Entities enabling scientific fraud at scale are large, and growing rapidly
pnas.org
pnas.org
The end result was natural. People first started published in really low quality journals, then started plagiarizing high papers from others and submitting in lower quality journals. Then got smart, and created their own "fake" journals to publish their "fake" papers in. At the forefront of this corruption was the scientist himself [1]. Things have become dire. Recently, a famous university in Pakistan offered a candidate professor, a contract stating that they would hire him if the published ~10 papers a month. And the government money from that would be his salary.
The point of the story is that fraudulent science is not often not just because people are "evil". It can emerge from bad incentives set up by governments or larger institutions.
[1] https://loksujag.com/story/bentham-science-publishers-scam
> Discussions with different stakeholders suggest that many currently perceive systematic fraudulent science as something that occurs only in the periphery of the “real” scientific enterprise, that is, outside OECD countries. Accumulating evidence shows that systematic production of low quality and fraudulent science can occur anywhere.
From supplement (section about the output of the "ARDA" paper mill):
> We obtained 20,638 documents and were able to impute country of authorship for 13,288 documents (64.4%). Of these documents, more than half were solely from India (26.4%), Iraq (19.3%), or Indonesia (12.2%).
The identity and reputation of the authors, and the publication venue, is (for now) still a strong signal when evaluating the credibility of an article.
The article is spot-on though in that there is a real risk of paper mills infecting formerly reliable journals, and this is not helped by the publishers' commercialism. For example, it used to be easy to ignore Hindawi journals (they are characteristically low quality); then Wiley started publishing them under its own brand. The good is now mixed with the bad under the same label. Practicing scientists can fall back on whether they know the authors personally but that doesn't really help non-practicing professionals or the general public.
My experience is that incentives within the two are converging: monetization drives all activities.
Higher ed is allowing professors to slump teaching responsibilities - as it has for many years - in favor of high-flying research. What is new is that now: entire departments struggle to find chairs or people to run basic functions at teaching or research levels. Professors are rarely on campus except at the bare minimum and are largely diverting resources (people & research) to their companies.
Tuition is at all-times high, but apparently only 1/4 to 1/3 of this money goes to the actual teaching staff.
who is going to pay them more? institutions? do you think that institutions are acting against their own incentives somehow? institutions are acting on their incentives and it's producing suboptimal outcomes for society because spoiler alert the free market isn't the correct mechanism for absolutely everything in life.
Fixing the incentives might, however funding comes from very few places and they have their own incentives => lobbied goals or profit-motivated.
One might argue that money is a prioritization method.
I'd argue that having one metric (amount of money) makes you susceptible to single-metric problems: optimization of everything to the point of meaninglessness, critical dependence on the stability of that metric's underlying present & future value.
Defects in the currently implemented financial system (exploitable by evolving technologies) might lead to larger systematic failures and less robustness.
Politics doesn't mean anything, money. Academia is starting to mean less, money. Culture is mostly, money. Health care is having serious issues, money. Military industrial is having issues, money. Even farming is having issues, money.
Give me something that isn't being enabled by the current technology progress.
This sounds pretty damning, and the figures mentioned (closer to the end of the article) are pretty revealing.
Goodhart's Law gives rise to Sturgeon's Law :(
The ingress: "Some suggest that the ease of communication provided by the internet and open-access publishing have created the conditions for the emergence of entities..."
The article: nothing
This article seems more like part of the problem.
Publishing has been broken for years and the system built by academia on top (publish or perish) has exacerbated the problem. Science is well and all, and as you mentioned, results should be reproduced, not only this paper's (with a better methodology preferably), but ALL science that has even the faintest hallmark of being published for publishing's sake.
This line gave me pause. So basically everyone is deceiving everyone else all the time? At least on the plus side, it did make me feel a little more optimistic about AI slop. A machine-written report rife with errors and fabrications is apparently at a parity with real human performance.