Making Life Easier for Professional Publishers: A Call for More Blatant Fraud
May 31, 2021
I enjoyed “Please Commit More Blatant Academic Fraud.” The intent is to highlight the disgusting underbelly of academic underbellies of naked mole rats. The author picks up on the fraudulent peer cheerleading for research related to artificial intelligence, but when tenure is at stake, I wager that professors teaching ethics can be manipulation minded as well. It just depends upon how one frames the argument, right?
The essay has a very interesting quote; to wit:
It would, of course, be quite difficult to actually distinguish the papers published fraudulently from the those published “legitimately”. (That fact alone tells you all you really need to know about the current state of AI research.)
I want to add a slightly different quantum entanglement to the nuclear nature of the academic fraud issue. The professional publishers must be considered. These are the outstanding executives who often publish research known to be wonky. The professional publishers create journals filled with hocus pocus, wrapped in the magic of peer reviewing, and totted up to be the beacons of “real” information.
If anyone wants more and crazier research written by authors and institutions willing to pay assorted fees to get their estimable contributions to knowledge published, it is the publishers. When an author makes a change, the outstanding professional publishers often charge to fix up a passage. Want reprints? Just get out that electronic payment system. Order away.
The professional publishers are struggling to get libraries to buy, subscribe, license, and renew automatically if possible. More junk research and increased content manipulation will improve the professional publishing system itself.
Imagine. Bogus research in medicine, social science, and quantum computing. When something actually reproducible and substantive becomes available, a researcher will have to spend more time on for fee commercial databases, apply more research assistant labor, and scan more tweets to figure out what’s “real” and what’s fake.
The advancement of knowledge is enabled, and even the professional publishers can get behind the call for action expressed in “Please Commit More Blatant Academic Fraud.” Marketing is more important for everyone it seems now.
Stephen E Arnold, May 31, 2021
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