[Itse]

I think the real meat of that article is this:

For a minimal payment of $625, Cogent Social Sciences was ready to publish, “The Conceptual Penis as a Social Construct.”2

There seems to be a deeper problem here, however. Suspecting we may be dealing with a predatory pay-to-publish outlet, we were surprised that an otherwise apparently legitimate Taylor and Francis journal directed us to contribute to the Cogent Series.

I think this comment from that page puts this in the proper light:

Who got hoaxed here? It looks like the respectable journal sniffed out that your stuff was stinky and decided you could be fleeced for a few bucks in a vanity publication.

Which I would agree is a problem and highlights an ethics problem with scientific journals.

However, I still think the guys writing this article are being ridiculous.

Take this part for example:

Portland State University has a fund dedicated to paying fees for open access journals, and this particular journal qualified for disbursement. For ethical reasons, however, we did not apply for funding, which in this case was virtually guaranteed. Instead, the article was externally funded by an independent party. We never received an invoice from the journal. We did not pay to have this published.

So in other words they got someone else to shell out $600+ to publish their drivel, but go out of their way to obscure that fact and keep insisting that the main problem here is gender studies.