They have a very deceptive piece about the "confidentiality" of pre-publication papers on that facebook site.
People here who have published besides me have already confirmed that we put the title of submitted papers on our vita and list the journal they are under review at. There is absolutely no expectation from journals of keeping it a secret that it is under review by them. What you are not allowed to know is who the referees are.
This is especially true when your current research is being funded by a grant from the national science foundation or whatever - you'll put the title of the grant and the reference number on there. It is going to be a technical report for the granting agency at a minumum, and if it is good it will get into Nature or something. So people know what you are up to long before you even submit it.
I do mostly consulting work now so I list what contract I am on and the technical report, after I am finished, is the property of the people I am doing it for. But I am free to publish the results somewhere if I weren't so lazy. Money will make me get off my fat butt, but journals don't pay you to publish and I don't need it for an activity report at a university anymore.
Here is the main deception involving her non-disclosure agreement, which can't possibly have anything to do with this tripe:
The NDA was required by this project because of the involvement of many people who have no experience with the research and peer-review process. You don't have to tell a scientist that they can't talk about research they plan to publish. However, when a project involves lay people, an NDA ensures the journals' expectations of confidentiality.
The first sentence is probably a half-truth that is followed by a misleading second statement and finally the outright lie.
The half-truth is that it involves hoaxers who are not involved in peer-reviewed publication because they are crooks. The second statement is untrue - as a matter of fact when you work at a University you are
required to put on your activity report what research you are doing and where you sent it for review. Likewise, you list it on the vita to show people what your current research activities are.
The last part is just a bold-faced lie. Journals only disallow you from submitting it elsewhere for publication.
It's hilarious to see someone with a facebook page that has appeared on everything
except a peer reviewed journal complaining that she is handicapped in her nonexistent peer-reviewed work by the very people who she HAS chosen to interact with. It is like an actor on TV complaining about his TV show audience interfering in his nonexistent medical practice.
In terms of the psychology, you have to consider what happens to someone when they have been pushing a hoax this long, and the pressure builds because they have been promising that something is coming soon.
parnassus is right that money is the motivation, but that doesn't mean you apply the ordinary psychology of the profit motive. You have to apply criminal psychology where the criminal may have a goal in mind like conning someone out of money or robbing a bank - but when things don't go according to plan and they start losing control then you get behavior that seems bizarre to us. But the crooks are just doing the best they can given their twisted ethics. They aren't going to stop lying and stealing. When they first tell the lie or start the con-game they are poised and confident. When things turn against them their lies start self-contradicting, they create diversions and evasions, and they'll do things out of frantic desperation. The thief, when caught at the door of the vault, does not say "Oh yeah, I'm robbing this bank" or tell his confidence game mark "Oh, I'm not really the man I am pretending to be..."
So it is going to be entertaining.
