How scientific publishers are fighting back against fraudulent papermills
The growth of AI and papermills has caused publishers countless headaches The post How scientific publishers are fighting back against fraudulent papermills appeared first on Physics World .
Scientific publishing faces a growing threat from fraudulent papermills, according to Elisabeth Bik, a microbiologist at Stanford University. Bik's groundbreaking 2016 study exposed image duplication and manipulation in over 20,000 published papers from 40 journals between 1995 and 2014, documenting 782 instances of image duplication and 196 papers with duplicated figures with alterations.
This revelation prompted Bik to become a "scientific sleuth-in-chief," mentor and advise amateur sleuths on detecting misconduct, ultimately earning her the Einstein Foundation Award in 2024. The rise of AI and machine learning has enabled these papermills to scale their operations rapidly and evade publisher checks, posing a new threat to scientific integrity.
Written by urgent.news from Physics World's reporting — not their text. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.
