Maybe you get reimbursed for half as long as there are no obvious hallucinations.
In other words, such a structure would not dissuade bad actors with large financial incentives to push something through a process that grants validity to a hypothesis. A fine isn't going to stop tobacco companies from spamming submissions that say smoking doesn't cause lung cancer or social media companies from spamming submissions that their products aren't detrimental to the mental health.
That's not the right threat model. The existing peer review process is already weak to high-effort but conflicted research.
Instead, the threat model is closer one closer to that of spam, where the submitting authors don't care about the content of their submission at all but need X publications in high-impact outlets for their CV or grant application. Predatory journals exploit this as part of a pay-to-play problem, but the low reputation of those journals limits their desirable impact factor.
This threat model relies on frequent but low-quality submissions, and a submission fee would make taking multiple kicks at the can unviable.
Plus, the t in me from submission to acceptance/rejection can be long. For cutting edge science, you can't really afford to wait to hear back before applying to another journal.
All this to say that spamming 1,000 journals with a submission is bad, but submitting to the journals in your field that are at least decent fits for your paper is good practice.
Suppose you are an independent researcher writing a paper. Before submitting it for review to journals, you could hire a published author in that field to review it for you (independently of the journal), and tell you whether it is submission-worthy, and help you improve it to the point it was. If they wanted, they could be listed as coauthor, and if they don't want that, at least you'd acknowledge their assistance in the paper.
Because I think there are two types of people who might write AI slop papers: (1) people who just don't care and want to throw everything at the wall and see what sticks; (2) people who genuinely desire to seriously contribute to the field, but don't know what they are doing. Hiring an advisor could help the second group of people.
Of course, I don't know how willing people would be to be hired to do this. Someone who was senior in the field might be too busy, might cost too much, or might worry about damage to their own reputation. But there are so many unemployed and underemployed academics out there...
While well-intentioned, I think this is just gate-keeping. There are mountains of research that result in nothing interesting whatsoever (aside from learning about what doesn't work). And all of that is still valuable knowledge!
Maybe something like a "hierarchy/DAG? of trusted-peers", where groups like universities certify the relevance and correctness of papers by attaching their name and a global reputation score to it. When it's found that the paper is "undesirable" and doesn't pass a subsequent review, their reputation score deteriorates (with the penalty propagating along the whole review chain), in such a way that:
- the overall review model is distributed, hence scalable (everybody may play the certification game and build a reputation score while doing so) - trusted/established institutions have an incentive to keep their global reputation score high and either put a very high level of scrutiny to the review, or delegate to very reputable peers - "bad actors" are immediately punished and universally recognized as such - "bad groups" (such as departments consistently spamming with low quality research) become clearly identified as such within the greater organisation (the university), which can encourage a mindset of quality above quantity - "good actors within a bad group" are not penalised either because they could circumvent their "bad group" on the global review market by having reputable institutions (or intermediaries) certify their good work
There are loopholes to consider, like a black market of reputation trading (I'll pay you generously to sacrifice a bit of your reputation to get this bad science published), but even that cannot pay off long-term in an open system where all transactions are visible.
Incidentally, I think this may be a rare case where a blockchain makes some sense?
Anyway, how will universities check the papers? Somone must read the preprints, like the current reviewers. Someone must check the incoming preprints, find reviewers and make the final decition, like the current editors. ...
(no snark)
But it should also fair. I once caught a team at a small Indian branch of a very large three letter US corporation violating the "no double submission" rule of two conferences: they submitted the same paper to two conferences, both naturally landed in my reviewer inbox, for a topic I am one of the experts in.
But all the other employees should not be penalized by the violations of 3 researchers.