Ivan Oransky
speaker
46 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jan 2025
last heard Jan 2025
Ivan Oransky’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
So, and I would just, not so much as a correction, but just to say that, yes, Mark Tessier-Levine was defenestrated as president. He remains, at least at the time of this discussion, a tenured professor at Stanford, which is a pretty nice position to be in.
I've been quoted saying that the most likely career path or the most likely outcome for anyone who has committed misconduct is a long and fruitful career. And I mean that because it's true. Because most people, if they're caught at all, they skate. The number of cases we write about, which, you know, grows every year, but is still a tiny fraction of what's really going on.
Dan Ariely, we interviewed Dan years ago about some questions in his research. Duke is actually, I would argue, a little bit of a singular case. really bad, significant misconduct.
So I got to be honest, and, you know, people in Durham may not like me saying this, but I think Duke has a lot of work to do to demonstrate that their investigations are complete and that they are doing the right thing by research dollars and for patients.
People are now really fixated on what are known as paper mills. So if you think about the economics of this, right— It is worthwhile if you are a researcher to actually pay. In other words, it's an investment in your own future to pay to publish a certain paper. What I'm talking about is literally buying a paper or buying authorship on a paper.
So to give you a little bit of a sense of how this might work, You're a researcher who is about to publish a paper. So, you know, doesn't it at all have got, you know, some interesting finding that you've actually written up and a journal has accepted. It's gone through peer review. And you're like, great. And that's good for you.
But you actually also want to make a little extra money on the side. So you take that paper that essentially it's not a paper. It's really still a manuscript. You put it up on a brokerage site or you put the title up on a brokerage site. You say, I've got a paper where, you know, there are four authors right now.
It's going into this journal, which is a top tier or mid tier, whatever it is, et cetera. It's in this field. If you would like to be an author, you, The bidding starts now or it's just, it's $500 or 500 euros or wherever it is. And then Ivan Oransky comes along and says, I need a paper. I need to get tenure. I need to get promoted. Oh, great. Let me click on this, you know, brokerage site.
Let me give you $500. And now all of a sudden you write to the journal. By the way, I have a new author. His name is Ivan Oransky. He's at New York University. He just joined late, but he's been so invaluable to the process.
Often they don't know about it, or at least they claim they don't know about it.
They do. I mean, there are a couple different versions of fraudulent with a lowercase f publications. There are publications that are legit in the sense that they can point to doing all the things that you're supposed to do as a journal. You have paper submitted. You do something that looks sort of like peer review. You assign it what's known as a digital object identifier.
You do all that publishing stuff. And they're not out and out fraudulent in the sense of they don't exist and people are just making it up or they're trying to, you know, use a name that isn't really theirs. But they're fraudulent with lowercase f in the sense that they're not doing most of those things.
Then there are actual what we refer to, we and Anna Abelkina, who works with us on this, as hijacked journals. We have more than 200 on this list now. They were at one point legitimate journals. So it's a real title. that some university or funding agency or et cetera will actually recognize. But what happened was some version of the publisher sort of forgot to renew their domain.
I mean, literally something like that. Now, there are more nefarious versions of it, but it's that sort of thing where, you know, these really bad players are inserting themselves and taking advantage of the vulnerabilities in the system, of which there are many,
to really print money, because then they can get people to pay them to publish in those journals, and they even are getting indexed in the places that matter.
Well, I think what it tends to correlate with is how direct or intense the publisher parish culture is in that particular area. And generally, that varies more by country or region than anything else. If you look at, for example, the growth in China of number of papers published, what's calculated is the impact of those papers which relies on things like how often they're cited.
You can trace that growth very directly from government mandates. For example, if you publish in certain journals that are known as high impact factor, you actually got a cash bonus that was a sort of multiple of the number of the impact factor. And that can make a big difference in your life.
So Hindawi's business model was they're an open access publisher, which usually means you charge authors to publish in your journal and you charge them, you know, it could be anywhere from hundreds of dollars to even thousands of dollars per paper. And they're publishing, you know, tens of thousands and sometimes even more papers per year. So you can start to do that math.
What happened at Hindawi was that somehow paper mills realized that they were vulnerable. So they started targeting them. They've actually started paying some of these editors to accept papers from their paper mill. And long story short, they now have had to retract something like, we're still figuring out the exact numbers when the dust settles, but in the thousands.
It's a volume play. And when you're owned by shareholders who want growth all the time, that is the best way to grow. And these are businesses with, you know, very impressive and enviable profit margins of, you know, sometimes up to 40%. And these are not on small numbers. The profit itself is in the billions often.
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