Showing posts with label paper mills. Show all posts
Showing posts with label paper mills. Show all posts

Monday, June 17, 2024

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

 and 
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."

Saturday, May 18, 2024

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."