Remember When Satanic Mills Referred to Old Factories?

Nowadays, there is another kind of Satanic Mill afflicting academia, particularly in the sciences. Read on:

US lawmakers have warned that fake research papers risk compromising trust in the entire scientific system, as artificial intelligence (AI) makes it ever easier for so-called paper mills to fool journals into accepting made up articles.

Some estimates suggest hundreds of thousands of fake papers could exist in the human genomics literature alone. Paper mills have also managed to impersonate guest journal editors to wave through hundreds of their own fraudulent articles. “The automation arms race is upon us,” warned Democratic congressman Bill Foster in a hearing of the US House of Representatives’ science, space and technology committee last week.

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To prove his point, Foster, along with another representative, created a fake nuclear physics paper using a text generator that easily evaded plagiarism detectors. “The creation of hundreds of papers – complete with figures and citations – becomes the work of an afternoon, much to the disgust of real scientists who might spend months on a single paper,” said Foster.

Fraud in scientific work will undermine honest academics’ work, and could have “disastrous” effects if it ends up influencing policy or public behavior, warned congresswoman Eddie Bernice Johnson, who chairs the committee. Concern around paper mills has existed for at least a decade, but improvements in AI image and text generation have made fake paper production possible on an industrial scale. Now, with last week’s congressional hearing, there is high level political attention focused on what it could do to the scientific system.

“This is the first time the US Congress has been interested,” said Chris Graf, research integrity director at scientific publisher Springer Nature, and one of those who testified at the hearing, told Science|Business.

Paper mills use AI tools to create realistic-seeming papers that are submitted to journals, normally many at a time. They then sell authorship spots on those journals to academics willing to pay for authorship. This might then earn the academic a bonus or promotion. One Latvia-based paper mill uncovered by a publishers’ report last month claims to have sold close to 13,000 articles into real journals. But Graf said publishers often didn’t know where the mills were based because they conceal their locations...

Full story at https://sciencebusiness.net/news/us-lawmakers-turn-attention-plague-fake-journal-papers.