Firms churning out fake papers have taken to bribing journal editors

Last year, the university where I work signed the Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA) [1], which recommends, among other things, that institutions "[b]e explicit about the criteria used to reach hiring, tenure, and promotion decisions, clearly highlighting, especially for early-stage investigators, that the scientific content of a paper is much more important than publication metrics or the identity of the journal in which it was published."

We were the first university in our country to sign DORA, and I was very proud of that decision. If more institutions followed those recommendations, there would be less motivation for paper mills and other abuses.

[1] https://sfdora.org/

Freakonomics Radio has a recent related piece on academic fraud in scholarly publishing. https://freakonomics.com/podcast/can-academic-fraud-be-stopp...

UBI could fix this.

A man values truth when it doesn't conflict with his paycheck.

Everyone in SV has figured out that arxiv is the new PR Newswire too…

Yuck.