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OT: Peer-reviewed Academic Papers for Sale

I've long said here that many top scientists have sold out for big $$$$$$$$$ when it comes to putting their names to - to take just one example - studies around Climate Change[tm] and it seems I was right (as usual). Just heard on BBC Radio 4 that there is a whole industry out there now for printing academic papers with no value whatsoever, containing mostly gibberish, solely for the purpose of allowing the author to claim he's a published academic. Not only that, but for a few extra bucks, anyone can get their "research" not only published, but favorably peer-reviewed! So the next time anyone tells you they've had peer-reviewed papers published, you'll know to take it with a pinch of salt. This is basically just vanity publishing for wannabe academics.

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And I checked on Google and there are umpteen organizations and individuals offering this service. This *should* be a major scandal but I'll wager nothing gets done to punish those crooks responsible.

Reply to
Cursitor Doom
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All scams need an ultimate revenue source. What's this one? University salaries?

But the "legitimate" scientific paper mill isn't much better. In many fields, the research can't be reproduced.

And there is lots of plagiarism and, now, AI junk.

Reply to
john larkin

Not sure what you mean, John. The money comes from essentially unqualified or partly qualified individuals who hope they can enhance their standing or get a better job by boasting about having their research published. No different in effect to those types who buy fake degrees and doctorates from online suppliers.

Too true and the BBC article does venture to suggest this also.

AI gives a who new dimension to this plague of fakery.

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Reply to
Cursitor Doom

As usual, Cursitor Doom has got hold of the wrong end of the stick.

The Climate Change Denial propaganda machine has been desperate to get papers published that cast doubt on the well-established scientific case for anthropogenic global warming.

Ironically, the Climate Gate scandal, which was intended to "reveal" this

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showed up a climate change denial attempt to do this, which got the corrupted editor fired,

Fred Pearce, (2010) The Climate Files: The Battle for the Truth about Global Warming, Guardian Books; London.

Fred Pearce does document this, but he's a British science journalist and didn't understand what was going on. Cursitor Doom is similarly under-informed.

Reply to
Bill Sloman

The Heartlands Institute pays better.

Observational science can never be reproduced. You can often find different ways of observing the same process, which is how Michael Mann's "hockey stick" paper ended up getting replicate about a dozen times with different proxies for historical temperatures.

The peer reviewed literature isn't perfect, but - like democracy - it is a lot better than any of the alternatives.

There's always been some, but it has never been influential, and AI junk isn't going to do any better.

If the work isn't worth citing, it doesn't get cited.

The median science author publishes just one paper. The world gets changed by people who do rather better.

Reply to
Bill Sloman

I've got a couple of copies of other people's Ph.D. theses. I got them because the content was of interest to me. A fake doctorate wouldn't have been useful.

The BBC piece is a broadcast talk, not an article, and it is well know that the scientific literature contains a lot of less-than-useful content. A scientific education does include training in reading the literature with a sceptical eye. English language journalist rarely get that training.

Really? ChatGP and the like are just large language models, and produce stuff that sounds like stuff that has been published before, which is merely automated plagiarism.

Reply to
Bill Sloman

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