Commoditization Threatens the Basic Fabric of Science. Some are fighting back

[MedRxx]

Publishers are testing prototypes of automatic systems to flag submitted manuscripts bearing the hallmarks of paper mills — businesses that produce fake research papers...

Paper-mill submissions to journals have increased massively over the past few years, says Jana Christopher, an image-integrity analyst at FEBS Press in Heidelberg, Germany. “If we did nothing about this, then the literature will just become really unreliable,” she says.

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-04245-8?utm_source=Nature+Briefing&utm_campaign=314f451216-briefing-dy-20221206&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_c9dfd39373-314f451216-43544217

As Linus Pauling observed "Science is the search for truth—it is not a game in which one tries to beat his opponent, to do harm to others."

This truth, along with so many others, is being lost to society—as, indeed, society itself is unraveling.

[multigraincracker]

1. I wonder about Pubmed.

The first place I look.

[MedRxx]

2. Pub Med just, I believe, simply collects and references what is published in the literature

It is not a publisher of original papers. Do not think that it has its own editorial or review board.

[Sancho]

3. Some of the real problem is the profit motive of publishers...

...and the rush to quantify ideas in an index. Citation indexes are becoming the only metric of scholarship, and journals are charging more and more. After acceptance, some publishers charge thousands to publish the article.

Open source journals that are refereed (by the same reviewers), but cost little are called "predatory", and it's almost impossible to distinguish who is legitimate.

Editors play a game of journal "ratings" too.

It's extremely easy to get something "published" in the internet world. There is no accurate system that will qualify "ideas" until decades and history find the value of the thinking. Plenty of articles on the pedestal turn out to me fraudulent, and obscure stuff in the corner is recognized as genius decades later.

There is no magic glass to categorized original thinking...but academics and universities seemed to have lost sight of reality.