Pump-and-Dump Preprinting
Another bad comparison of preprints and papers also seeks crypto profits?
Why would an Assistant Professor at USC specializing in the blood-brain barrier, advanced cell therapies, and genetic engineering for stroke and Alzheimer’s disease co-author a preprint about preprints with a post-doc in Canada who is the social media editor of an Elsevier journal?
Well, it’s potentially part of a crypto pump-and-dump scheme. The Assistant Professor at USC put $330 behind the study and the Canadian post-doc threw in $4, making them two of the nine funders who put $900 in total. In exchange, they got some crypto coin which could increase in value and be withdrawn in actual cash at any time. It’s called “the incentive layer for open science” by the company running the platform, complete with promises of returns, bounties, and earnings — you know, science stuff:
Yet, in the preprint, the authors state this:
The pump-and-dump crypto scheme is one we’ve seen before — ResearchHub. The founder of Coinbase is involved.
- I guess if you’re hoping to make money off your preprint or paper, that’s not a competing interest per se. It’s a compatible or consonant interest?
- I’d urge you to re-read the initial ResearchHub post, because it’s hilariously weird.
ResearchHub entices users with the possibility of returns like these from its deceptively named “endowment”:
The endowment is a store of crypto that tempts people on the way up and burns the laggards on the way down. The behavior of crypto schemes was recently on egregious display via President Trump and his coin’s winners and losers, with the most recent reporting showing that nearly 1 million people bought Trump’s memecoin with their losses total $3.81 billion as of the end of June while Trump earned $636 million.