Mary Childs

It needs to be a big institution with a website with tons of famous people on it.

And when you send the email, people will be like, what the hell is this thing?

I need to respond.

It's legit.

A friend of mine, his wife did the logo for free, like a design, like, you know, I mean, like just bare bones.

He recruits some serious, famous economists for the board to put on his legit looking website.

And pretty soon he does start to get responses to some of his emails.

He's able to get some data sets and coding packages.

And he convinces some colleagues and junior researchers to start doing some replications one by one in exchange for a co-author credit on one big paper.

It's like an IRS for the ivory tower.

So then I thought, okay, we need to mass reproduce journals.

So then I was like, okay, I need to get maybe a few hundred replications or reproductions per year.

So now I'm thinking, how do you do that?

The answer, Abel says, came to him kind of by accident.

Around the time he got his Potemkin website up and running, he got an unrelated invitation to a conference in Oslo, to a couple of seminars.

He was planning his trip about a month ahead of time, and he noticed that he had seminars on a Wednesday and on a Friday.

And I thought, like, what the hell am I going to do on Thursday?

Like, I've never been to Oslo.

I'm sure it's pretty and nice.

But a full day, like, I'm going to walk around and then I'm going to have, like, six, eight hours just to relax.