It's hard to tell specifically how their methodology went, but this bit of the author's write-up jumps out: > As for our performance, 80% of our papers overall

It's hard to tell specifically how their methodology went, but this bit of the author's write-up jumps out: > As for our performance, 80% of our papers overall went to full peer review, which keeps with the standard 10-20% of papers that are “desk rejected” without review at major journals across the field. We improved this ratio from 0% at first to 94.4% after a few months of experimenting with much more hoaxish papers. This makes it sound like the authors wrote a bunch of absurd articles, all of which got desk rejected, and then they iterated until they got papers accepted somewhere. With that methodology, the conclusion ("we got papers accepted somewhere!") doesn't seem very surprising. Edited to add: if the above is correct and their early submissions were all rejected, one could reasonably say of the results: "Editorial standards at all journals surveyed were more rigorous than the authors initially expected".