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Astronomy and house sciences have principally averted the fraudulent practices of paper mills and predatory journals, however that is likely to be about to vary, warn the authors of a brand new report that delves into the ugly machinations of prison organizations that revenue from pretend science.
“Because space is a huge economic priority and many countries are doubling down on space research, I would expect to see the fraudulent publishing industry expand into this area,” the lead creator of the report, Reese Richardson from Northwestern University, informed Space.com.
Worryingly, the report concludes that fraudulent science publishing is beginning to outpace professional journals, saying that if nothing is completed about this subject, it might without end pollute a wealth of scientific literature and even end in artificial intelligence (AI) being trained on made-up data.
One of the prime means of assessing a scientist’s career is considering what papers they’ve been involved with: How many papers have them as first author? How many as a co-author? How many cite their work?
However, this metric appears to pave the way for some manipulative tactics. Paper mills and predatory journals prey on researchers by creating made-up papers, which are often plagiarized, full of nonsense science or describe developments so minor or low quality as to not even justify publication. They sometimes even offer authorship to researchers for prices amounting to hundreds or even thousands of dollars. A paper can also be pushed through a scam peer-review process for a price to make sure it gets published in a fraudulent journal.
Ultimately, the criminal organizations at the heart of this nefarious industry make millions out of scientific fraud. Sometimes the journals these fake research papers are published in are created for that monetary purpose.
Other times, though, a legitimate journal can be hijacked. The newly published report on academic fraud, for instance, cites the example of the British journal HIV Nursing. It had ceased publication — only for its domain name to be bought by a criminal organization so that a fake journal in its name could be created with the sole intent of publishing fraudulent papers from a paper mill, often on topics that had nothing to do with HIV or nursing. The most extreme cases involve these organizations infiltrating a legitimate journal, buying off staff to ease fraudulent papers through to publication.
“Paper mills tend to prefer topics that are more easily exploitable,” says Richardson. “For instance, there’s a lot of suspected paper mill activity in materials science.”
In other words, if there is profit to be gained from a field such as materials sciences, medical sciences or engineering, then that makes the field vulnerable to fraudulent publications. Richardson cites the example of solar panel technology as a case in point.
“One of the heavily exploited areas by paper mills is renewable energy,” he said, highlighting examples of dozens of papers in this field where he found the same curves on graphs just repeated over and over, in different papers or sometimes even in the same paper, in both fraudulent publications and legitimate journals from well-regarded North American and European publishers.
These copy and paste jobs are indicative of a problem that in this particular topic can hamper real research into renewable energy technology that could help us to combat the climate crisis.
Yet, “Space and astronomy research is one of the areas where not a lot of paper mill activity has been detected,” said Richardson.
There could be several reasons for this. One is that those who seek out suspected paper mills tend to come from the scientific fields most affected by this plague of fake papers, and so they are not sufficiently familiar with astronomical subjects to recognize the fake ones.
“If there is significant paper mill activity in space and astronomical research, then it’s possible that it just hasn’t really been detected,” said Richardson.
Another possibility is that space and astronomy isn’t a particularly easy subject to exploit for profit. However, this could be about to change. In many developing countries where paper mills are particularly rife, the space industry is beginning to grow. This could soon begin to attract the criminal organizations looking for exploitable areas of science.
To prevent this and to curtail the activities of paper mills, the report concludes that not only does there need to be greater scrutiny on journal editorial processes, but we also need smarter methods of identifying fake papers and, most revolutionary of all, a major rethink about how the scientific community incentivizes science as a career.
Time is of the essence. “At some point it will be too late and scientific literature will become completely poisoned,” said a co-author of the report, Luís Amaral of Northwestern University, in a statement. “We need to be aware of the seriousness of this problem and take measures to address it.”
The downside is also about to develop far worse. There are already debates about professional scientific papers using synthetic intelligence, and now AI can be utilized by paper mills to spit out pretend science ever quicker. If these fraudulent papers lay undetected within the scientific literature, then they are going to inevitably be used to coach future generations of AI, infecting them with pretend scientific information that the AI will assume is actual, resulting in AI giving unhealthy outcomes — not simply in generative chat apps, but in addition when utilized to constructing advanced local weather simulations, searching for cures for ailments or modeling troublesome issues.
The fraudsters are poisoning the properly for revenue and if they are not stopped quickly, then the times of having the ability to belief the physique of scientific literature, and of being able to tell apart between scientific truth and scientific pretend, could also be coming to an finish.
The report was printed on Aug. 4 within the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
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