In 2005, two scientists, David Mazières and Eddie Kohler, wrote a paper titled Get me off Your Fucking Mailing List and submitted it to WMSCI 2005 (the 9th World Multiconference on Systemics, Cybernetics and Informatics), in protest of the conference’s notoriety for its spamming and lax standards for paper acceptance. The paper consisted essentially only of the sentence “Get me off your fucking mailing list” repeated many times, sometimes as illustrations or diagrams.
…the paper was reviewed, and its appropriateness for the journal’s publishing criteria was rated as “excellent” by the journal’s peer-review process. It was accepted for publication with minor editorial changes. The paper was not actually published, as Vamplew declined to pay the required US$150 article processing charge. This case has led commenters to question the legitimacy of the journal as an authentic scholarly undertaking.
Oh, thank you. I stopped reading when it started to talk about someone else 9 years later, I thought it would be some other controversy.
I wish he crowdsourced the $150 though. I wonder how many citations it could have gotten…
How can we know the over-arching theme and conclusion of this paper without seeing it in it’s entirety?
I’ll never know because there was no TLDR.
You can read it here https://www.scs.stanford.edu/~dm/home/papers/remove.pdf
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Journal_of_Advanced_Computer_Technology
And how did it end? Was it published? Did they get off the fucking mailing list? Wikipedia doesn’t say.
It does:
Gotta love the “please don’t sue us” phrasing there.
At first I was like “come on! Do it for the bit!”, but then I remembered that, far from having the “make a Broadway sized song and dance number telling mining mogul Bob Murray to eat shit”* money of Last Week Tonight, scientists tend to be less than extravagant in their capital holdings…
What a way to end the season, though! ❤️😂
*which was nominated for the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Original Music and Lyrics in 2020
Oh, thank you. I stopped reading when it started to talk about someone else 9 years later, I thought it would be some other controversy. I wish he crowdsourced the $150 though. I wonder how many citations it could have gotten…