Questa mattina alla rassegna stampa di radio 3 un ascoltatore che si
definiva un fisico dava come abituale nel suo ambiente l'uso di chatGPT
nel 'supporto' alla generazione di paper scientifici.
Discutendo la cosa un amico mi ha segnalato questo apparentemente
diffuso fenomeno dei 'paper mills':
<https://sciencebusiness.net/news/us-lawmakers-turn-attention-plague-fake-journal-papers>
(lo riporto di seguito)
L'articolo e' datato ma non credo che nel frattempo i numeri dei paper
fasulli sia calato.
Forse con chatGPT i paper mills andranno in rovina: perché pagare?
Alberto
--
US lawmakers turn attention to plague of fake journal papers
26 Jul 2022
AI tools are now allowing so-called paper mills to trick journals with
fake articles on an industrial scale. The issue risks scientific
integrity and is beginning to get high level political attention
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
<https://science.house.gov/imo/media/doc/chair_foster_os_publishing.pdf>
Democrat congressman Bill Foster in a hearing of the US House of
Representatives’ science, space and technology committee last week.
To prove his point, Foster, along with another representative, created a
fake nuclear physics paper
<https://science.house.gov/download/fake-foster-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 behaviour, warned
<https://science.house.gov/imo/media/doc/chairwoman_johnson_os_publishing.pdf>
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
<https://publicationethics.org/files/paper-mills-cope-stm-research-report.pdf>
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.
As for the mills’ customers – academics willing to pay for a fake
authorship credit – they tend to be based in Asia, Graf said. “The
majority of the authors whose papers I know about […] are in China,” he
said. “A proportion them are also in India.”
Graf, who is one of the leaders of a publishers’ effort to better detect
paper mills, said he is angry with the mills, not the academics themselves.
These academics – often busy clinicians - may be trapped in a system
that demands they publish internationally but without the time,
resources, or English language skills to do so honestly, he said.
*Fooling journals*
In some fields, research is so specialised that journal peer reviewers
simply cannot spot when a paper is fake. In human genetics, sometimes
there are no expert communities for particular genes, said Jennifer
Byrne, an oncology professor at the University of Sydney, another expert
who testified last week.
“If the manuscript looks plausible, for example by including the
expected types of images and nucleotide sequence reagents, they may
accept the manuscript, even though they don’t know whether the results
describe represent a genuine advance in knowledge,” she said.
Bryne and colleagues recently screened around 12,000 human genomics
papers, and found
<https://science.house.gov/imo/media/doc/Byrne%20Testimony.pdf> over 700
contained errors indicating they could originate from a paper mill. “The
threat of paper mills to scientific publishing and integrity has no
parallel over my 30-year scientific career,” she said in her testimony
<https://science.house.gov/imo/media/doc/Byrne%20Testimony.pdf>.
Another paper mill technique relies on full-scale identity fraud.
Journals often use outside guest editors to oversee niche editions, said
Graf. In one case, however, a journal was contacted by a paper mill
pretending to be a specialist guest editor, using a very similar email
address to the academic they were impersonating.
This fake guest editor then waved through hundreds of articles from the
paper mill before the journal realised what was happening and retracted
the articles, Graf said. “We realised the journal had been hacked,
effectively.”
Paper mills have also targeted pre-print servers. These publish articles
online prior to peer review, and became increasingly important during
the pandemic, when scientists couldn’t wait for publication to get their
results out.
ArXiv, a popular pre-print server, has received fake papers for some
time, said Steinn Sigurdsson, scientific director. “It is a bit of a
‘Red Queen Race’ as computer technology and algorithms improve and the
fakes become ‘deeper’,” he said, referring to a situation where more and
more work is required just to stay in the same place.
“arXiv uses a combination of human moderators who do mostly quick
screens of submissions, and a hierarchy of software tools that run both
synchronously with submission and asynchronously offline to detect
submissions with errors or problems, and outliers of various sorts,” he
explained.
*Scale unclear*
Exactly how many fake papers lurk in the scientific literature is unclear.
In the publishers’ report last month, called /Paper Mills/
<https://publicationethics.org/files/paper-mills-cope-stm-research-report.pdf>,
estimates varied widely. At most journals, just 2% of submissions are
from paper mills, it found. But when a paper mill finds a journal that
takes its papers, it appears to bombard it with manuscripts. At some
targeted journals, nearly half of submissions are from paper mills, it
found.
One unnamed publisher cited in the report discovered that between 2019 -
21, they had published more than 450 paper mill articles.
Publishers have faced criticism of inaction when issues are flagged up,
either due to paper mill fakery or other forms of misconduct.
“Journal and institutional responses remain, on average, very
ineffective and inefficient, even when evident problems have been made
public,” US lawmakers were told
<https://science.house.gov/imo/media/doc/Stell%20Testimony.pdf> by
Brandon Stell, co-founder of the PubPeer site, which allows anonymous
commentators to pick apart problems in papers.
It’s also unclear to what extent fake papers in the literature will
actually steer science down blind alleys. Graf thinks that researchers
are on the whole able to spot them. “They know what’s rubbish, and they
know what’s trustworthy,” he said.
*Taking action*
Still, the existence of fake paper mill articles has rattled publishers,
said Graf. “Publishers care a lot about this,” he said. “It goes
straight to the heart of the thing we call our value proposition.”
Last December, the International Association of Scientific, Technical
and Medical Publishers, set up an Integrity Hub, which they will use to
share data on simultaneous submission of papers to several journals,
which can be a sign that a paper mill is behind them.
Graf predicted a spike in retractions due to increasing paper mill
fraud. “Maybe we’re at the start of that spike for retractions for paper
mill type work,” he said.
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