An epidemic of scientific fakery threatens to overwhelm publishers; The Washington Post, June 11, 2024

Adam Marcus

 and 

Ivan Oransky, The Washington Post

; An epidemic of scientific fakery threatens to overwhelm publishers

"A record number of retractions — more than 10,000 scientific papers in 2023. Nineteen academic journals shut down recently after being overrun by fake research from paper mills. A single researcher with more than 200 retractions.

The numbers don’t lie: Scientific publishing has a problem, and it’s getting worse. Vigilance against fraudulent or defective research has always been necessary, but in recent years the sheer amount of suspect material has threatened to overwhelm publishers.

We were not the first to write about scientific fraud and problems in academic publishing when we launched Retraction Watch in 2010 with the aim of covering the subject regularly."

Wiley shuts 19 scholarly journals amid AI paper mill problems; The Register, May 16, 2024

 Thomas Claburn, The Register; Wiley shuts 19 scholarly journals amid AI paper mill problems

"US publishing house Wiley this week discontinued 19 scientific journals overseen by its Hindawi subsidiary, the center of a long-running scholarly publishing scandal.

In December 2023 Wiley announced it would stop using the Hindawi brand, acquired in 2021, following its decision in May 2023 to shut four of its journals "to mitigate against systematic manipulation of the publishing process."

Hindawi's journals were found to be publishing papers from paper mills – organizations or groups of individuals who try to subvert the academic publishing process for financial gain. Over the past two years, a Wiley spokesperson told The Register, the publisher has retracted more than 11,300 papers from its Hindawi portfolio.

As described in a Wiley-authored white paper published last December, "Tackling publication manipulation at scale: Hindawi’s journey and lessons for academic publishing," paper mills rely on various unethical practices – such as the use of AI in manuscript fabrication and image manipulations, and gaming the peer review process...

In January, Wiley signed on to United2Act – an industry initiative to combat paper mills.

But the concern over scholarly research integrity isn't confined to Wiley publications. A study published in Nature last July suggests as many as a quarter of clinical trials are problematic or entirely fabricated."

Past coronavirus: an open-access future for academics; The Bowdoin Orient, April 3, 2020

Radu Stochita, The Bowdoin Orient; Past coronavirus: an open-access future for academics

"What Aaron Swartz left us is the courage to try and break the wall that exists between the public and the profit-driven industry of academic publishing. In his eyes, information was meant to be free and accessible. Progress was meant for the common good, in the benefit of everyone, not only for a selected few."

The Guardian view on academic publishing: disastrous capitalism Editorial; March 4, 2019

The Guardian; The Guardian view on academic publishing: disastrous capitalism  

Editorial

"In California the state university system has been paying $11m (£8.3m) a year for access to Elsevier journals, but it has just announced that it won’t be renewing these subscriptions. In Britain and Europe the move towards open access publishing has been driven by funding bodies. In some ways it has been very successful. More than half of all British scientific research is now published under open access terms: either freely available from the moment of publication, or paywalled for a year or more so that the publishers can make a profit before being placed on general release.

Yet, somehow, the new system has not yet worked out any cheaper for the universities. Publishers have responded to the demand that they make their product free to readers by charging their writers fees to cover the costs of preparing an article. These range from around £500 to $5,000, and apparently the work gets more expensive the more that publishers do it. A report last year from Professor Adam Tickell pointed out that the costs both of subscriptions and of these “article preparation costs” has been steadily rising at a rate above inflation ever since the UK’s open access policy was adopted in 2012. In some ways the scientific publishing model resembles the economy of the social internet: labour is provided free in exchange for the hope of status, while huge profits are made by a few big firms who run the market places. In both cases, we need a rebalancing of power."
 

Addressing the Crisis in Academic Publishing; Inside Higher Ed, November 5, 2018

Hans De Wit and Phillip G. Altbach and Betty Leask, Inside Higher Ed; Addressing the Crisis in Academic Publishing

[Kip Currier: Important reading and a much-needed perspective to challenge the status quo!

I just recently was expressing aspects of this article to an academic colleague: For too long the dominant view of what constitutes "an academic" has been too parochial and prescriptive.

The academy should and must expand its notions of teaching, research, and service, in order to be more truly inclusive and acknowledge diverse kinds of knowledge and humans extant in our world.]

"We must find ways to ensure that equal respect, recognition and reward is given to excellence in teaching, research and service by institutional leaders, governments, publishers, university ranking and accreditation schemes."