James Heathers will fix Wiley’s problems for less than 3.7 million dollars (that is, 2,553,739 Jamaican beef patties, 47,064 whisky-sodden meals at Newark airport, or nearly 218 invites to a conference featuring Gray Davis, Grover Norquist, and a rabbi)

The data thug quotes from: an April 2023 post from the EVP of Research at Wiley: In September 2022, Wiley identified and immediately alerted the industry to paper mill activity we found operating at scale. Specifically, we found fraudulent outside editors that had subverted our processes and workflows, leading to a proliferation of bad content. This scheme hit Hindawi’s Special Issues program hard. For those who are unfamiliar with academic publishing: Wiley is a long-established firm. Back when I was a student, Wiley was perhaps considered the #1 publisher within statistics. They published Feller’s classic books on probability, Cochran’s classics on design of experiments and survey sampling, and many other standard texts. In recent decades, as with other academic publishers, they’ve branched out into other publishing-related businesses, for example, Hindawi, which has a habit of filling your inbox with spam about dodgy journals. From Wikipdia: “In 2023 and after over 7000 article…