Like moths to a flame (the buck stops with the Ph.D.)

 

Over the past two decades, numerous organizations appeared in academic publishing that promise "respect" and "reputation"—if you only use their paid services. Such organizations that request money (while begging for donations on top of it) to stamp the already Ph.D.-ed scholar's work and thus "approve" her/him for a happy personal future include the infamous reputation-seller DOI, respect-seller directory DOAJ, integrity-seller COPE, professionalism-seller OASPA, and many other sellers and re-sellers (too many to count)... But what is common to all these crooks and their schemes is the duping networks they create via which they support—each other. In that way, the con artists appear even more high-class as they shamelessly promise credibility, consistency, permanency, and what have you not—to and through their paying members.

Why is all this elitism just plain laughable (we were going to say sad, but that is the case only if you're uninitiated in this "business")? For in science, the only academic (and legal) criterion for validating a scientific research result is that the author held a Ph.D. from an accredited institution in the area of the research—as it is only that very Ph.D. researcher who creates real value in the entire world of academia! (Now you know why there are no post-Ph.D. committees—because they would be illegal.) No additional criteria are needed or legal, including schemes like impactfactormania, politicking, and reputation market deals. In science, the buck stops with the Ph.D.

As for the credibility of the aforesaid organized crime syndicate that pretends in the role of post-Ph.D. committees who want to judge science based on made-up (illegal) criteria and imagined (illegal) products: the same as money can't buy you respect, as evidenced by countless real-life examples, a DOI number is not permanent (it becomes useless as soon as the website, hosting the linked-to paper, goes down) nor useful (any among 100s of free URL shorteners like Bitly or TinyURL will do the same trick—of forwarding one imagined URL to another working URL) nor omnipresent (for instance, ARK has seen 9+ billion installations vs. 240 million DOI's).

Talking about capitalism's top-of-the-hill madhouse that the academic community (STEM more than any other) has voluntarily turned itself in(to). Like moths to a flame, or, as some would say, sheep heading for the slaughterhouse, amused by the escaping sounds. For it's all bleat, all right—except they had never heard that much of it. "Oh, look!"—happy are the sheep—"It's a new playhouse, surely for guys like us!"

 

The Journal of Geophysics