Emil O. W. Kirkegaard

Academic reception

The quality of peer review at OpenPsych has been disputed. Reviewers do not need advanced academic qualifications, nor need to specialise in what they review. For example, Kirkegaard reviews paper submissions to two of the journals, but has only a BA in linguistics, claiming he is entirely "self-taught". Most of the reviewers are also authors of articles in the same group of journals. Of the thirteen known members of the review board in 2020, two were anonymous and eight seemed to have doctorates. Members of the review teams include Gerhard Meisenberg, Heiner Rindermann, Peter Frost, John Fuerst, Kenya Kura, Bryan J. Pesta, Noah Carl and Meng Hu.

Political positions

The journals act as a research network for far right, alt-right, and White nationalist causes, following in the footsteps of the Pioneer Fund and Mankind Quarterly; of its top 15 contributors in 2018, 11 had written for Mankind Quarterly in the preceding three years. Several members of its editorial board hold far-right political views and have attended the controversial London Conference on Intelligence. The Southern Poverty Law Center, in an article discussing proponents of scientific racism including Kirkegaard, describes OpenPsych as a "pseudojournal". Kirkegaard is regarded by the Centre for Analysis of the Radical Right to be a "figure on the radical right fringe". Landis MacKellar has described Emil Kirkegaard and John Fuerst as "both outright cranks" noting OpenPsych are "tenderly peer-reviewed online journals specializing in scientifically controversial (bordering on dubious) politically incorrect pieces derived in part from (Roger) Pearsonian hereditarianism."

OkCupid

In May 2016, Kirkegaard and Julius Daugbjerg Bjerrekær published a paper in Open Differential Psychology that includes the data of nearly 70,000 OkCupid (a dating website) users, such as their intimate sexual details. The publication was widely criticised at the time and been described as "without a doubt one of the most grossly unprofessional, unethical and reprehensible data releases." Although Kirkegaard claimed the data was public, this was disputed by data ethics scholar Michael Zimmer who pointed out that the data is restricted to logged-in users only:

Moreover, it remains unclear whether the OkCupid profiles scraped by Kirkegaard's team really were publicly accessible. Their paper reveals that initially, they designed a bot to scrape profile data, but that this first method was dropped because it was "a decidedly non-random approach to find users to scrape because it selected users that were suggested to the profile the bot was using." This implies that the researchers created an OkCupid profile from which to access the data and run the scraping bot. Since OkCupid users have the option to restrict the visibility of their profiles to logged-in users only, it is likely the researchers collected—and subsequently released—profiles that were intended to not be publicly viewable. The final methodology used to access the data is not fully explained in the article, and the question of whether the researchers respected the privacy intentions of 70,000 people who used OkCupid remains unanswered.

Kirkegaard uploaded the OkCupid data to the Open Science Framework, but this was later removed after OkCupid filed a Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) complaint.