 15 office for one paper which is not normal. Then all of these papers are grant funded. So this is usually taxpayers' money which is in these papers. Then a lot of these papers is copy paste. So if you run this through a software, you really see that there's a lot of copy paste going on.
And if you take them to a scientist to do a peer review what we did, then they told us, OK, some of this, what is in there, it's really scientifically questionable because probably they were written in a very short time. We were lucky to have had a whistleblower who was familiar with this case,
with this CUNY case, and he told us that professors can benefit from gaining higher salaries at promotions because they probably have some legit papers from good journals and then they can just fill it up with these cheap publications.
They can also obtain other benefits. This could be the reason why this is so liked for a minority of people. Which we find interesting is that even if you do this knowingly or unknowingly,
it doesn't really matter because you are feeding the system with this. The predatory publishers, they get the money from the universities, so this is one thing, so they can grow with their business model. And the other thing is they get the reputation of the universities.
They can advertise with, oh, people from Stanford are publishing here or people from Harvard are publishing here. So even if the scientists don't know, so even if they do this unknowingly, they are helping the predatory publishing and they are helping a different group where Till will know more about.
Yeah, so when we looked at this, we thought, well, this goes way beyond academia, right? So it's one thing if professors try to polish their publication list and get more money maybe or have a better reputation, but this whole business can really be used for all kinds of purposes
because we as a society, we still have this kind of feeling that if something is scientifically proven, it's kind of valuable. And this is great that this is the case because usually science does exactly that, but in the case of the predatory, it is quite different. So we not only looked what academics are doing there, but we looked what our companies and lobby groups
and political influencers are doing there because in the end, big companies and big corporations have research and development departments where they present their own research and their new products and all these kind of things and oftentimes what they find is not really scientifically sound, but good enough for the predators, right?
So one big branch, of course, the tobacco industry. They have a reputation, and I think most of you guys here know about this, they have a reputation for deceiving the public for decades, trying to downplay the danger of secondhand smoking or the dangers of smoking altogether.
You probably know that spiel, right? It's like, oh, well, cancer has many reasons and smoking, maybe one and maybe not, I don't know, let's leave. That's kind of what they do sometimes. And so what they do now, particularly Philip Morris is a company that we found there quite often, the producer of Marlboro, you probably know them. So they start to revamp their business a little bit by selling e-cigarettes
that are potentially less harmful as they claim. They have scientists writing about this and where does the science sometimes end? In the predatory publishers. So they have those well-looking brochures that they hand out to investors and to the public where they make their health claims and they list the articles here as peer reviewed
and they're off from WasIt, you know? They were published in WasIt and we know what WasIt is, right? We got a presentation award for reading a computer-generated nonsense paper there. So, well, not quite reputable, I guess. So, but this is not a one-time shot. Philip Morris seems to be quite a good customer for them.
So they publish all kinds of studies in those non-peer-reviewed journals that claim to have a peer review. They go to conferences, present their research there and particularly for the tobacco industry it's interesting because for some serious academic conferences they are banned. They're not even allowed to go there because of their history of deceiving the public.
They're on a blacklist. So they just, it seems that they found another way to disseminate their research to kind of boost their reputation. Who else is there? Pharmaceutical companies. The pharma giant buyer from Germany, inventor of aspirin. They published there quite a few papers and one of them is actually interesting because it actually has to do with aspirin, right?
Their flagship product. Because they want to sell different variations of aspirin, they come up with aspirin plus C which is basically just normal aspirin with vitamin plus C added. They have a paper here claiming that this helps against the common cold whereas many other scientists that we showed the paper say well this is not actually a legitimate claim.
The German consumer protection agency actually says that the addition of vitamin C doesn't make any sense in this case but you can sell it at a higher price. So if you are a consumer and you want to find out oh well there's this normal aspirin and there's this aspirin plus C you probably go to the internet, look up what the benefits are
and you end up here. So if you Google aspirin plus C the omics paper and let's keep in mind this is non peer reviewed this is just any you know any study you can publish there is on the second rank on Google. So I think now with you guys actually looking it up and clicking on the link you may actually make it rise to the top.
So I guess that's the collateral damage of a talk like this but well let's give this to buyer they can have it okay. So I think you understand what's going on here right? Other companies, Mallinckrodt, very controversial company that's just recently been fined a hundred million dollars for absurd and obscene increase of the prices for the medications.
They published there about medications there. AstraZeneca is doing it. Lobby groups, Ilse Europe, a think tank funded by Coca Cola, Hershey's and Kellogg's. They sent their scientists over to a conference speaking about childhood obesity and nutrition and guess what it was not about salad right?
So they used this kind of forum to disseminate their research. What else did we found? We were kind of around right? We were typing in all the companies. So we found critical infrastructure from Atome, a company that's responsible for the nuclear safety. They published things there. And was it again you know the company that we just saw
and it just goes on and on. Institutions from Germany, basically tax payers money goes up, they present their stuff there. And once you publish the scientific publication it just doesn't end there you know. So it's cited in other publications, other people cite it.
It's cited in patents for example. Yeah for somebody making patents on medical products. They cite was it publications there. And what we found particularly disturbing, there's this whole big group of climate change deniers. The CO2 coalition for example here in the United States. Very very controversial people.
You've got the Eicke Institute in Germany that is scientifically working together with the German right wing party AFD. They speak in front of parliaments in Germany actually presenting their view that climate change is not man-made. This is all not a problem and we should all you know further invest in coal and all these kind of things. They use studies in those journals to back up their claims.
So this is a very common strategy in scientific political propaganda that you say well look on the one hand you've got all those award winning scientists those great you know thinkers who come up with their theories and their proofs. But we've got other studies that just say a different you know that just say the opposite.
And in this case we could really prove that their arguments come from predatory publishers. And how do we know? Well we just actually submitted a computer generated nonsense paper at the exact same journal and got accepted like this. So in order to kind of conclude this first part we really have to think again what does science mean?
And we got back to the slide from the beginning. So this is not just about you know your common professor doing a little bit of research on the side. Scientific progress is really a super important driver for our society in the age of enlightenment and democracy. So what scientists find out influences not only political decisions
but what we buy, how we think and how we see the world. And if you now with the knowledge that you all have now about the predatory publishers I think you see the danger that is in place there. Anything can be disseminated. Anything can have the aura of science. Nobody checks it. And when we confronted many universities they were absolutely clueless.
They have never heard of this problem before. And so the societies, those studies, they're spreading like viruses. You know they're quoted here, they're quoted there. Lots of dangerous things are happening. You can in the end no longer distinguish fiction from fact. So the most terrible thing that could happen with this whole thing
is that the trust that we have in science erodes because we think science is awesome. We think science is great. And when they do this thing they really sell themselves at a very, very cheap price. And the trust that we have in science and progress may erode. If more people publish in those journals the trust is gone.
And this would be really terrible. So in order to kind of combat this we really made a long streak of investigative projects where we published the findings that we had together with 23 media partners and journalists around the world where we shared the data and people from other countries, be it Korea or India
or the United States or Austria, France, they looked into specific cases from their countries. Which universities are there? Which companies are there? Germany, from the 30 biggest companies, 12 had publications in those journals. And this big kind of publication really had the aim to raise awareness.
As I said, don't mess with him. Yeah. It's all because of Chris, yeah. Or of DevCon, right. So, those are some of the results of the publications that came out and there's more to come. The Guardian just ran a story today and there's more coming up for this in the future. So, never end a talk without a call to action.
That's what we learned, right? So, we're speaking in front of a very, very curious and interested audience here. So, I think what you all can do is you can actually help to make this problem go away. When you find a study that somebody, some wacky person cites and says, oh, you know what?
Autism doesn't exist or tobacco is not harmful. Look where this study has been published and if you find it to be from a predatory publisher, say so and share the word. Spread the word about those companies. If you look up your university or if you have academic friends, warn them, tell them that this is actually hurting science
by publishing in those journals. And again, we know that academic publishing has its flaws and even the established publishers do some mistakes, but what those predators are doing is really hurting everyone. So, the big point is here, you all can help with this project because you don't even need the database and all those files.
This is just if you want to dive deeper, but if you have a simple Google string search that Swaya is just about to tweet out on her account, if you enter any word there, be it a university email address that you know of, be it a controversial product that you have heard of,
be it a controversial person or anything that you want, if you Google it through this, the chances are really high that you will find if this comes from a predatory publisher or not. Look for government. We found a lot of government in Germany, so look for surveillance because this would be very interesting if some surveillance stuff is sold with these studies.
Yeah, the military is there sometimes too, right, because all those people, they need publications, they need the aura of science, and this is the cheap and easy way to do it. Oh yeah, there was a .gov that just submitted to the Vancouver conference that had just been, so you could look for that. So, I think this concludes the first part of our presentation.
Of course, this was a big research and a big work from a lot of people, so this whole project is more than the three people here, so we thank all the people on this chart, and want to invite you to stick around for the documentary that we're just about to show, and yeah, we are approachable on Twitter.
If you find something, get in touch with us. We'll hang around after the show here, of course. Come talk to us. We share our knowledge, and we thank you very, very much for the attention. This has been great. This has been a pleasure. Thank you. You guys rock.
We'll get the documentary set up. I mean, if those guys would have just given me my money back when I asked, you know, that rug really tied the room together. Yeah, and so the documentary that we're showing now, of course,
is subtitled, so you will understand it, and if you have any questions now while we're setting up the laptop, we're happy to answer. If there's a quick question, we have some time, so come in front or speak it out so loud. Yeah, say it loud so that we can hear it. I think there's a question here, yeah.
Well, the question was from the papers that we looked up, how many of them were really legitimate? That is a very great question, and the answer is it's hard to tell, because only some of them that we really found out were seemingly really dangerous. For example, with the cancer medications,
we gave them to other legitimate scientists to look them up, so we didn't, of course, control all of the papers and see how good they are, but we really think the problem is that it is almost impossible to tell the difference, so we kind of had the comparison like in Germany, you have like a big institution that every car has to go there.
I think it's like the DMV here or something, right? You get stickers on your car that checks if everything is okay. Those predatory publishers are like the DMV, just putting the stickers on any car without looking at them. Most cars will probably be okay. Some of them will have exhumes that are poisonous, and some of them won't have brakes, because nobody looked at them,
and this is the problem with those journals, that nobody looks at them, so the filtering function is gone. Now, everything is science, and everything is peer-reviewed, and you can't tell the difference, so we invite everyone here to find papers and go for a hunt and look it up, and if you have expert friends and you find a paper,
show it to them and share the knowledge. And if authors are publishing papers to these places and kind of leaving them there, granted, sometimes it's hard to get your paper removed, so that's a factor, but if people are publishing there, which is kind of deceptive in its own right, then you have to then wonder, is the whole pool polluted?
How was the research methodology and the data? We just don't know. And when there are open access and pre-pub paper, you know, sites like archive and osf.io, you have to question why researchers aren't publishing there instead, so it's really difficult to sort of extract what's real and what's not
and why people, what were people's motivations for publishing there. We've got another question there, yeah, please.
Well, so the question was how those business models of the conferences and the publications are intertwined. And the answer is yes, they are absolutely intertwined. Like, for example, Omics, one of the key players in this, they offer both. They do a lot of conferences and they do a lot of journals.
And there's currently actually an FTC investigation here in the United States against Omics because of their deceptive practices. And so, yes, a lot of people who publish there also go to the conferences. Of course, there are some separations as well. Some people only go to conferences, others only publish, but many do both, full package, right? Another question? Another question on the EHD degree is independent on these publications.
We actually, we researched one case in Germany where we had a professor. And in Germany it is like you have to collect papers and if you have enough paper then
you are a professor. And in this case we found his, yeah, his work and a lot of his work was from predatory publishers and he was a professor. He was actually a Tuber professor because he was very young. I think he actually had two or three PhD degrees and he was a very young professor
and yeah, we called him, yeah, he sweated a lot. We did a lot of phone calls. We didn't publish his name, but if the people don't look closely, they may not see it, that it is published in predatory journals. What's his name?
Poor guy. Yeah, there was also, I'm sorry, question over there. Thanks.
We were really often asked for doing this. The question was are we going to make the database available? Sorry. But we can't do this because it's a legal problem because in Germany it is when you
publish a person's name then you first have to give him the opportunity to say something for these allegations. And with 400,000 scientists this would not be possible for us. So the only thing what we can do and this is what we did here is to publish this easy
Google search so that everybody can check his institution and we tried to help people to do the scraping or probably to do a scraping project, put it on GitHub so that everybody can do it because we cannot publish the whole database in the web.
Yeah, go on, please. Just put their name on a journal and say that they were there at the time.
Great question, yes. So when you go on your search here. That is a good question. So the question was if we came across the fact that some of those journals they actually list people there as editors or editorial board members and yes, we came across tons
of people who were just there either who were already dead, that happens, so not a lot of editorial work from their side or people who are absolutely clueless about this because you know those website photos, they're public, the CVs are public so those predatory publishers just take the photos on the website, put them up there and when we asked them, we wrote emails to those people, we looked them up and said did you
know that you're a publisher there or an editor there and a lot of people replied I have never heard of this and they tried now legal, some legal steps to get their pictures removed but we don't know how this will end. But with the scraping, the scraping code only took the papers and the abstracts.
Scraping code did not include the editors but what the scraping code of course included was paper who probably where people want to retract it but didn't get through it. So yes of course and the 400,000 scientists there might be a quota of people who is in there but who definitely not want to be in there.
And now there's a question over. So maybe let's take one or two more questions I guess and then we will have more questions after the document. One more question, the guy has been standing patiently with his, you, yeah.
You mean like the GC math case? Yeah, well we're investigating still into the data, yeah. So there's more, there's more stuff coming up there. But we really hope from input from other people because some of those, some of those findings, you just have to come across them. You know, we don't know about any wonder drug that's sold in Minnesota or
South Korea or wherever around the world those, those, those snake oil sellers do their business. So yeah, of course we still keep looking into these, into these data sets and, and see what we can find. But since it's kind of easy to find those products, we really hope that other people pick it up and, and, and, and do the work as well. Yeah, the Google search will get you quite far, actually.
And the scraping's super easy too. Shall we roll the video? Yeah, so let's watch the film. It's like around 30 minutes and we'll stick around and, and take more questions afterwards. Thanks so far. This has been great.
Hello, I'm Marguerite Strahl. It's nice to meet you again. Thank you so much. I hope you're doing well.
I'm not here for my life, I'm here for a very long time. This is a very, very short story. We have a very long story to tell.
She told me about her students. And I told her, we have a lot to tell. She told me that she knew what was going on. And that was why it was so hard to talk about it. What's it like to be a student at the Netz for Brighton?
This is a film about a chef with two children and the truth about us.
The father of the moderator, Miriam Pielhau. She told me, How do we, as a young person, manipulate the world to understand what the outside world is? It's very emotional. It's very emotional.
It's very emotional. The moderator also told the students a big story. The art students write about the outside world, very small. I told her, Why? Why can't we talk about it?
Miriam Pielhau shared a blessing to the audience. Thank you. For even two years, she was a friend of a young girl who had a very important role with the name Gitzi Maff. In an e-mail she said, I'm better and better,
but I'm also better. Google called Gitzi Maff when she told her, it's going to be the end of the final. Her best friend is Ina Zich. She said, I'm better and better. I'm better and better. The good people are active
and the bad people are better. The bad people are not. Was it a shock? A shock. No medical person was missed. She must have stayed here, in Blau. For life's sake, for life's sake. But I don't want to forget that I lost her.
Gitzi Maff, Gitzi Maff, the first step towards Gitzi Maff is aggressive. She is not the only one who tested the test. She is not the only one who tested the test. Four months before her death,
she was caught with her best friend. Miriam Pielhaun is the only one with the test. She is not the only one who tested the test. Miri was an expert in medicine. She was very happy with her studies.
And there were a lot of people who tested the test. Gitzi Maff tested a lot of people. A lot of people with the tests. Miriam Pielhaun tested the ULI in 2016. She tested her studies. She was very proud of her studies.
Promising medical breakthrough in the U.S. A big study to get her studies done. A big study to get her studies done. To get her studies done. We are in the midst of the intense death.
A string of protests are happening and it is all over the world. It is international anarchy and immigration. If a city is a city, check out the city's national history. The studies are happening in the city's national history.
We are looking for a way to get our studies done. A lot of people are dying. Controller to colleague peer review will take the process. We are looking for a way to encourage students to get their studies done.
This is the first step. to a world where the peer reviews are not As reviewers, if you are shown by a list of a lot of people who are in the dark, you must ask yourself, why is it so important to write a book? Why is it so important to write this book?
The experts are in the process of doing a lot. The students are in the process of doing something. We need to understand the other methods is a form of positive work. It is possible that he is not in a scientific journal, but in a scientific journal.
With the study of GZMAF, the study of GZMAF was manipulated. 300 scientists from 8 nations have 180 students from GZMAF. And we have 200 of them.
But we have written 32 of them. I took the GZMAF 2 million years ago and took three of them. I am not tired.
This is not true. It is a scientific journal. I believe that the study of GZMAF is one of the reasons for the publication. Not only does one have to deal with the fact that we know what the quality is, but also that one from the Internet knows what the quality of life is,
and that one has to deal with the fact that the study of GZMAF is identical. We can assume that the students in the study of GZMAF process are able to do so. My colleagues and I were able to do so. We made our way to the study of GZMAF.
We created the Spitz, a computer program designed for us as a studio for our students. We went to the App Center. The University of Himmelpfahrten did not give us the opportunity.
Here, you can see the Prostamp from Weihnachtsman. We wrote the paper, where the students of GZMAF were able to find out what the quality of life was. In the end, science publications published the paper, and listed three and three subjects
in the journal, with more than 16,000 students. So, we, SIPAP, have a lot of research to do. We have OMICS, Science Domain, EOS Ed. Journals, and WASSET. In the future, we will be able to work on research.
It is an industry that I have worked with a lot of people. Will our non-sensors and other people participate in this? The answers are also more than 20 years old, since they were made by the senior students. And it is not only a huge problem to have the renowned Korean-German teacher.
The students there say, they cannot go to school and when they come to school, they are not allowed to go to school. Because, of course, the students are not allowed to go to school or to school. and globally.
Cyberpads are our studio. And we are going to work again. Then these fake signs will be sent to the fake conferences. Or here, right where we are, for an international conference in London. By the World Academy of Business and Technology
will give us all three things in the conference. The first thing is a peer review from our colleague. Our next guest is King Doig, the former president of Ford. Next to the probe for the event, he won't be able to speak.
Together with my colleague, Isabella Stein, also from the University of Applied Sciences of Law, Saxony, at Himmel-Ford. And... ..we are going to talk a little bit about business opportunities.
At the beginning of the year, the largest company in the World Academy of Business started a conference in a small conference room and had a meeting with a teacher. What for? A teacher. And this meeting with a teacher, Bora Adel,
is located in the middle of the room. Our non-studio is also there, located in the conference room and in the room. Also, there is also a peer review of the review of the paper and the paper itself. And the line is, operator T and the line is operator O.
Each of them is written. In mathematics, it is written in genius language. And in Korean, it is written. The film critic, Alice Doig, has written a lot of language and books. You can find out more about the book and the user conference with a good one.
I want to make a project that must be published publicly. I don't want to know what kind of publications we have, what kind of names we have. And if we, our friends, are going to vote for us, how will we vote for them? Then let's do it. My colleague, Isabela Stein.
We'll see you later, Isabela Stein and Christian Schreiber from the Universität-Hemelpfoten. Here and now.
Computer experts are there. Any questions? Un peer review, sofa irfendlichen, den einfachen wegen. The subs are here at 10 und eine gewissen schaftler. Und der Röbstendreingefahlen auf einen der Wolklingden Konfahrensnammen. Sie wohln Rieden an unum. Honestly I'm just shocked. Erlich gesagt in ich totar schock iht.
Ich was erfruheute Morgen dar, ich habe abar aus amie niematen gesien, neue einen Tüb, der dot nuch auf Bauter und herum Wömte. What do you think the make is of the conference? I suppose they are acting on it. That's the only thing. They are making up their minds.
They are like being respectful with research. If people do not know about the university, then that is not the case. I think it is completely incomplete. Around 23.000 Euro had this conference. Was it a good conference for Bora Adil?
We were inspired by that. Was it the World Academy of Science and Technology, a very strong one? Or the Zuganov-Mere, a brainwashing machine, a platform for science and science, to develop science and science in theory, than in the gesellschaftgelang.
Else, Sarah Juss presented the warhead for the Zuganov-Mere in the Politecian Altag. One of the most fantastic, great ideologues in the world. I speak of climate change. Why does climate change? A lot of people think of it. I think it is very difficult to follow.
So why should I speak of climate change in the German and international climate politics? E.E. is the one who is currently in charge of the climate change. Limburg. Michael Limburg is the member of the Red Glide and Geist, also an expert in Brandenburg.
Michael Limburg is the president of AIC, an institute for climate and energy that is currently in charge of the climate change. For AIC, he published Michael Limburg and recently published a study about a peer-reviewed review
that presents serious problems. Those are the three things which we can work with. For the AIC, the institute is now in charge of the climate change. I am here with Glaude.
We are here today to talk about climate change. The first thing I would like to talk about is the climate change. This is the first thing that I would like to talk about. Climate change in Brandenburg. Michael Limburg is here for the climate change study.
The government of the AIC is here today to talk about the climate change. The first thing I would like to talk about is the climate change. The climate change research of the industrial industry in the city of Dauers. Michael Limburg is a student of the climate crisis
and its natural phenomena. No one knows. No one knows why. Therefore, it is important that we make sure that the temperature of this planet, the atmosphere of this planet, is correct.
When we find out, the climate crisis in the city of Dauers is now a serious, serious problem. I am a new, new student of the climate crisis because the climate crisis has been solved by the climate crisis.
Our students are now in the city of Dauers. Our students are now in the city of Dauers. We are now in the city of Dauers. Michael Limburg is a student of the climate crisis. No one knows. No one knows why.
Therefore, I am not sure. I am sure that it is up to them. And I am sure that they will be able to understand it. Students with German-German peer reviews are now in the city of Dauers. They can now manipulate. The question is also dramatic,
whether the climate crisis or the climate crisis will lead to a climate crisis. The question is, if the climate crisis will lead to a climate crisis, then it is possible that the crisis will be maximalized.
We are now in the city of Dauers and the climate crisis will lead to a climate crisis. We are now in the city of Dauers. The public concern is that the climate crisis will lead to a climate crisis.
A reactor will be sent to the city of Dauers. The farmers will be able to afford a plus-c or BMW and Airbus will be able to afford a plus-c. The students will be able to afford a little bit of money.
New York. Here you find a visit to a conference.
My colleagues and I are going to visit a conference in Hanover, where an institution will be invited to the conference. What is going on? Is it here, present here? So it is bright and fake for a long time?
We are going to meet a professor from Brazil. This is a non-scientific institution. This is a commercial institution. The institution is used to make money. Then is that here?
The institution is in Hanover. Come with your friends. Two students will be invited to the conference. It is a long time from here. We are going to visit a conference in Hanover. We are going to visit an institution and the students will be able to afford a plus-c. I think it is important to understand
what is going on here. It is public, and it is also important to understand what is going on here. We are going to visit a conference in Hanover. We are going to visit a conference in Hanover. We are going to visit a conference in New York.
For the camera, we are going to visit New York. It is a wonderful city, and it is one of the last institutes to be invited to a conference in Hanover. So that is what we are going to do.
The Institute of Public and Logistics at the University of Hanover. One of the institutes has been interviewed. Peter Niehus is the president. He is the president of the German Wissenschaft. He has released over 30,000 papers and published millions of lectures on this project.
On May 29, 2019, Mr. Niehus' name was published in his publication. I call him from New York. One hour after the first year of the conference, New York would have run away. Yes, it is pretty heavy. We are already doing things right now. I think they have changed their minds.
The organization never learned anything. So I think that's why this protest is going to be so important. It's not so that we don't have this thing in the air. The fact is that it's very important that we have it in the air, especially when it's in the middle. Again, it's in the air or that it's in the air from further.
That's why it's in the air. That's why I think that the solution is the solution. Why can't we do it? Well, it's not quite true. When I talk about reviews, especially for my publication system, is that there is no review of that? Yes.
Okay. It's very important. That's why it's important to talk about it. And the idea of a game where we have to communicate as a review paper, to talk about what we're looking for in the office. For me, it's very important not to talk about it. That's why I think it's very important to talk about it.
And the Wissenschaftler of Hanover, the New York University, is not directly related to the Institute. Why does the Wissenschaftler have to talk about it? We're talking about an R.I.D. journalist from Zütte, Deutscher Zeitung magazine
and international partner Zusammen. It's about 160,000 publications from around the world. It's a gigantic cosmos, with 400,000 Wissenschaftlers, such as Harvard and Stanford. And,
among other German universities and universities, there are... the Charité Berlin, the TU Mönchen, the Fraunhofer Gesellschaft, the R.V.T.A. and the Universität Hanover. In the past, more than 5,000 German Wissenschaftlers
have been involved in the recent fake-failure. All those who were sent to email us were not aware of the reality of the fake-failure, as one feller and wanted to solve the problem again. As that, of course, was also the case,
I'm sure, and that was very clear. But that's also why, as I said, I'm not saying anything. That's why I'm not saying anything. Of course, I'm not saying anything at all. Lindaus Ambodensee, the first Nobel Prize-trick.
Many Wissenschaftlabs, who were sent to email us, were not aware of the reality of the fake-failure. And that, of course, was the fake-failure. One in one week. Stefan Hell,
Nobel-prize-trick-me of 2014. He was right. Of course, he was right, with fake-failure emails. One in one week. When it comes to the system, and not only to the fake-failure, when it comes to fake-failure, and then, you have to do something about it.
And then, you have to do something about it. Wissenschaftlabs, who were sent to email us, were not aware of the reality of the fake-failure. Of course, he was right, with fake-failure emails. that is the fake-publication. We are sitting in our studio,
right in front of the research. Or else, you should go to a conference, one of the fake-failures. At least, I'm not sure. The series, also in the photo of the fake-failure, is not the only one in the world. We are either right, or not. The other organization,
also known for its criminal work, finds the evidence of the fake-failure. This is the truth. We must fight for it. This is the truth. There is a fake-failure, a false-failure, where we are in the house. This is the truth. There is a false-failure, where we are in the house.
And this is the truth. If we don't do it, we will lose it. Wasert made a statement, a conference in Berlin. Buhrer Adel, caseered with the 450-year-old.
In a year, Wasert made a statement, 3 million years ago. We have been waiting more for the Turkish family to come to the house. So, it is not possible to have a official office. The government has already decided to come to the house. We are waiting for the right time.
Is this science? Is this science? Why was this? You call this a scientific conference, so what is scientific about this conference? For Matika, Wasert, or the IRC? Oh, let me call the lawyer. Just let me call the lawyer. No, no, no. No, no, no. You will face it. Yeah, yeah. The general police. Buhrer Adel wanted to.
He said, he is now a small man. At the same time, no one else. He said, the consequences of fake conferences are the most important. The British government has already decided to come to the house.
In November, in London, the protests started. The government had already decided to come to the house and to present them. In the next four years, the government has already decided to come to the house and to provide the medical care to the whole city. But, of course,
the government does not want to. But the whole city, here, is already going to the house and is already in the house. The most important thing about the government is that it is going to provide the health
I'm very happy to be able to talk to you. I'm very happy to be able to talk to you. I have two tips. The first tip is to build a big channel. The second tip is to build a community with all the students and all the students. I'm very happy to be able to talk to you.
Then, to see that our existence can be maximized and understood, then I wouldn't be able to talk to you for ten years. You have to find your way around. To a world of people who live in the physical world, to see what is the most important part, and to see what is the most effective part.
We, all of you, are not alone. And you do whatever you can.
chairman, and only subtitled, we shared the link on Twitter, so if you want to share
the video, it is on my section's website, also subtitled, spread the word. I think if nobody goes there, if nobody publishes there, this is a pretty easy way to end the business model. Thank you.
We're happy to take a few questions while we clear up and before we get thrown out. There was a couple of points. We haven't figured out where all of the money went, you know, for the conferences. What else does that fund? So, there's some interesting angles to explore and we'll be digging a little bit deeper.
And if anybody asks themselves what actually happened to our terrible cancer paper with the bees, you know, because we thought, oh, we don't want this to be out in the public anymore, right? We just tried to prove a point here. So, what we did, we wrote an email to Omics saying, oh, you know what, we made some terrible mistakes
and by terrible mistakes, we mean everything. The mythology is crappy. We sent them like a whole list of stuff that is completely wrong and asked them to take the paper offline. So, guess what happened? They wanted to charge us. They said, oh, yeah, sure, you can take it offline, but we need a retraction fee, whatever that is, for 2,000 euros. So, we didn't pay, but the moment we kind of said that we were
journalists investigating their predatory publishing model, the same day, the thing was gone. So, it's no longer there, luckily, but we had to really, you know, put them under pressure with journalistic research because if we were
just normal people, then we would have to pay 2,000 euros to get the stuff removed. So, they earn money both ends. So, you know. Looks like there's a question over there. I might not be able to hear you. You may need to come a little bit further forward, but you can shout, give it a go.
No. I wish we did, but there was a lady that tweeted the Wasitwatch website yesterday and said, oh, you should have seen the scenes in Vancouver when people found out this was like a bullshit factory. So, it might be interesting to follow up with her and see what was going on, but there was also a US.gov
paper, I think, that was submitted to that conference, not the cybersecurity conference, but one of the conferences out of the 150-odd conferences held in that small room. There's another question there? Yeah, sorry. I mean,
that's vague, but yeah. So, the question is if, I guess, if papers have been published there, maybe some PhDs might be provoked. What do we think about that?
Not provoked. What's the word for it? Revoked. Yeah. It's been a long day. We actually can't tell. Maybe. I mean, all what we could do is spread the word and make this whole thing public, and we confronted many, many universities with our findings, and now it's up to them what they do.
Probably they will have to look into the specific papers whether or not they are worth of the scientific label or not. So, I think it's up to the universities in the end. Please. You say it's up to the universities.
Is there no international or national level clearing house or agency that, who's supposed to be doing this job that you guys have been doing? Who's supposed to be doing the job that us guys have been doing in, I guess, holding these folks to account, right? Yeah.
Well, to our knowledge, there is no national or international entity that controls the publication process of scientists. So, I think there needs to be more like this. It's hard to make this happen. There is a freedom of publication for scientists, and I think this is a very
important good that you can publish your study wherever you want. For us, the right peer review and scientifically on it, then it, you know, what's on it should be in it. And this is with this predatory publisher, which is not.
So, the universities, I think there is some kind of blacklisting, whitelisting going on right now, and we definitely wanted to contribute to this. And I think this could be a way, blacklisting, whitelisting, then because of our research, many universities and institutions in Germany, they do like FAQs and dos and don'ts.
So, the community right now tries to help itself, and I think this is a good solution, but we will look in one year or one and a half year, we will look again if the scientific community is able to cure this.
And, I mean, I'm not pessimistic probably. Because I think one of the, we have to understand one of the reasons why this business model is successful is because it's also a business with shame. You know, you go there as a young researcher maybe or even as an established researcher, you get your paper there, you pay the publication fee,
you go to this conference and you find out, oh damn, this is some sort of a scam. I fell for some weird deceptive business practice, but nobody knows. So, you go home, they ask you, oh, how was the conference? Do you really say, I was scammed, sorry, this was a big mistake. I actually, you know, throw away government money or funding money.
Many people don't have the guts to do this. And they just say, ah, well, it was okay-ish and try to answer in short sentences and then hope that people talk about something else. And so, this is, this is definitely a goal from our research that, that the public knows about this and that, that there's awareness about this. And I think after the publication, it's hard to say we didn't know.
And also to encourage people to come forward. We even, when you Google best presentation award, was it? Woo-hoo-hoo. So many universities give out press releases, you know, having this like, people are holding this, I got a presentation award from Wasit, because they probably were too ashamed to tell it home.
Yeah, please. Is there a model, so I see a paper that's cited, you know, published by this, this publishing company. And well, other than submitting a fake paper and having to have the garbage published.
There is a, there's an answer to that. And that is, journals do have what they call impact factors. And promotion and tenure committees do look at the impact factors when they look at the publications. But like was mentioned earlier, if they've got like 80, 90% good publications, they could slide some of these ones with lower impact factors in them.
University probably wouldn't even look at those papers to see how bad they were. Question was if there are criterias so that I can see if it's a predatory journal or not. So one answer is impact factors. So of course you can look at the impact factors if they are very low or
if they are not existent, this might be a hint. But there are also new publications or new journals out there, for example. So that there are courageous people founding a journal and making a good peer review, but they don't have an impact factor. So this is, this is not the only criterion. And it's, I, I must admit it's very hard
to definitely say this is a fake journal or something like this. What we did for our research was we had more criterias or submitting a fake paper was only one. But look at the website, is there an office or
a bureau, is, is there an address, an official address? And is it legit or is it, for example, some of them have addresses in London, but if you Google the address, it's just somebody who sells addresses, like virtual office addresses like this. There are some lists out there. There's a, there's a guy that we, that, that, that, that he's called Jeffrey Beale.
He, he did a lot of research in this and he, he published something that is called Beale's List. Where he did his own research and published and made it public, which papers and journals and, and, and conference organizers he deems predatory. So, again, there's some problem with just, you know, a single person doing this and, and having a list as a definitive list.
But this is definitely a good hint. He did some amazing job there. There's another company that's called Cabbles. They offer some black and white lists as well. They're subscription based, so they, for them it's a business model too, but. For medical paper, there's PubMed. Yeah. And there's also a white listing in India, so that, what we did for the research was looking at different white lists, black lists from the country.
It's, it's a hard job to, to, to find that out. It, it's a hard job for, for scientists, for journalists. But, but I think with these companies we researched, I think you, you can be pretty sure for these companies. Yeah. If it's Omics, or Wasit, or Science Demand, or SIPAP, you're pretty.
For Omics, there you have the FTC investigating this. For Wasit the CUNY case, there's also investigation going on in New York. So, this is also a hint for a predatory publisher, please.
That's true, yeah. It could run all day, every day, if you like. There was a question over there, first that guy had his hand up a while ago. Absolutely.
Sure. Sure, in London, for example, at the conference, there, there was a guy, he was really funny. He was from India, and, and he was pretty frank and honest.
And he was a professor, so I think he, he did not have anything to lose. We asked him, and he said, of course, I know this is a fake conference, but anybody, anybody from India has to see London one time. So, of course, yeah, yeah. There are people using the system, of course there are, but.
And if you have like 29 publications there you should probably be a little, a little bit suspicious about, about the practice. But the thing is, I mean, when we submitted our fake cancer paper there, we got some comments. They were super, superficial, you know. I mean, this paper was full of mistakes. We just presented a few of them here, but it was really,
we, we wrote it with the purpose of being discovered, in a way, and we did not. So, the comments we, we got back were so superficial, that we thought this is absolutely no proper peer review. But if you are like a scientist who considers the research great, you know. You think you, you did an amazing job.
And the, the only review you get after two days, which should raise some eyebrows, I agree, but, but then those only comments are, this is an amazing paper. You should just maybe change one, one, one sub headline somewhere. You think, oh, I did a good job. So many people don't, don't have maybe the self-criticism to see that this is not a proper peer review.
Please. Yes, very, very good question. After how big is was that and how many people are working there.
So, we went to three Vassar conferences, and we had these international partners. So, I don't know, not how many Vassar conferences we went in total, but probably six or eight with, you know, in South Korea and, and then several other places, and we think yes, it's a family business.
And Bora is doing Europe. We spotted him in Europe, in Copenhagen, in Berlin, in London. Then we're thinking his father, Chaimal, he's doing Asia and also Turkey, and then they have some kind of franchise in the US, so this was not a family member we met in New York. And we're thinking the daughter maybe is doing the books or something.
So she's doing the work behind. So it's a, it's a very, very small company. And I think they can be a small company because they, there's not so much work to do. It's. So all that Bora was doing at the conferences we went to was really literally just sitting outside the conference room collecting money and giving out name tags.
I left his laptop unlocked all the time, by the way. And you, you know, you just upload your presentation on a USB stick, so you just, maybe I shouldn't have said that. Oh no, it's no problem. These guys, they had a funny story when they, you know, they they worked with these 23 different media partners, and I think there was one conference
where there were a whole bunch of people presenting their bullshit papers at the same conference, but none of them knew that the other, so. It was like a full conference of bullshit papers by these. They're like, are you a journalist? Are you, are you a journalist? Yeah. It was hard to tell. Who was the, please.
Have we talked to who, sorry? Tax authorities. The tax authorities. I, I, have we talked to the tax authorities? I don't know what the U.S. tax authorities are, but I did notify the the FTC and the FBI and figured at some point maybe they'd get around to something like that.
And I did that in a few countries as, as, as well, not just the U.S., but like Canada, where they were having conferences last year and, and so on. So folks are aware about it. Yeah, there's a question there.
Sorry, I didn't, I didn't.
So is, was the question correct me if I'm wrong, but you know, have we looked into how to deal with the sort of the avalanche of spam that academics are getting from these various publishers? And how many people are responding and what sort of people are responding?
I'm, I've not looked, have you guys looked in that? No, it's, it's hard to tell. I mean, we kind of think that most people who end up publishing there have, at some degree, responded to those spam emails that most academics know. And we received in bulk after we, we made those fake institutions and, and, and all these kind of things.
So we were also wondering who would reply to that. But actually those spam emails, they really vary in sophistication. Some of them are just, hi, you researcher, you want published, this great. So, okay. But some of them were really like giving the, the, the correct titles, citing some work that we have done, saying, oh, we,
we read that you did some work on cancer. Do you want to do this and this and this? So, this, some of them don't really look like your just really normal spam. And, and again, if you don't suspect people to be that, that evil, if you don't suspect predatory publishers to exist. You could think this is a legitimate request for, for publication.
You think, oh, they discovered my greatness. Finally somebody found out what great research I'm doing and they invite me to publish. Oh yeah, great, I want to do this. So some, some people definitely fall for this, for this reason. And I mean, I didn't get an email invite. I, I Googled it. You know, it's like political psychology. I wasn't aware of this. It's like, I'll look for a conference that looks kind of legit, looked exactly like an IEEE conference, so I wasn't on the wiser.
So, yeah, I guess people are searching and maybe finding the conferences that way too. I mean, we, we did eventually get all of the stuff removed. Once we started talking about it with journalists, things went pretty quickly. And then like a couple of weeks ago, we uploaded a, a,
the full paper to a, a pre-pub server, osf.io and we'll be, you know, submitting the paper for the whole peer review process. Please.
Yes, yes, we, we, in, in the US, this is the first, yeah, this, you are the first who, who hear about this, we, we, we have.
Who was the lady you mentioned? Rachel Maddow. Rachel Maddow. MSNBC. MSNBC, no, I don't, I don't know, have we? Yes, we, we teamed up with the New Yorker because the writer there,
he already did a story about this this fake predatory, also, yes. Yeah, okay, yeah. Yeah, we, we will probably come off, yeah, and write it,
write it down, because we, you know, Germany, far away from the US, and. We worked together, so Mother Jones picked up the research that we did. And there is an institution, an amazing one that you all should support. It's the International, the ICIJ, International Consortium for Investigative Journalism. They supplied us with some, some help, connecting with other journalists, and
they gave us some technical infrastructure where we could share findings on an encrypted basis so that not, not everyone could, could read that, the work that we were doing. So, and this is an American institution too, so they work together with American. But it's, especially for the US, there's, there is lots of research what can be done. Especially if you want to follow cases like the Mallinckrodt case or
if you want to follow all the CO2 collision case. Because we, we did not research these cases until the end. Or the governmental cases. And we, we wanted to leave, you know, something special for Def Con. So we were kind of, we didn't want to have too much information in the US before Def Con. And so we were constantly worried that all this might just kick off.
And, you know, so please don't, and, and so. Yeah, now we're, we're happy for it to be broad. Yes, please. Also, I, I spoke, spoke with our legal person from the station before
Def Con because this definitely is a GitHub project. It's, it's private, but he did not want to cover for this. So, I, I would have loved to make this private project public here. This would, would have been great.
So, but, but, you know, as these companies, especially Omics, they're really willing to fight. So, so I could not release it. But, I mean, if there's a researcher who really is interested in doing this, then just, you know, give me a shout out, so maybe you can do something. Yeah, it's pretty straightforward. So, if, if somebody happened to do that and put it out there.
Please. Oh, that's awesome. That would be a good idea. That's the follow up.
Thanks for that. I know. All right. We should come up with a name. That's the next challenge, though. The International Journal of Bullshit. That would be my suggestion. I, J, B. MBS. Yeah, MBS. Correct, yeah. Okay. All right.
Thanks so much for this. This has been a pleasure.