Paul Cameron Finds Someone to Publish His Pseudoscience: Himself

Evangelical psychologist Paul Cameron has been expelled from the American Psychological Association, reprimanded by the American Sociological Association for "consistent misrepresentation of sociological research," and condemned by the Canadian Psychological Association for "consistently misinterpret[ing] and misrepresent[ing] research on sexuality, homosexuality, and lesbianism."

Not to be deterred from his crusade against homosexuality, Cameron is now trying a new tactic to get his views out.

What do you do when you are having trouble getting your junk science published in reputable peer-reviewed journals? Well, one solution would be to improve the quality of your science. Or, if you're Paul Cameron and you're running an outfit called the Family Research Institute (FRI), you try something else:

"FRI is doing something exciting -- we are starting an online scientific journal! It is entitled the Empirical Journal of Same Sexual Behavior (EJSSB)."

This seems like it has become a somewhat standard tactic for those who can't cut it in the real world of science. If you're unhappy that your views can't survive peer-reviewed scrutiny with regards to climate change, then you can start your own non-ISI listed journal (see Energy & Environment). If you're unhappy that creationism doesn't withstand real scrutiny, you can also start your own journal (see Creation Research Society Quarterly).

As Ed Brayton points out, the purpose of this tactic is pretty obvious:

That exciting announcement went out to members of Paul Cameron's mailing list. The brainchild of Paul Cameron and George Rekers, the EJSSB's first articles were slated to appear sometime in September, although the pay-to-publish website (beginning at $500) appears to still be under construction. But even if it does go live, don't look for this journal to appear in your local university library...

Cameron intends to dress this "journal" up as an academic journal, but that doesn't mean it will actually be one. Because there are some 1,700 real social science journals listed in Journal Citation Reports, an article in the most reputable journals may still be read by only a few thousand professionals around the world. But that's not who Cameron is targeting. Instead he wants to draw in thousands of unsuspecting readers on the internet, few of whom will realize that it isn't a reliable journal- or even a real one.