Exactly.

The editors DON'T get any financial reward whether papers are published or not. They are supposed to be independent. Hence, these scammers are apparently targeting editors and bribing them with an incentive.

Then this decision is usually sent on to the journal staff who handle the publication itself. And charge publication fees. But, the peer review process is usually handled by the editor (usually unpaid).

The publishers would definitely not approve of editors taking bribes. The editors are independent of the publishers. They decide which manuscripts get sent for peer review, which reviewers are invited & the final decision to reject, or approve for publication after major/minor revisions.

FYI, Prof. Tol is the editor-in-chief of the journal. He is NOT "the publisher" (that's Elsevier - one of "the big 5"). I haven't spoken to him - just reading his Substack. But, it seems he decided to reply to the unsolicited invitation & see how far it went.

www.sciencedirect.com/journal/ener...

The "$5k price" was him pretending it was the minimum bribe he would accept. The scammer said, yes, we'll be willing to Paypal you that much for each paper... and we could send you up to 500 per year. (i.e., it was a good price)

Again, this is a bribe to the editor. Separate from any journal fees.

I gather he was following along with the scammers to see how far they were prepared to go. When the scammers submitted the first paper, this confirmed it was a serious "enterprise". He never took any money or approved any papers, but played along until then. Apparently, he's reporting real-time.

By the way, that $5k would have been direct PayPal to the editor & separate from any publication fees for the journal. It was a bribe to get him to approve for publication "after minor revisions" whatever manuscript was sent to him ($5k/paper).

Plus:
"Do manuscripts need real data?"
"Nah."

From what I can tell, the scammers are being paid by "co-authors" trying to boost their resume with multiple "peer-reviewed papers" in high profile journals.

Being a co-author on a paper in an IF=13.6 journal is great for your CV (translation: dishonest people would pay scammers good money for it)

I get what you're saying. I think though, if we compare to the proposed D-K effect, it's probably more the inverse of D-K. That is, experts overestimating the ability (or rather in this case, knowledge base) of non-experts.

I think it dovetails quite well with "imposter syndrome" though... 🤔

Indeed...

Currently, I'm at stage 3... 🙈😉

Got it! Yes, I see it in the feed now - it must have just been slow to update. "The site is under stress at the moment". Gotcha! Looking at the recent dramatic uptick in BSky membership, I can understand why! Thanks, Manu!

bsky.app/profile/rona...