It was, at first glance, just another scientific paper, one of the millions published every year, and destined to receive little to no attention outside the arcane field of biological signalling in stem cells destined to become sperm.<\/p>\n
But soon after the paper was published online, in the journal Frontiers in Cell and Developmental Biology, it found a global audience. Not all of the readers came for the science.<\/p>\n
The reason for its broader appeal? An eye-catching image, which depicted a rat sitting upright with an unfeasibly large penis and too many testicles. Its body parts were labelled with nonsense words such as \u201ctesttomcels\u201d and \u201cdck\u201d.<\/p>\n
Rather than fading into academic obscurity, the paper soon became the subject of mainstream media mockery. \u201cScientific journal publishes AI-generated rat with gigantic penis\u201d, reported Vice News. \u201cIt might be considered an AI cock-up on a massive scale,\u201d intoned the Daily Telegraph.<\/p>\n
The images had indeed been generated by artificial intelligence (AI), but that was permitted<\/a> under the journal\u2019s rules. The problem was the authors had not verified the accuracy of the AI-generated material. Neither the journal\u2019s staff nor its expert reviewers caught the glaring errors. Three days after publication, the paper was retracted.<\/p>\n What separates the anecdote from other stories of AI mishap is the glimpse it provides into wider problems at the heart of an important industry. Scientific publishing records, and plays gatekeeper to, information that shapes the world, and on which life and death decisions are made.<\/p>\n The first scientific journal was published by the Royal Society in 1665. The maiden issue<\/a> of Philosophical Transactions told readers about a spot on Jupiter, a peculiar lead ore from Germany, and a \u201cmonstrous\u201d calf encountered by a butcher in Lymington.<\/p>\n Since then, journals have been the chronicle of serious scientific thought. Newton, Einstein and Darwin all posited historic theories there; Marie Curie coined the term \u201cradioactivity\u201d in a journal.<\/p>\n But journals are more than historical records. Groundbreaking research in critical fields from genetics and AI to climate science and space exploration is routinely published in the growing number of journals, charting humanity\u2019s progress. Such studies steer drug development, shape medical practice, underpin government policies and inform geopolitical strategies, even estimates of fatalities in bloody military campaigns, such as Israel\u2019s assault on Gaza.<\/p>\n The consequential nature of journals, and potential threats to the quality and reliability of the work they publish, have prompted leading scientists to sound the alarm. Many argue that scientific publishing is broken, unsustainable and churning out too many papers that border on the worthless.<\/p>\n The warning from Nobel laureates and other academics comes as the Royal Society<\/a> prepares to release a major review of scientific publishing at the end of the summer. It will focus on the \u201cdisruptions\u201d the industry faces in the next 15 years.<\/p>\n Sir Mark Walport, the former government chief scientist and chair of the Royal Society\u2019s publishing board, said nearly every aspect of scientific publishing was being transformed by technology, while deeply ingrained incentives for both researchers and publishers often favoured quantity over quality.<\/p>\n \u201cVolume is a bad driver,\u201d Walport said. \u201cThe incentive should be quality, not quantity. It\u2019s about re-engineering the system in a way that encourages good research from beginning to end.\u201d<\/p>\n Today, following the dramatic expansion of science and publishing practices<\/a> pioneered by the press baron Robert Maxwell, tens of thousands of scientific journals put out millions of papers annually. Analysis for the Guardian by Gordon Rogers, the lead data scientist at Clarivate, an analytics company, shows that the number of research studies indexed on the firm\u2019s Web of Science database rose by 48%, from 1.71m to 2.53m, between 2015 and 2024. Tot up all the other kinds of scientific articles and the total reaches 3.26m.<\/p>\n In a landmark paper<\/a> last year, Dr Mark Hanson at the University of Exeter described how scientists are \u201cincreasingly overwhelmed\u201d by the volume of articles being published. Keeping up with the truly original work is only one issue. The demands of peer review \u2013 where academics volunteer time to vet each other\u2019s work \u2013 are now so intense that journal editors can struggle to find willing experts.<\/p>\n According to one recent study<\/a>, in 2020 alone, academics globally spent more than 100 million hours peer reviewing papers for journals. For experts in the US, the time spent reviewing that year amounted to more than $1.5bn of free labour.<\/p>\n \u201cEverybody agrees that the system is kind of broken and unsustainable,\u201d says Venki Ramakrishnan, a former president of the Royal Society and a Nobel laureate at the Medical Research Council\u2019s Laboratory of Molecular Biology. \u201cBut nobody really knows what to do about it.\u201d<\/p>\n In the \u201cpublish or perish\u201d world of academia, where and how often a researcher publishes, and how many citations their papers receive, are career-defining. The rationale is reasonable: the best scientists often publish in the best journals. But the system can lead researchers to chase metrics. They might run easier studies, hype up eye-catching results, or publish their findings over more papers than necessary. \u201cThey\u2019re incentivised by their institute or government funding agencies to put out papers with their names on them, even if they have nothing new or useful to say,\u201d says Hanson.<\/p>\n skip past newsletter promotion<\/a><\/p>\n Our morning email breaks down the key stories of the day, telling you what\u2019s happening and why it matters<\/p>\n Privacy Notice: Newsletters may contain info about charities, online ads, and content funded by outside parties. For more information see our Privacy Policy<\/a>. We use Google reCaptcha to protect our website and the Google Privacy Policy<\/a> and Terms of Service<\/a> apply.<\/p>\n after newsletter promotion<\/p>\n Scientific publishing has a unique business model. Scientists, who are typically funded by taxpayers or charities, perform the research, write it up, and review each other\u2019s work to maintain quality standards. Journals manage the peer review and publish the articles. Many journals charge for access through subscriptions, but publishers are steadily embracing open access models, where authors can pay up to \u00a310,000 to have a single paper made freely available online.<\/p>\n According to a recent analysis<\/a>, between 2015 and 2018, researchers globally paid more than $1bn in open access fees to the big five academic publishers, Elsevier, Sage, Springer Nature, Taylor & Francis, and Wiley.<\/p>\n Open access helps disseminate research more broadly. Because it is not behind a paywall, the work can be read by anyone, anywhere. But the model incentivises commercial publishers to run more papers. Some launch new journals to attract more studies. Others solicit papers for vast numbers of Special Issues.<\/p>\n For one Swiss publisher, MDPI, special issues of journals are a major income stream. A single MDPI journal, the International Journal of Molecular Sciences, is inviting submissions to more than 3,000 special issues<\/a>. The publication fee, or article processing charge (APC) for one article is \u00a32,600. As of last year, the Swiss National Science Foundation refuses to pay publication fees for special issues amid concerns over quality<\/a>. MDPI did not respond to an interview request.<\/p>\n Unhelpful incentives around academic publishing are blamed for record levels of retractions<\/a>, the rise in predatory journals<\/a>, which publish anything for a fee, and the emergence of AI-written studies<\/a> and paper mills<\/a>, which sell fake papers to unscrupulous researchers to submit to journals. All contaminate the scientific literature and risk damaging trust in science. Earlier this month, Taylor & Francis paused submissions<\/a> to its journal Bioengineered while editors investigated 1,000 papers that bear signs of being manipulated or coming from paper mills.<\/p>\n While fraud and fakery are important problems, Hanson is more concerned about the glut of research papers that do little to progress scientific knowledge. \u201cThe far greater danger by volume and by total numbers is the stuff that\u2019s genuine but uninteresting and uninformative,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s now possible to publish a peer-reviewed article in a journal that has practically nothing new to contribute. These papers are a major drain on the system in terms of the money used to publish and pay for them, the time that\u2019s spent writing them and the time that\u2019s spent reviewing them.\u201d<\/p>\n Prof Andre Geim, a Nobel laureate at the University of Manchester, said: \u201cI do believe that researchers publish too many useless papers and, more importantly, we aren\u2019t flexible enough to abandon declining subjects where little new can be learned. Unfortunately, after reaching a critical mass, research communities become self-perpetuating due to the emotional and financial interests of those involved.\u201d<\/p>\n Hanson believes the problem is not open access and APCs per se, but for-profit publishers that seek to publish as many papers as possible. He believes the strain on academic publishing could be substantially alleviated if funding agencies stipulated that the work they support must be published in non-profit journals.<\/p>\n Hannah Hope, the open research lead at the Wellcome Trust, said in general, research that is good enough to fund should be published, and that greater investment in science, particularly beyond North America and Europe, has contributed to the rise in scientific papers. But she agrees peer review might be used more selectively. \u201cI\u2019m sure peer review does lead to improvement in research. Is it always worth the time that goes into it? I think it\u2019s something that we should be questioning as a field, and whether peer review happens in the current format on everything,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n Ritu Dhand, the chief scientific officer at publisher Springer Nature, rejected the narrative of \u201cgreedy journal publishers\u201d making money by publishing poor-quality papers and pointed to the fact that the research landscape has gone through a \u201cradical transformation\u201d, quadrupling in size over the past 25 years. Long dominated by western countries, research is now far more global, and led by China<\/a> rather than the US.<\/p>\n \u201cIs the solution not to allow the rest of the world to publish?\u201d she says. \u201cWe live in a digital world. Surely, it doesn\u2019t matter how many papers are being published.\u201d She sees solutions in better filtering, search tools and alerts so researchers can find the work that really matters to them, and a global expansion of peer reviewers to absorb the demand.<\/p>\n While technology poses fresh challenges for academic publishers, Ramakrishnan agrees that it may be the answer to some of the problems. \u201cEventually these papers will all be written by an AI agent and then another AI agent will actually read them, analyse them and produce a summary for humans. I actually think that\u2019s what\u2019s going to happen.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"It was, at first glance, just another scientific paper, one of the millions published every year, and destined…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":6771,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[45],"tags":[182,181,507,74],"class_list":["post-6770","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-ai","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6770","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6770"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6770\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/6771"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6770"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6770"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6770"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}