The death of open access mega-journals?
Mar 2023, phys.org
"...explosive growth of mega-journals may be accompanied by the fall of some previously prestigious journals."Many newer mega-journals have begun specializing in discipline-focused journals that are publishing faster and in greater volume than traditional journals can keep up with.And because getting more citations and publishing more stories in a current year helps lift the impact factor, self-citing journals are skewing the imapct factor of the journal.Using an internally-developed AI tool to help identify outlier characteristics that indicate that a journal may no longer meet quality criteria, the Web of Science has removed the impact factor of nearly two dozen journals, including one of the world's largest, the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health. Many of the journals published by Hindawi and two by MDPI have had their impact factor ratings removed, likely reflecting concerns with the integrity of the publishing process.
- Hiring "guest editors" who may not be reviewing studies in their field of expertise
- Quick turnaround times from submitting a paper to publication (200 hundred days in traditional publishing, 30 for Hindawi)
- Hindawi was purchased by Wiley publishing in 2021 for $300 million and has already had to deal with thousands of retractions after uncovering thousands of fraudulent papers filled with off-subject citations.
via opinion letter by researchers from Italy and Stanford: John P. A. Ioannidis et al, The Rapid Growth of Mega-Journals Threats and Opportunities, JAMA (2023). DOI: 10.1001/jama.2023.3212
Megajournals may perpetuate and accentuate an already dysfunctional system of scientific evaluation and publication,” they write. The pay-for-publication model creates an incentive for authors trying to meet institutions’ quotas for publications, and “megajournals may drain an already strained pool of reviewers from traditional journals.” Ioannidis calls for more research comparing the quality of peer review in megajournals and traditional ones, and he suggests institutions and funders reward researchers for studies that are transparent and rigorous.
-Fast-growing open-access journals stripped of coveted impact factors: Web of Science delists some 50 journals, including one of the world’s largest, Mar 2023, Jeffrey Brainard for Science [link]
And by the way:
AI language models open a potential Pandora's box of medical research fraud
Mar 2023, phys.org
Meta things -- they wanted to see if artificial intelligence could write a fabricated research paper and then investigate how best to detect it, so they ran their AI-generated text through a free, online, AI rephrasing tool -- the consensus unanimously flipped to "likely human," suggesting we need better AI detection tools, since these technologies could be used to write entire studies with false data, nonexistent participants and meaningless results.
via Faisal Elali of the State University of New York Downstate Health Sciences University: Faisal R. Elali et al, AI-generated research paper fabrication and plagiarism in the scientific community, Patterns (2023). DOI: 10.1016/j.patter.2023.100706
Image credit: AI Art - Anatomy of an Altmodern Female Head - 2022
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