Flood of Fake Science Forces Multiple Journal Closures (wsj.com) 93
schwit1 shares a report: Fake studies have flooded the publishers of top scientific journals, leading to thousands of retractions and millions of dollars in lost revenue. The biggest hit has come to Wiley, a 217-year-old publisher based in Hoboken, N.J., which Tuesday announced that it was closing 19 journals, some of which were infected by large-scale research fraud. In the past two years, Wiley has retracted more than 11,300 papers that appeared compromised, according to a spokesperson, and closed four journals. It isn't alone: At least two other publishers have retracted hundreds of suspect papers each. Several others have pulled smaller clusters of bad papers.
Although this large-scale fraud represents a small percentage of submissions to journals, it threatens the legitimacy of the nearly $30 billion academic publishing industry and the credibility of science as a whole. The discovery of nearly 900 fraudulent papers in 2022 at IOP Publishing, a physical sciences publisher, was a turning point for the nonprofit. "That really crystallized for us, everybody internally, everybody involved with the business," said Kim Eggleton, head of peer review and research integrity at the publisher. "This is a real threat." The sources of the fake science are "paper mills" -- businesses or individuals that, for a price, will list a scientist as an author of a wholly or partially fabricated paper. The mill then submits the work, generally avoiding the most prestigious journals in favor of publications such as one-off special editions that might not undergo as thorough a review and where they have a better chance of getting bogus work published.
Although this large-scale fraud represents a small percentage of submissions to journals, it threatens the legitimacy of the nearly $30 billion academic publishing industry and the credibility of science as a whole. The discovery of nearly 900 fraudulent papers in 2022 at IOP Publishing, a physical sciences publisher, was a turning point for the nonprofit. "That really crystallized for us, everybody internally, everybody involved with the business," said Kim Eggleton, head of peer review and research integrity at the publisher. "This is a real threat." The sources of the fake science are "paper mills" -- businesses or individuals that, for a price, will list a scientist as an author of a wholly or partially fabricated paper. The mill then submits the work, generally avoiding the most prestigious journals in favor of publications such as one-off special editions that might not undergo as thorough a review and where they have a better chance of getting bogus work published.
Where are these fake studies coming from? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Where are these fake studies coming from? (Score:5, Funny)
>>Rather than discontinuing the journals in question, couldn't some filtering be used to try to ensure that fake studies are caught before publishing?
Yes, perhaps have the submitted papers reviewed by the scientist's peers. You could call it "peer review", that's catchy.
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Re:Where are these fake studies coming from? (Score:5, Interesting)
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as far as I recall, was an unpaid thing and your name is not going to appear anywhere, meaning it does you, the reviewer, no good...
Many journals integrate with some tools (Publons now "Web of Science Reviewer Recognition Service" https://clarivate.com/products... [clarivate.com] ) which gives credits for each reviewed paper. Depending on the faculty, these credits can be taken into account in the yearly performance assessment.
Like you I'm wondering who has time for reviewing. I think it's at the edges of the career: young post-docs who are not yet overbooked with administrative burden; and senior professors who have delegated everything.
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Journals versus conference papers. The journals were always considered more prestigious, partially because they had much more peer review, whereas conference papers were much more easily accepted. If journals are now having problems with being overloaded by fakes, then something seems broken somewhere. Why the modern flood of fakes? Because they're obviously fake, and sent to lower quality journals, they don't seem to really help someone get a job in academia, it won't satisfy publish-or-perish demands
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>>Rather than discontinuing the journals in question, couldn't some filtering be used to try to ensure that fake studies are caught before publishing?
Yes, perhaps have the submitted papers reviewed by the scientist's peers. You could call it "peer review", that's catchy.
I thought I was supposed to trust the science.
Grievance Studies Hoax reference (Score:2)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
The Grievance Studies hoax succeeded in getting multiple purely made up academic papers published in social science journals.
Its aim was "to highlight what they saw as poor scholarship and erosion of standards in several academic fields. "
Re:Where are these fake studies coming from? (Score:4, Insightful)
Yes, perhaps have the submitted papers reviewed by the scientist's peers. You could call it "peer review", that's catchy.
That's the old model; papers are peer reviewed before publication. Unfortunately, reviewing papers is unpaid volunteer work that really doesn't give you any noticeable benefit to your career. It works by the fact that people do, in fact, want to help out, but now the system is oversaturated with junk papers, and the volunteer peer review system can't keep up.
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That would endanger profit margins and salaries. Better to just shut down the journals in question.
Yes. It's a brilliant business strategy. Make more profit by not selling anything.
Seriously though, I have little doubt the journals in question would become money losers if they got more rigorous about their review process. I can't blame Wiley for just shutting them down.
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Let's get back to the original question: who was publishing the fake studies? Who had incentive to do this and how did they benefit? I'm going to guess it was little know assistant professors desperate to get something published somewhere, anywhere. You'd think they department peers (and especially the tenure review committee) would pretty rapidly catch on that this was bogus.
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There have been quite a few "superstar" researchers who feature highly in retraction count. That's how they get to be superstars.
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Lol. They'd have to pay editors and reviewers for that.
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Sorry, but editors and reviewers couldn't catch a well-done fake. You'd need to actually run the experiment. Even then some folks have claimed that you just made some mistakes in your attempt to reproduce.
Now currently many of the fakes are not well done, and could be caught just by checking for internal inconsistencies, or obviously faked images. And sometimes they are. But that's currently.
On the horizon is AI faked papers. This is a new tsunami of fakery that is soon going to appear. (Well, tsunam
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There are entire organizations that you can pay to do an experiment for you. You have to pay them though. Lots of regular university labs would happily rerun an experiment in a relevant area for their costs being covered. They're unlikely to do it for free as part of a confidential review process though, and even less likely in the two week turnaround journals typically want from reviewers.
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Exactly.
When I'm asked to review now I look up the journal. If it's for profit I send a nice reply that I would be happy to offer consulting services. If it's free, I'm happy to volunteer to review.
Saves a LOT of time.
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What do you mean, "where from"? (Score:3)
It is a direct result of the moronic "publish or perish" culture, whereby you're literally dependent on a quota of publications yearly to keep your academic job.
How much article-worthy shit can you produce in a year that is state-of-the art level and would, ideally, be worthy of publication?
Yep, it is a tad harder than getting a +5 comment here.
So we're where we are.
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How is it lost revenue? (Score:2)
I could understand it being a financial burden to be vetting the extra papers but how is that revenue? Or is it just presuming the value of what it would be if those papers were valid? Actually, how do these journals get revenue anyway?
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Re:How is it lost revenue? (Score:5, Interesting)
Most journals are "reader pays".
You can't read the journal without a paid subscription by you or your organization.
Many people object to this revenue model because much of the research is publicly funded, yet the public can't read the results. It also has the problem described in TFA of journals being flooded with crap since submitting articles is free.
Some journals are moving to an "author pays" model.
An author pays a submission fee to have their paper reviewed and (maybe) published. The cost is paid out of the research grant.
"Author pays" also has drawbacks, but many consider it a better model than "reader pays". Anyone can read for free, and junk science is discouraged.
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There's nothing about the author paying the journal that discourages the journal from publishing whatever junk the author submits. Quite the opposite.
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No, but it discourages the author from publishing unless he would get more benefits than the cost. BOTH methods encourage the publisher to publish submitted junk. The only thing that would discourage that is if publishing junk actually cost the publisher (relatively quickly) rather than just increasing the stuff it could sell. (And the publisher must NOT be allowed to decide whether what it published is junk.)
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A publication is the benefit, and it doesn't usually doesn't cost the submitter anything anyway, they just pass it on their funding agency. Turning down money certainly isn't an incentive for journals not to publish junk.
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Turning down money certainly isn't an incentive for journals not to publish junk.
They don't turn down the money.
The author pays to submit the paper. They don't get a refund (or at least not a full refund) if the paper is rejected.
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There may be a few journals like that, but the vast majority charge the fee on acceptance.
I vaguely remember submitting to a fee-on-submission journal once. The fee was something like $200 though, with several thousand due on acceptance.
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> Many people object to this revenue model because much of the research is publicly funded, yet the public can't read the results
You could always try to contact the research group/university and ask for a copy. Worst case is they published in a very strict journal that disallows it, but usually you can get at least a pre-print version.
Assuming they aren't too busy to reply anyway.
=Smidge=
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Author Pays Incentivises Junk Science (Score:2)
"Author pays" also has drawbacks, but many consider it a better model than "reader pays". Anyone can read for free, and junk science is discouraged.
It's exactly the opposite case. In the author pays model journals have a strong financial incentive to accept junk science because if they reject the paper they do not get paid and with online publishing there is no material cost if you increase the number of papers you publish. With reader pays the financial incentive is to only publish good science because otherwise readers will stop paying. In this case bad papers only get through because of a lack of proper reviewing.
Author pays is definitely better
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if they reject the paper they do not get paid
The author pays to submit the paper and have it reviewed, not to have it published.
So the journal still gets paid even if they reject the paper.
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The author pays to submit the paper and have it reviewed, not to have it published.
That's not how publication fees work - you only pay if your paper is published.
Clarification (Score:5, Interesting)
Almost all of these journals were from an Egyptian publisher, Hindawi, that Wiley had purchased in 2021. Hindawi was already in trouble when they were purchased, and had lost another $18 million after Wiley had purchased them.
https://retractionwatch.com/20... [retractionwatch.com]
Hindawi’s journals have been overrun by paper mills and published “meaningless gobbledegook,” in the words of one sleuth, leading to thousands of retractions, journal closures and a major index delisting several titles.
Re:Clarification (Score:4, Informative)
Huh, so the whole story in the WSJ is almost as fake as those journals then.
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Re:Clarification (Score:4, Interesting)
Hindawi was great. You paid them your $2000 and they'd publish anything. They weren't "overrun," they were one of the original paper mills that saw the profit potential in "open access" and jumped. How in the world did they manage to lose money?
Oh well. I look forward to the amount of "greetings of the day honored professor" spam in my e-mail.
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How in the world did they manage to lose money?
People stopped subscribing to their journals because they were worthless, so they lost that revenue. Once circulation falls, nobody wants to pay them $2000 to get published in a journal that nobody reads and aren't referenced in journal indices.
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Hindawi didn't have subscriptions, they were open access. They also didn't have a reputation to lose. They also weren't short of papers to publish.
I expect "lost money" is actually Wiley losing accounting money on the $300 million they paid for them.
Re: Clarification (Score:2)
So the problem isnâ(TM)t necessarily the paper mill, but the journal itself.
After reading the history of Hindawi on Wikipedia, it appears that the publishing industry has started adjusting its own models of operating and editorialism in order to grow revenue as fast as possible.
Basically, the search for rapid growth and profit compromises a journalâ(TM)s ability to filter out junk papers.
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The predatory journals mostly popped up when someone had the bright idea that scientists should pay by the paper. In the old model you paid to read (mostly libraries purchased subscriptions) so if you were known for publishing crap, nobody would buy it. In the "open" model the author pays a bribe, uh, fee, to get their paper published. The incentive even in the established journals is to accept more papers, and if you're somebody with a bit of time and an internet connection you too can start a scientific j
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Perhaps, but it's describing a real problem. One with only a very few obvious solutions...and the only "really simple" obvious solution is to stop publishing.
Hoe do you curate for fake papers in fields where there are only a few real experts?
Every successful system attracts parasites (Score:2)
Science has been very successful, so its parasite load is now unsustainably high.
See also the United States of America.
Smoking is good for you, and CO2 is good for us (Score:2, Interesting)
Re: Smoking is good for you, and CO2 is good for u (Score:2, Insightful)
Cryptocurrency poisons everything it touches.
The same people who believe in it can be counted on to believe other stupid shit.
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It's been many years since slashdot was anything like a pro-science, pro-logic, pro-smart platform. Maybe your dns sends you to a different slashdot than the one the rest of us are on. Can I use your dns server, please?
Review of journals (Score:2)
Need a peer review of journals at this point, there are too many of them. Also the sources need to be reviewed, such as when the Institute of Condensed Matter Physics of Blungablunga turns out to be someone's apartment.
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I vacuum my place twice a week and the bathroom is always clean. What's wrong with my apartment?
This doesn't surprise me. (Score:1, Insightful)
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Everyone can be whatever they feel like they are or want to be. Just because it takes an extraordinary amount of surgery and drugs to become almost passable externally and internally will remain as per birth biology doesn't mean they aren't that other thing or something else entirely like nothing or multiple things or things that aren't even human.
We don't judge.
I really... (Score:1)
...gotta create a collection of these kind of posts to show people who utter any nonsense even remotely related to "trust the science".
You can pick any topic of public interest of choice in the last four decades and you can pick a side of the fence and I guarantee you you'll find so many people repeating utter bull.
I no longer care for studies. I think as far as societal evolution goes, we have degenerated to the point of not being adult enough to handle proper science.
Good thinking! (Score:2)
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This is a news aggregator. There are actual news stories behind these... and you compare it to facebook crap.
Congrats: You are one of the dumb fucks I am talking about. You do not comprehend enough of the existence you share with your betters to have an opinion.
There, I said it and I am not sorry. I'm done pretending some people on the internet couldn't be replaced by a bonobo without anyone being the wiser.
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You already know this.
Also, you know what selection bias [wikipedia.org] is. You can't just say "news aggregator", as if that cancels all selection bias.
Science and tech are too specialized for normals. (Score:2)
Intelligence is a matter of luck and arguably neuro-divergent. Most humans are incapable of interest in science or anything beyond emotional affirmation. They lack the mental toolkit to be more than drones. Anyone doubting this should consider what Mencken called the booboisie reward with power.
The parasite load of disinformation further ensures only true, dedicated SMEs are able to parse what's on offer. Journals should be considered individual and corporate advertisements no better than Youtube videos sim
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I had a discussion with my wife a few days ago. It seems that a non-trivial amount of people actually is unaware of how their worldview, opinion or educational level has changed over the years.
It seems that many people actually believe that what they believe at forty they have always believed, even at 16.
Take a minute to contemplate that nugget of information and try to extrapolate what this means for a democracy if even remotely true. All that you can hope for is that such people do not vote.
I have a work
Publish or perish (Score:4, Interesting)
The natural consequence of "publish or perish". Rather than evaluating the actual quality of faculty members, universities resorted to a simple metric. Inevitably, people optimized for that metric.
Also, there are just far too many graduate programs and graduate students. Masters programs are lucrative for universities. I am familiar with one program where the standards are deliberately lower than the equivalent undergraduate program. Lots of students, lots of tuition, why not? The "research" that goes on is laughable at best, but plenty of papers get published...somewhere. Meanwhile, PhD students make for cheap labor. I know of one professor who ensures his students get their doctorate, as long as they quietly handle his lectures and grading. Again, papers get published, but let's not look to closely at the content.
Peer review was a great concept, when most researchers were dedicated and competent. Unfortunately, in many areas we have passed a critical point where most researchers have advanced by published poor research, and they apply the same standards to any reviewing they do. Add in the lack of incentive to replicate results, and here we are: widespread academic fraud. Fit your data to the desired curve. Write your conclusion and cherry-pick data to support it. As a last resort, p-hack until you get some fascinating, but entirely coincidental result.
Evaluation Vastly more Complex (Score:2)
Rather than evaluating the actual quality of faculty members, universities resorted to a simple metric.
Sorry, but as someone whose job it is to take part in annual faculty reviews this is rubbish. There is no "simple metric" that is used because of the incredible complexity and diversity in science. Even in a single field like particle physics the number of publications is meaningless: if you are on a large collaboration like those at CERN on the LHC you get ~100 papers/year while some smaller collaborations may only publish 3-4 papers/year or even none during periods when the experiment is being built. Pur
Welcome to the new post-AI world (Score:2)
Where the only *real* science comes from AI, because human science can't be trusted.
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I think you're forgetting the famous AI "hallucinations".
Re: Welcome to the new post-AI world (Score:2)
Good Riddance! (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Good Riddance! (Score:5, Interesting)
But every university expects their professors to be “top in their field”. Eyeroll. I have colleagues at universities in poorly-funded third-world countries. They have no top-line equipment, there are literally bombs exploding 25 km from the university, the local k-12 school system is a wreck, and barely anyone wants to get a phd. But the requirements for tenure are still x journal articles per year, 50% must be in Q1 or Q2 journals, and they must have y citations. It’s a near-impossible task to do legitimately, even for an extremely intelligent, hardworking person. So most of them game the system. Just enough to avoid getting fired. If they take a stand on principles, they’ll be out of a job and the next guy will participate in the publication mill anyways.
Universities expect every math professor to be Euler-level. Every physicist to be the next Einstein, and every engineering prof to be as good as Timoshenko. It just isn’t possible. There are only a few people like that per generation, and thousands of universities all demanding their profs be in the top 0.00000001 percent.
We need new ways of distinguishing who is good in their field and who is a poser. The academic journals did that job well for 100 years, but the system is breaking as people have figured out how to game it.
What journals??!!?! (Score:3)
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Apparently Wiley bought some Egyptian journal company without due diligence. If your stuff is in US or Europe based journals, I wouldn't worry.
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AI (Score:2)
Is AI smart enough to realize it is learning from a retracted paper?
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No, we don't have AGI and these LLM fake-AI have zero cognitive ability or capacity. Absolutely everything fed in during the training phase is "true".
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True, even is quotes, is the wrong way to describe what LLMs do. They have no direct connection to the universe, only to their training data (which is often the internet). What they do is try to answer "Given what I've seen so far, what is the next thing to expect?".
This is highly useful, more so than I predicted, but it's not intelligence, and doesn't have any relation to truth, not even to "truth".
Note that this criticism is specific to LLMs. There are AI models that do make empirically good prediction
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Yes, we agree. Anything fed in as training data is accepted as fact/truth without question.
LLM have flat dead zero ability to differentiate from complete shit and quality input in their training data.
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Nearly everyone. Thankfully not 100%.
I do find the censorship and bias of some of the publicly queryable systems laughable. Ask about anything political and most of them consistently will tell you things like Biden's daughter's diary or Hunter's laptop don't exist or are Russian disinformation plots when we know they are very real. Or ask about Joe holding documents and get told you're a conspiracy theorist (which not even Joe denies having in his garage) but ask the same about Trump and get 3 pages back
And here's the problem (Score:2)
Quote: "... everybody involved with the business,"
Yep, that's it. When science is nothing but business I'm quite happy to see 'em closing for good.
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Yeah, but the purpose of this site is not to be believed, but rather to be argued with. The articles are all that good, and are occasionally blatantly foolish, but often the arguments in response are worthwhile.
Game Theory in Action. (Score:3)
Perverse incentives/Goodhart's law (Score:2)
Replication Crisis (Score:2)
With half or more of 'scientific' studies being unable to be replicated, frankly, I'm having trouble clearly defining the difference between "good science" and "bad" these days?
https://www.nature.com/article... [nature.com]
Re: Replication Crisis (Score:2)
I suppose a clarifying distinction is the difference between good or bad science and good or bad Science. The former might have a substantive problem, but the latter only has an image problem if word gets out about the substance problem.
How about a new rule for peer review? (Score:2)
Scrap the standard review process. Everyone posts their shit on arxive or some such. The only things that get put into a journal are *replicated* or *disproven* results attested to by a live human peer, with only a link to the original and maybe a few paragraphs (or more) describing specific subtleties not mentioned in the original manuscript.