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#peerreview

5 posts5 participants0 posts today
Miguel Afonso Caetano

"A growing tide of fake papers is flooding the scientific record and proliferating faster than current checks can rid them from the system, scientists warn.

The source of the trouble is “paper mills,” businesses or individuals that charge fees to publish fake studies in legitimate journals under the names of desperate scientists whose careers depend on their publishing record.

The rate of fake papers generated by these operators roughly doubled every 1.5 years between 2016 and 2020, according to a study published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

“The entire structure of science could collapse if this is left unaddressed,” said study author Luís Amaral, a physicist at Northwestern University.

Paper mills look for weak links, such as lax verification protocols, in the typically rigorous publication machinery, then exploit those to place hundreds of fabricated studies with vulnerable journals or publishers, according to scientist investigators who have been tracking and cataloging their work.

It can be a costly mess to clean up.

Publishers who have become aware of suspected paper mill activity have been forced to retract hundreds of papers at once, and in some cases shut down journals."

wsj.com/science/scientific-jou

#AI#GenerativeAI#AISlop
macfranc

I problemi della Scienza – #scienza #ricerca #PeerReview ed #editori nella diretta di Giacomo Moro Mauretto di #EntropyForLife con Giovanni Spitale

Nella Live di stasera intervisterò Giovanni Spitale, ricercatore, amico e autore del libro: "Mi fa male la scienza" che ho avuto la fortuna di leggere. Con lui parleremo di diversi temi che in larga parte saranno anche definiti dalle vostre domande.

@scienza

youtube.com/live/D5vZ8kY-w6Y

YouTubeI problemi della Scienza con Giovanni SpitaleBy Entropy for Life - Giacomo Moro Mauretto
ndocist

Recognizing and Rewarding #peerreview of Scholarly Articles, Books, and Funding Proposals: Recommendations by the CoARA Working Group on Recognizing and Rewarding Peer Review #assesment
zenodo.org/records/15968446

ZenodoRecognizing and Rewarding Peer Review of Scholarly Articles, Books, and Funding Proposals: Recommendations by the CoARA Working Group on Recognizing and Rewarding Peer ReviewIn this pre-endorsed publication, the CoARA Working Group on Recognizing and Rewarding Peer Review calls for systemic efforts to  acknowledge, and appropriately reward, peer review as integral to the research ecosystem and a critical scholarly contribution--and provides recommendations on how to institute such reforms. Peer review is fundamental to the scientific method but remains largely invisible in research assessment. This document provides targeted recommendations for different stakeholder groups, including research-performing organizations (RPOs), research-funding organizations (RFOs), publishers/editors, and individual researchers,  such as issuing verifiable certificates, providing protected time for peer review, developing digital infrastructures for crediting review activities (e.g. ORCID integration), and including peer review in performance reviews and job evaluations. The recommendations aim to start a much-needed conversation within academia on how to make visible this key pillar of the scientific endeavour. 
James Hawley, PhD

Hey #AcademicChatter, I'm looking for good training sources for #peerReview that covers topics like how to structure your review, ethical considerations providing reviews for for-profit vs non-profit publishers, how to gauge when you are a good fit, and related obligations of reviewers for the wider scientific community.

Does anyone have good resources they'd recommend on this topic?

pyOpenSci

🚨 Event for the Stanford open source community!

Your research code matters. Let’s treat it that way.

On Aug 7, pyOpenSci + OpenSource@Stanford (#OSPO) will share how open peer review supports better tools, cleaner code, and academic credit.

🗓 Thursday, Aug 7
⏰ 11AM MT / 10AM PT
🔗 www.pyopensci.org/events/pyopensci-stanford-ospo-peer-review.html

#OpenScience#OpenSource#PeerReview
Levka

#vaccines #PeerReview

This is anti-vax propaganda. That doesn't necessarily mean it's not true. The best propaganda is always true. It does come across as cherry picked. After all. It's the Daily Mail, not the most reliable of sources. Also the use of the phrase 'linked to' always triggers my Spidey Sense.

"Scientists discover Pfizer COVID jab linked to major eye damage

(. . .)

The new study specifically examined how the vaccine affected patients' corneas, the clear front part of the eye that allows light to enter.

In 64 people, scientists in Turkey measured changes in the cornea's inner layer, called the endothelium, before taking the first Pfizer dose and two months after receiving the second."

dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/ar

So I looked up the study it's based on:

"Original Article
Evaluation of the Effects of mRNA-COVID 19 Vaccines on Corneal Endothelium"

tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.10

The DM article is basically a cut and past from the study itself. And yeah, it does purport to be peer reviewed. But the whole peer review process, and especially the publishing thereof has been scammed, faked, and lied about so often that I didn't just automatically trust the publisher, so I looked *them* up, too. Here's what I found:

"Taylor & Francis Online – Bias and Credibility

(. . .)

These sources consist of legitimate science or are evidence-based through credible scientific sourcing. Legitimate science follows the scientific method, is unbiased, and does not use emotional words. These sources also respect the consensus of experts in the given scientific field and strive to publish peer-reviewed science. Some sources in this category may have a slight political bias but adhere to scientific principles."

mediabiasfactcheck.com/taylor-

Sounds good, but sounding good is proof of nothing, so I double checked the endorser:

"Is mediabiasfactcheck.com Legit?

With its medium trust score on our chart, we determined it has a low risk. We determined this score by aggregating 53 powerful factors to expose high-risk activity and see if mediabiasfactcheck.com is safe. Our in-depth review examines the website and its News & Blogs industry.

(. . .)

The Scam Detector’s algorithm gives this business the following rank:

70.4/100"

scam-detector.com/validator/me

So far, so good (sort of), so I checked out the reviewer with Trustpilot. Here's what they said :

"scam-detector.com
Reviews 529

Companies on Trustpilot can’t offer incentives or pay to hide any reviews.

(. . .)

Most reviewers were somewhat happy with their experience overall. Customers appreciate the service for helping them identify potential online scams, allowing them to avoid risky transactions. Many users have used the tool to check their own websites, with some initially receiving low scores. People value the platform as a first step to check websites, especially with the increasing sophistication of online scams.

However, some reviewers express concerns about the accuracy and fairness of the site's ratings. Several users report that their legitimate businesses were wrongly flagged as scams, leading to reputational damage. Some consumers mention that the website's assessment of their business is inaccurate, unsubstantiated, and false. A few reviewers also accuse the site of using questionable tactics, such as assigning low scores to pressure businesses into paying for a better rating."

trustpilot.com/review/www.scam

Conclusions:

As always, I suggest that you do your own research and reach your own conclusions. I got you started. You can go on from there.

Personally, I feel it's probably true, but cherry picked. But what do I know, I barely squirmed out of reform school. My partner has a Ph.D in molecular biology. She said I'm probably right this time. I always defer to expert opinions, especially hers.

We both have taken the vaccines in question. Neither of us had any deleterious results that we know of. But I always prefer to err on the side of caution. Besides, this study agrees with the government, as well as many prominent anti-vaxxers. That alone makes it suspicious. So I scheduled an eye exam. I'll let you know how it turns out.

In the meantime, I heartily recommend that you get the jab. Everybody should get the jab. If this particular COVID vaccine weirds you out, not to worry. There are other brands available. Just saying.

Daily Mail · Scientists discover Pfizer COVID jab linked to major eye damageBy Chris Melore
*
Arie van Deursen

Wow. AAAI 2026 is running a pilot “AI-Assisted Peer-Review Process”. Besides regular reviews, each paper will receive one extra LLM-generated review. No scores, but visible to reviewers and authors.

I take it that as an AI conference, AAAI was eager to try this out. Not looking forward to writing the author response to an LLM’s opinion on my paper, though. Also not sure how this will help reviewers.

aaai.org/conference/aaai/aaai-

AAAIMain Technical Track: Call for Papers - AAAI
#aaai#aaai2026#llm
Levka

#AI #PeerReview

"Researchers have been sneaking secret messages into their papers in an effort to trick artificial intelligence (AI) tools into giving them a positive peer-review report.

The Tokyo-based news magazine Nikkei Asia reported last week on the practice, which had previously been discussed on social media. Nature has independently found 18 preprint studies containing such hidden messages, which are usually included as white text and sometimes in an extremely small font that would be invisible to a human but could be picked up as an instruction to an AI reviewer.

Authors of the studies containing such messages give affiliations at 44 institutions in 11 countries, across North America, Europe, Asia and Oceania. All the examples found so far are in fields related to computer science.
Although many publishers ban the use of AI in peer review, there is evidence that some researchers do use large language models (LLMs) to evaluate manuscripts or help draft review reports. This creates a vulnerability that others now seem to be trying to exploit, says James Heathers, a forensic metascientist at Linnaeus University in Växjö, Sweden. People who insert such hidden prompts into papers could be 'trying to kind of weaponize the dishonesty of other people to get an easier ride', he says.

The practice is a form of ‘prompt injection’, in which text is specifically tailored to manipulate LLMs. Gitanjali Yadav, a structural biologist at the Indian National Institute of Plant Genome Research in New Delhi and a member of the AI working group at the international Coalition for Advancing Research Assessment, thinks it should be seen as a form of academic misconduct. 'One could imagine this scaling quickly,' she adds.'

archive.is/UqGht

El Duvelle

I will never understand why the authors of a manuscript that they post on a preprint server spontaneously decide that it will be better for whoever reads their manuscript to have not only all the figures at the end, but also separated from the legends?

WHY 😭

(Same question for papers sent to review btw. Most journals allow for the format of your choice for the first submission. WHY not make it a nice, easily readable format??)

#ScientificJournals#ResearchPapers#Academia
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