There’s a brilliant essay by Michael Nielsen from 2009 which predicted that disruption in academic publishing was imminent. Of course, we’re still here, so there was no existential crisis, but I think it’s still worth a read, even now. Reflecting on Nielsen’s essay in 2016, Michael Clarke observed that the web was created at CERN for the purpose of communicating scientific research.
It’s 1 January 2021. Dozing in bed, floating in that warm & fuzzy limbo between dreams and reality, and that’s where it hits him. That lightbulb moment. (At last!) He sits bolt-upright in bed, punches the air and shouts: “You know what, honey, I’m gonna start a papermill!”. She snorts awake; reluctantly conscious. Oh no. Not again. Not another hare-brained scheme… “…and, by the end of next year, we’ll publish 20,000 fake papers!”.
I remember finding ChatGPT usage in a research paper for the first time. It was April 2023, and a Twitter user pointed out that you could identify bots by their use of the phrase “as an AI language model…”. It’s a hallmark of ChatGPT usage. So I searched Google Scholar for the phrase … and found just one paper.
TL;DR: The current version of the Papermill Alarm detects signals in 98.9% of the Hindawi retractions conducted over the last 12 months.** It’s never nice to see the harms caused by papermills, but it is good to see independent verification of the Papermill Alarm’s predictions. Here’s a question: Why are there 2 multi-squillion-euro detectors at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider?
TL;DR: We can detect individuals with a high probability of being involved in milling papers. The question is: how should we respond? A few years ago, my bike was stolen. It was an organised job. The thieves arrived after dark, cut a hefty lock clean off, and my bike disappeared silently forever. I imagined it dismantled and sold off into some vast black market network. Poor bike. The police admitted that they weren’t going to do anything.
TL;DR: the rate of Papermill Alarm alerts is significantly higher in gold OA content than it is in subscription content. If you’re concerned about papermills, Clear Skies offers the Papermill Alarm: the world’s leading papermill detection tool. Get in touch for a demo. I’m a big believer in Open Science.
So, we’ve established that papermills like to use templates. We see templates in referee reports and in the text of cookie-cutter research papers. There’s an important insight here: Templates are used in legit academic behaviour as well as in industrial research fraud. So we need to be careful — we can’t assume that templates are necessarily a sign of research fraud.
There’s this phrase used by some technologists: ‘epistemic security’. Epistemic security has to do with things like the spreading of misinformation on social media. I.e. if we spend enough time on social media reading unreliable information, how does that influence us? That’s a matter of epistemic security. Epistemic security is interesting because if you start a conversation about epistemic security at a party, they don’t invite you back.
TL;DR: peer-review times appear to have been growing for a long time. The effects of COVID-lockdowns on peer-review are surprising. A few months ago, I was invited to referee a research paper. So, I guess the editor thought that I was one of the 2 best people in the entire world to review this thing. That’s how it works, right? Flattered, I flagged the editor’s email to signal its importance and I got straight to work!
The Papermill Alarm draws a line between papers which have the characteristics of papermill-products and those that don’t. Given data like that shown below, where red dots represent papermill-products and green dots represent normal papers, where should we draw that line?
