Miguel Afonso Caetano<p>"A growing tide of fake papers is flooding the scientific record and proliferating faster than current checks can rid them from the system, scientists warn.</p><p>The source of the trouble is “paper mills,” businesses or individuals that charge fees to publish fake studies in legitimate journals under the names of desperate scientists whose careers depend on their publishing record.</p><p>The rate of fake papers generated by these operators roughly doubled every 1.5 years between 2016 and 2020, according to a study published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.</p><p>“The entire structure of science could collapse if this is left unaddressed,” said study author Luís Amaral, a physicist at Northwestern University.</p><p>Paper mills look for weak links, such as lax verification protocols, in the typically rigorous publication machinery, then exploit those to place hundreds of fabricated studies with vulnerable journals or publishers, according to scientist investigators who have been tracking and cataloging their work.</p><p>It can be a costly mess to clean up.</p><p>Publishers who have become aware of suspected paper mill activity have been forced to retract hundreds of papers at once, and in some cases shut down journals."</p><p><a href="https://www.wsj.com/science/scientific-journals-fake-paper-mills-92e42230" rel="nofollow noopener" translate="no" target="_blank"><span class="invisible">https://www.</span><span class="ellipsis">wsj.com/science/scientific-jou</span><span class="invisible">rnals-fake-paper-mills-92e42230</span></a></p><p><a href="https://tldr.nettime.org/tags/AI" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#<span>AI</span></a> <a href="https://tldr.nettime.org/tags/GenerativeAI" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#<span>GenerativeAI</span></a> <a href="https://tldr.nettime.org/tags/AISlop" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#<span>AISlop</span></a> <a href="https://tldr.nettime.org/tags/AcademicPublishing" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#<span>AcademicPublishing</span></a> <a href="https://tldr.nettime.org/tags/PaperMills" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#<span>PaperMills</span></a> <a href="https://tldr.nettime.org/tags/ScientificJournals" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#<span>ScientificJournals</span></a> <a href="https://tldr.nettime.org/tags/Science" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#<span>Science</span></a> <a href="https://tldr.nettime.org/tags/PeerReview" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#<span>PeerReview</span></a></p>