OT: Peer-reviewed Academic Papers for Sale

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.