Beware of Fake Sci-Study By Biden & Cohen?

WSJ says fake “academic studies are turning the publishing industry on its head” as publishers are forced to retract reports & close journals. We should have guessed there was something funny about that Covid origins study by “Biden & Cohen”?

Yet, the news is NOT funny. In fact, it’s so bad that the paper is talking about “thousands of retractions” & “millions of dollars” lost in revenue with “the biggest his [coming] to Wiley, a 217-yr-old publisher” which announced it’s closing 19 journals, “some of which were infected by large-scale research fraud.” Although the WSJ says even 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.

Apparently, the sources of the fake science are numerous & typically involve “paper mills” that get paid to list a struggling scientist or wanna-be scientist as an author of a wholly or partially fabricated paper, then, target second-tier pubs or one-off special reports in special editions that are less likely to get the bogus work past lessened reviews & credibility checks. A “signature move is to submit the same paper to multiple journals at once” and some “fraudsters have even posed as academics to secure spots as guest editors for special issues & organizers of conferences.” Whatever. While “legitimate” publishers are fighting back to save their industry with AI technology, paper mills are using the same kind of tools to stay ahead. “Generative AI has just handed them a winning lottery ticket,” said one publisher. “They can do it really cheap at scale & the detection methods are not where we need them to be.”

Davd Soul