 Inside the fake science factories, that's the next talk, and I was reading about this and I was asking myself, is in Himmelfochten a university or a university of applied sciences and it's both or neither. It's not really sure, but there are scientists who come from these institutions. Isabella Stein, she's a doctoral student. She invented a mob algorithm who improves compact technologies and trees and she also got a prize for best talk when she introduced the algorithm. Then there was a Dr. Err-Hunden invented. He's a fellow of the David Copperfield Society and our winner of the Pinocchio Award and an Origela fellow in advanced spoon bending. Well, okay, I made this just up, but you know the people who are responsible for those avatars are Svea Eckhardt, Till Krause and Peter Hornung and what they did and what that has to do with science and why they had to think about this rubbish. They are going to tell you right now. Give a big hand for Inside the Fake Science Factory. Thank you. It's nice that we can be here this morning. My name is Svea Eckhardt. I'm working as an investigative journalist at the MDR in real life. My name is Peter Hornung and I'm also working as an investigative journalist and my name is Till Krause and I work as an editor at Süddeutsche Zeitung Magazin and also working on investigative journalism and one is missing the one who started it all under the name Dr. Dave Murphy that is Chris Sumner. He is an IT security expert and a hacker, I think I can say that and he's unable to come today because of some issues with the family, but he thinks about us right now. Why do we want to talk about this topic? Why is this important to us? Well, science influences us in so many ways that we don't even think about it in political decisions and how we behave and what products we buy and where does money go that goes to science. Often the base for our decisions are scientific studies or scientific results so it shapes our understanding of the world in a very very strong way and we love science. We really really love science and that's the reason why we said okay we have we have to think about those fake science factories. We have to look at these in detail and we have to uncover that. It started all in this Somali room. The man with the circle around the head that is Chris who cannot be here today and he is an IT security expert and he works in an organization who works a lot about privacy and he does a lot of studies and tries to make it to understand the world in a better way and he presents the studies at congresses and at events and he thought oh well I did a decent study here with some some fellows and I just go to Copenhagen and present this on yes present the studies that we did and it all looked very very well prepared and very to be taken seriously and then he found himself in this room this was the conference and from those about 10 people each one had had a different background so there was political science physicists people from geology no one understood what the other really did it was a really really weird event and not at all something that he had experienced at a conference before and so he thought like something is wrong here and he came onto a phenomenon that that existed before until it's going to talk you know predatory publishing exactly so predatory publishing so a periodist who steal this is a term that was coined by a librarian Jeffrey Beale and what he describes companies that hunt scientists and well steal from them they are burglars and by this they steal the most important value of science which is their credibility and we have here a nice formula from Albert Einstein euro equals mc square something that looks like science is going to be used for financial purposes so these companies these people who give these conferences but also people who publish journals that publish scientific journals they just skip the basic quality control of science they just publish everything they you send them without reviewing it and without the classical reviewing process of science and with this they publish these unreviewed scientific papers or non scientific papers so who in this room has ever published something who has experience with publishing well i see there's a quite a lot of people that's very good and nonetheless i will explain for the rest of you and how this basic process typically works so typically you start by submitting a study that is going to be checked by an editor and this editor then decides whether the study will be reject because it might be redundant or because it doesn't contain anything new or because it's just poorly made if this is not the case this editor sends it to the peer reviewers and this peer review process is the most important part about this whole process peer review basically is a control mechanism that where scientists check other scientists work so in conferences typically there are specialists who know the field very well and if you publish something on a conference there are people who check it and they ask themselves whether it makes sense and so this peer review process is not perfect again and again things go wrong in this process so typically the big publishers have a very strange model of with this academic publishing and they hide everything behind paywalls but well anyways the this peer review process is definitely not perfect there are a lot of things to work on but nonetheless it's the gold standard we've been working with so peer review this process many friends of mine who work on it in the academic context really suffer from it you constantly have to work on it you have to improve but at the end of the day it's for now the best we have to check our scientific work and we go back and forth and back and forth and if you finally get to it you can publish this your study with the predatory journals this system works quite differently you submit some you try to submit something you get some superficial comments and then you pay for it and then it's accepted now this process is something where you have to pay something to publish is something that happens in the normal in the in the good scientific context but these predatory journals just publish without checking the scientific papers and it's just a giant scam and this is what we wanted to check is this really the case that you can just publish whatever you want and we need to help from these two friendly people these are Isabella Stein and Christian Treibermer and we just invented a university the University of Appliance scientists and of oversexity at Himmelporten it's a little town between in Bremen and another city and with those two scientists we started our first action or sting operation our first trying to publish we tried to just write a paper and it was this paper you can see here and of course we have to see it's it's very simple to find out that this university Himmelporten does not exist and we took these names to publish this paper please don't also was it says it's just pure nonsense one sentence is not feed to the other sentence it's just gibberish I've read it many times but I nonetheless still don't understand it it originated from the iGEM and it was a joke from the students of the MIT and you just have to type in some words and you get something that you want and we submitted it in the world academy for science and technology and we went to a conference in London we had quite when quite quickly we had very superficial comments and like some comments here a comma there but nobody actually read it I mean we went then to this conference with this presentation as you can see here everybody understands what this is about it's a clear topic so and we actually filmed this how it actually was in London and this is a quickly cropped together my colleague Isabella Stein also from from our university of applied sciences see here now is the relationship between our solution and the analysis of the memory bus this is memory bus and here on the bottom and the top and all of this as again we would need a theory of like trees but we were pausing of that solution we used the 90s nintendo game boy across the sensor network which means the more pressure you give on the system the higher the scalability gets and that's what we wanted to achieve and how would our system behave it's in here and that you all know this single particular is in reflection on potentiality of the greek philosopher platoon thank you so you can clearly see that the setting where this happens it's a darkened hotel room at the fringe of london with just a couple of people from different disciplines who did not really understand what what happens there yeah and we were thinking like well even if there's a someone from chemistry or from maths okay now now we're going to be uncovered so now now it's over now they're going to to see okay or even the the people who organized the conference would say okay this is not the resides but we just went out we got an email and we're like okay now it happens now now they get us and we got the best presentation award well you know we really were so happy about this and there were a couple of days where we just just stared at this and talked with other people from those conferences and he said yeah well i also got this email and just wanted to download it and so i think everyone just gets the best presentation award who was there it's not public and so no one just knows that everyone got this and then you can go to your university or to your company and say hey look at this i performed really well there um yeah you can even google this if you uh if you make a backwards search on the image on google image search you will find at least 50 pages where people really proudly present this well who's behind all this well this is really a big money printing machine so someone who who worked along those teams uh and who uh know a lot about multigo he did some investigations so maybe some people know about multigo it's it's a tool where you can use where you can do a open source intelligence research and here you can see okay behind this was it conference there's a couple of websites and at the end there's two people behind this borah adil and cema adil that's two people who you find at the at the end of um all those threats cema adi you really find him on linkedin and yeah we were on a lot of those conferences and colleagues of us in asia cema adil does the asia part of it and borah adil we met him twice in london i don't know once in berlin and once in london there he is yeah well and it's really interesting because they registered a lot of names of fake conferences so even if a website goes down or if a website is being hacked they just can go to a different domain and just transfer their business to a different domain and i mean if you just look at the world academy and we um sum it up that's what we have 13 events and 13 um cities every month that's 13 000 conferences uh per month and that's because every single one of them on two days is in 50 disciplines with 20 conference names per discipline so you can register or you can just choose from thousands of conference names so even if there are 30 or 50 people in the room so it's it's really not likely that everyone's on the same event even uh they get a document with a different name on it of a conference so they have in the year 157 events 48 cities and 35 countries and 156 000 conferences and so we think voset makes around four million euro in a year with absolutely minimal costs so well all of this is just strange and funny and we can say okay there's just some damage for some people but what's the larger damage behind this and so this is we were looking at how how can this system of fake journals and fake conferences where nobody checks what so yeah what was the most evil way to abuse this system so if we'd be evil money makers what would we do and we came to the example that through these journals we can just publish cancer therapies that are just useless but as we pretend it's scientific we can just sell it for people who suffer from a horrible disease and that are just go for every straw of hope so we were wondering a magic potion against cancer and we came to the solution that bees are nice we like bees bees are super can they cure cancer well we're not sure but i mean who really knows or probably not and this is really the problem in this whole context you really don't know what is real and what is not so we founded an institute a call for cancer research and we generated a twitter account that just retweeted anything this institute after founding it we we founded this institute and we wrote a study and we submitted this to a journal and from our research we said okay that should be the second largest player in there so it's a journal of integrative oncology it's actually an oncology journal and at first glance it it looks it looks rather to be taken seriously and we submitted our study there which is really so stupid so damn stupid from first glance you would see it's not science so we again were working with the university it doesn't exist so anything we said in there we say that bee be wax should have a larger effect against cancer than any chemotherapy in existence we devised an arrangement for an experiment which was so our design was just we're asking people as we asked them as many questions until they say okay now i'm really feeling better just to get rid of the questions and well and we said also well well bees cannot get the cancer of the colon so they should be absolutely valid as a cure against cancer of the colon and then we also wrote about how funny bees are and they fly around and that's also an indicator because they have such a joy life so much and that's also an indicator that they help against cancer and we also invented a book that we cited on that and we had it in our literature list just because bees are beautiful all of that is correct but the book we actually cited is a children's book it had excellent reviews on amazon but it was not as great as a scientific source so well we thought like okay that this was really really too much so we just it was so you absolutely rubbish that we went what we put in there just diagrams of equal circles and stuff like that so you don't even need to be an expert to to really say this is just junk and and shortly after we got a review that this was an important evidence and this is really really to be taken seriously and the bio 1990 m so that's what we called our our cure that we thought about and and the only questions that we got was can you just clarify what this abbreviation s itf means well we couldn't really explain it but because we just invented it and we wrote it means signal infusion transfer function or something on those slides and that was okay for them and the paper was accepted and what it was published we also got an invoice for that for 2000 euro that we had to pay they wrote us on twitter and on all channels that they had that we absolutely had to pay this invoice we just ignored that and it even it went online in spite of that so professor dr funden professor dr and went in german so also has his first publication and we also think as soon as you're in this treadmill of fake science it really it really gets going so we also got got emails from lots of fake science publishers do you want to give a keynote on a brass brass cancer conference on paris if you just don't want to if you want to be an editor a publisher of another fake science journal so our stupid just made up institute just took a couple of weeks to get a scientific publication to to impersonate an editor of a cancer journal and we could also have done a speech on cancer on a conference so if our goal had been just to sell people our absolutely useless treatment on the internet now we could have the stamp on it that is scientifically valid that's how you can buy a reputation and well lots of serious scientists wouldn't wouldn't have believed us but that's not that's on the point it's uh it's about um faking things and getting money from desperate patients yes and this experiment really would have been really funny if it wasn't so sad and the interesting thing about this is really normally you would say these these journals i mean it's obvious that they are fake but the border is not really clear many people run to there to publish hence it's not really clear that it's bad science like this for example this is uh not funny this uh medicine was originates from scientific endeavors of the japanese um and it's fake uh nonetheless this medicine is produced as this magical potion against cancer um and in in england it's actually being sold as medicine but in germany as a supplement for food and this is not an emoke who works talks about this from eight nations have written 150 scientific research papers on gcmf 200 scientists but we have written 32 of them here in uh clear immune they clearly advertise with the study twice a week and after three weeks i started to feel less tired it isn't um something that's um you know just quackery it is scientifically backed this is exactly the the issue scientifically backed they claim it's science those are different publication um in this journal where we also published uh our b story this is all just fake uh we uh in famous german scientists looked at it and she uh claims these studies are really bad um but unfortunately for uh non-scientists it's impossible to differentiate this if you don't have ecological training you can't under you you can't see this and with these studies they advertise this product and they say we have here these studies and it shows that this is a good medicine here just follow up um david noakes was actually imprisoned by a child by english court and he got 15 months and his company was also child and he got they so but um they didn't care about the studies that that were actually fake that were behind this so we thought we have to look at the the whole of it uh it doesn't it's not enough looking at the details and so we packed uh five um five of them this way said and five others for others that we thought were relevant for europe and we just submitted a lot of papers and all of those computer generated nonsense papers we did them and some colleagues of us they did them from from different countries and of course we got accepted everywhere so we confronted them and they said no comment or they said um i know we're not really evil uh or the best thing well the authors are responsible we just a platform so yeah well that sounds familiar to find out who publishes there on those fake science publishers we thought like okay the other days the data is public so we just scrape the data from the websites here's an example and just to see who actually publishes there so is this just um fake healers uh yeah well who is it well i'll show you at then at one example how does it work so here we see the was it website it's that's step one for scraping process you just look at the websites and see okay how is it structured how does it work how is it linked and at what set we see okay there are the abstracts and uh that's really practical because you can get them in a lot of different file formats jason pdf xml file and that's cool because you can get a lot of metadata and information pretty easy from there so here's an id number and yeah well the next step was that we just took the abstracts uh downloaded them and well we just counted them basically that was the first thing they would have how large is that so what it has back then in june it had around 62 000 abstracts on the website and publications and the next step is there is metadata so we have title author date and some other markers country for example that we looked at and well those data we sorted them and put them in one giant file so that's a csv file you can do this more elegantly and if you well you can do it manually if you don't want to manually then you can use scrappy or scraping hub that's a platform that's a nice framework for helping you or what which makes this relatively easy just to scrape such websites the nice thing is at scraping that the process of downloading and sorting it it does it in one step and we just get a nice jason file and this file we can put it into a database and using different programs to analyze that so of course we used excellent one step in the process um tableau was was really really helpful and link couriers to see networks in there and how things branch that's the tools that we used so how we process those data and then we just try to find out who's publishing there and here we have some stats for you and here you can see omics and was it are the big players in there so we have almost 180 000 abstracts 400 000 authors yes so papers don't usually have one author they have several authors and there's was it with around 60 000 uh a little smaller and we also oh wait wait wait omg is signs in danger that was the first thing we thought yeah well then we thought like oh both those are really large numbers and we thought like ah is signs in danger right now well well yes and no if we compare it to regular scientific journals with the publications there um so if you take the the the complete number of uh scientists eight million uh in the world uh and even if we if we filter out duplicates we just have we say okay um publications and predatory journals are not really that much and besides the idea of signs well there's also fake healers uh in there so it's just to get the rough frame what does 400 000 names mean but what what what what triggered us in our research was what this graph where we said okay how did this develop in the the past 10 years and so we could get the month and the year from from the scraping process and then we saw oh well it increases so starting from around 2013 or 14 it's even more public more and more publications on those um platforms and apparently there's a demand for it so people are publishing there there's a demand so we have to to uh public publish our results then we looked at the countries we say uh Great Britain uh leading Italy France um Germany 1800 abstracts but well that's 5000 authors and you have to think about that's only those fake publishers we looked at so I think there's a lot of more German scientists effected because of course there's a lot of more fake science publishers so we also looked at institutions and I was at 229 from the Hanofa University a pretty uh in the top group uh Fraunhofer Gesellschaft in there well why Aachen and Nova they have a lot of technical uh science topics and and it's it's mostly technical faculties that are publishing at those fake science um publishers and almost there are lots lots of people from medicine they don't have a lot of medicine at those universities so if you only look at the medicine the ranking would be different and if you look at the company of the Germany universities it says it's good companies so we have looked at um elitist universities um they have lots of medicine and because they have a pressure to publish and then well just to get an idea how the how the how it looks as a whole now look let's look at some particular cases for example this guy um he looks like an important scientist is Bernd Schultz writer he's the director of the University of Bremen um he was a member of the DFG and he published uh uh in one of the journals we had also tried to publish and here's there uh several uh papers where he's the first author and if he said uh i confronted with it he said i he didn't know he didn't understand um and here we have another example it's not the physicist to the right but uh the scientist to the left uh it's Aaron Cranper he is from the Arviteha Aachen um he uh also published a street scooter he had built with one of our favorite publishers and we also have this one um i'm not sure whether you still remember who he is um here there on the uh uh left lower corner he's the former president of the uh of iran why what are the reasons um so the first reason is pretty obvious um it's just a scam uh scientists are being scammed the second reason um is the publication pressure there's this motto publish or perish um there's this pressure on scientists to publish everything uh they uh they discover and with uh the good journals it often takes many months or sometimes even years and it just takes quite a long time and this is why you take the easy route and another reason is this a career doping um one thing is like pressure um but another reason is um so imagine you're in this situation you have a project um uh we have a project that that starts and we have several people um and we it just looks better if uh several papers are connected with this project if it's cumulative there are often uh some that affect it so what do scientists say to it um we asked many of them um the university of Hanover sensibilization for the topic just it comes uh with some time um the only brain man said something that uh only upon uh reading the published statements we understand how big the problem is the university of frankfurter they are looking into it and uh we asked a doctor from the university of the Saarland um well what do you say uh if somebody publishes this and he says well it's just really really bad so why is it important so we've had that uh scientists uh look around uh but also magical healers uh so researching with our database um we found many uh email addresses from uh big companies and this is something we had not considered before we thought it was something inside the universities um that it's based on scam emails and career doping but actually also big companies global players use this concept uh to show themselves to establish themselves as a scientifically base and actually from the german um stock uh biggest stock exchange the ducks we found that 12 of the 30 companies actually published there one of them for example here is big pharma company uh buyer um that published there um but these uh pharma companies actually use uh these fake journals um as a short way to publish um here they publish something about uh aspirin um about this aspirin uh plus c in the same journal as we published our lovely paper about the bees and they actually just claim in this um study that it has a better effect than a placebo and well i mean it's it's a weird comparison of course aspirin plus c works stronger than a placebo uh because there is aspirin in it but it would be way more interesting to actually see whether aspirin plus c works better than aspirin um but they actually didn't ask this question we uh asked other scientists to take a look at it uh and they all said uh in a in a serious journal you you couldn't publish this it's just absolutely impossible um or other people said like from the stiftung variant test that addition of vitamin c is just nonsensical um so the sign of tc communications are really not serious um especially not for other scientists and the question now is why um do you actually do this and it's not about uh scamming scientists but it's about scamming the public um if you type in for example aspirin plus c into google then you actually find pretty quickly the study that directly relates you um to this study so the question now is if you buy aspirin plus c that it's typically cost the double um as the normal aspirin so um we have a comparison um and of course you go then for the more expensive because you can't really compare um so this is a long tradition just to lie to the public um especially with scientific studies or studies that look scientific if you remember the discussion about um smoking could be healthy or cancer has a lot of a lot of um origins and passive smoking is not not as harmful as we thought so there's a long tradition in the tobacco industry and they publish a lot um they they they publish on those less harmful products so and they make a um deliberate advertisement for that it's it's less harmful and all of those studies just land or um appear at those publishers and it's just one study it's a lot of them and there's um regulars at the conferences they they keep on appearing there and there's there's others if you look at illsie that's a think the think tank um paid by coca cola and mcdonald's and they send the experts there talking about child obesity and nutrition and there is a classical um this fear answer to the doubt thing at work and something that goes unchecked and unreviewed into public um also if you look at climate change denial so if you look at the co2 coalition they work together with the trump administration in the united states you find them again in germany it's the ikea institute which is close to the afd party and they publish their thesis that climate change is not man a man made and that mainstream science um is um to be doubted and they also go to the local parliaments um so uh they count they might even council at um at local uh local parliaments and say okay they have their studies we have our studies so they just um sew the seed of doubt in there and if you look so we have our own rubbish published in the same very same publisher that ike published with uh twice well that means yeah of course these are here critical infrastructure so companies who are um have to provide a security for uh for nuclear power plants for example of course well the problem is probably this this study is completely okay it's it's completely scientifically valid so it's not to be said that every paper that ends up there is complete nonsense but just no one is checking that so then there we have some uh signs to be taken seriously uh next to complete nonsense and no one can tell them apart so just to sum that up so that we have some time for q and a so well we just look at the slide from the beginning of our presentation so well science is a lot more just this an inner academic circle thing so if climate change deniers just uh can just publish their studies and then run around with their studies and say oh well we um that's well it and they try to influence people with that or that we just buy products that don't work but we find a study on it on the internet so it influences what we buy that means the damage for for the public is large so those studies and those lies they just get mixed up with truth it sends next to each other it's not checked it's not filtered and we just well that's like if the tooth the german um checking for for technology and cars they would just approve every car just any car that is submitted to them even if some cars had extremely um large damage to the environment they would get the seal and would be approved and that's the image that sums it up perfectly it erodes the trust in one of the pillar of our society and that's why we publish those findings large in the 23 media outlets worldwide in france austria a lot of counters took part in there so we wanted to get the public attention on that and to dismantle the system and now there are the three slides that we have been looking forward for the whole talk we looked yesterday and look at this so we have to say in july there was our publication in summer and that's when our papers went live uh when our reports went live in züttelzeitung züttelzeitung magazine um broadcasting in germany and well well we're looking at was it each week and at the conference programs and the germans germans are really rare thereby now and also people from countries where where where there was reports on those fake signs publisher some who go there just come from countries uh who whether no public reports about those fake science factories but we're going to report also those countries so what's our idea what do we want to say and what do we want to to enlighten people we want that's that consumers that scientists see where do you publish where do i read studies and please spread the word on was it and omics and co and because that's the only way to cut the the source of money that they get if scientists cease to publish in those in those outlets uh oh no that's that's bad company or i just don't need to write into my into my publication list because i would just say make myself look stupid and so we have a website and a twitter account was it watch and he tweets regularly on news on the topic and of course everyone can can look at this we just tweet this this customized search that we came up with and you can just publish your name or the domain of your own university and then you can check and you can go pretty far with this so of course we systematically we're looking for large universities large companies but we're sure in those gigantic treasure of data there's some pearls in there from public occasions that shouldn't be there so please make this google search you can just look for suspicious moments so what can we say we thank a lot a huge team that has been working on that and so it's not only the three of us it's a lot of people that helped us out and thank you for listening to us today thank you we have some time for some questions so here in this hall adams we have eight microphones and the signal angel did you place yes okay i see you there i would suggest i want to see all people with questions so let's start with the first question from microphone two thank you so thank you for the talk and at the end you showed a positive development but in the long run it doesn't help us so they have quite a lot of domains still in their pockets and they can just exchange them for the old domains on this twitter account also spot nice you can take a look at it we have like a central shaming spot my question again how do you get that how can you get out of there can you suggest how you can give scientists an option to like get beliefs from them well that's not that easy so there is not a central blacklist or whitelist that you can use to check that so first there's there's what's a predatory publisher so there's different definitions second even in germany there is a wrong understanding of uh liberal publishing that does not include that you that you are that you're forbidden to publish in unscientific journals so there's not a strong will in germany to set yourself apart from that and there's a there's a legal component in there because people are scared being sued by those companies so if i'm a scientist i want to know where to publish there's two things to do first there's there's a list a commercial is to lose capitals lists it's behind a paywall but there are criteria why a company or why a company is a predatory publisher or not and second the ubs the the the libraries of the universities they are pretty far they also have a publication seminars and third you can look where do i publish you just look at the website look at the editorial board look where are they so i look at the address of this so just check so yes just input the address into into google map and if this is just a farmhouse somewhere in the wild in the states and you make a backward search on the telephone number and you see it's it's a skype number and it's it's located in pakistan well then you know okay that's not a not not a serious publisher but it's manual work you have to look at it you to not be fooled but universities have recognized the problem after our publications and now in some you know lots of universities there is there have been uh doctoral seminars where doctoral students were instructed how it where they shouldn't publish and you just can enlighten people and well there's even there's even even a court process in the states so well let's see but maybe they're out of business pretty soon okay now we'll continue with microphone number five back there yes thank you for your investment i mean what did you say well we we sent a statement there which was said yeah well science is is in change of a change process and we all have to look carefully where we go but there was no feedback from from the from the event or maybe just by chance the event did not happen and well well at some point we we said okay we are journalists so and maybe they felt oh well professor dr invented is is not the the the person we were thought we're talking to signal angel the internet would like to know how well could you understand the other lectures at the fake conference did the other people try to hide bad signs or where they just clueless oh well most of the time they they wanted to present signs but from very very diverse backgrounds so at one conference the three of us were there there was a young scientist from south korea and well they were just on a very on on a student level they weren't was on computer signs uh i i couldn't couldn't tell apart but it's really really um diverse and the deliberate publication of bad signs it's really difficult to do in new york we had a case from a german scientist who just went blah blah blah on a topic and we said like okay so we checked it on a different space and that is really really thin so no one else would have taken him and at one conference there was someone who just did uh did a phd along along working and he was talking about the the product that he did with his company and and he had also a polo a hand with with the signature of the of the company and well he just did more or less some advertising for the product in a scientific way so well there was a commercial interest behind this particular talk all right so continue with microphone one thank you thank you as a great presentation i really didn't like so when it's clean you can see or people from different and and if we go to the criterion it would also be created by new fields and interdisciplinary things you would have to see it too skeptically that is really no argument that a collection of scientific fields where are the people that come together different in this field this question i have to um i have to intercept um if you you're here to ask a question not to give a comment so i just wanted to us whether the data um where you collected the fake journals is publicly accessible because it would be interesting um to compare whether in comparison with the health trends of the recent years um whether with the active call for example um whether this correlates with this fake science well yes we we had the intention of putting everything online but our legal department said well we would have to go in court after this because people might just sue us for the data and so we could not do it and our way is to say well if we take single cases and it's really easy with this google search then um we could look at those health trends for example just type it in there with the with the topics in there and then we get the results on a concentrated result on what's happening there and even looking at the raw data it's really really difficult because it's so it's such a huge amount okay so here in the front with micro microphone too so hello i have a question from a judicial standpoint so if i publish my own fake studies on these pages and i'll use them to declare can i be trial for this in germany well we're not lawyers but from my understanding well if i actually fraud someone and say this is science and it proves this and that and then use this wrong argument to prove something i think i might be liable for this okay so then i continue with then the back this is microphone eight yes he is waving your hand thank you my name is a little more than a great word one question means so quiet a lot of work that you are doing there mean how expensive was your research and who pays for it uh peter and me uh we are at the ndr norddeutscher rundfunk in germany so that is public finance broadcasting and oh yeah thank you yeah well and i'm a i'm a ploy and editor at suddeutsche Zeitung and we did this with our investigative department miss langhans who is also an editor at suddeutsche Zeitung it's being paid by by by people who have an a bottom out of this of this paper and yeah and so it's just classic journalism and it's half a year that we that we that the work took and we got also other stuff and then those in those in this time it's it's hard to quantify so yeah well we don't have a fixed sum that we can can hand out for that we can use for this so it's been part of our work just so we're not flying first class and of course we have not been to Sri Lanka there were also some talks there about that did not work out but in London we were all right so then the back and microphone seven there's somebody do you want to ask a question yes okay that's a question yes please hello have you actually tried to publish your fake studies in approved journal that's a good question we were thinking about it but we had this idea okay that's not that's wrong because then we would take the time of actual serious scientists just to look at our nonsense without knowing that so what we did is we took our papers that we submitted and we just showed them to serious scientists and they said yeah well that is absolute nonsense so that's what we did so we did some post post the fact peer review and and some big and and established journals have problems with peer review that's that's a known fact and they they do publish some nonsense from time to time but there's really really weird stuff that we that we submitted in any journal to be serious so it would be rejected yeah we're just like that yeah so unfortunately you don't have a microphone and we don't have a time I'm very sorry for the people who were queuing up at the microphones we don't have any more time for Q&A but we will surely be able to find you where we'll be able to find you so we all day long here on the congress or just write us on twitter I mean the Twitter handles are posted there big applause for the fake science factories