It’s 1 January 2021. Dozing in bed, floating in that warm & fuzzy limbo between dreams and reality, and that’s where it hits him. That lightbulb moment. (At last!) He sits bolt-upright in bed, punches the air and shouts: “You know what, honey, I’m gonna start a papermill!”. She snorts awake; reluctantly conscious. Oh no. Not again. Not another hare-brained scheme… “…and, by the end of next year, we’ll publish 20,000 fake papers!”.

I remember finding ChatGPT usage in a research paper for the first time. It was April 2023, and a Twitter user pointed out that you could identify bots by their use of the phrase “as an AI language model…”. It’s a hallmark of ChatGPT usage. So I searched Google Scholar for the phrase … and found just one paper.

TL;DR: The current version of the Papermill Alarm detects signals in 98.9% of the Hindawi retractions conducted over the last 12 months.** It’s never nice to see the harms caused by papermills, but it is good to see independent verification of the Papermill Alarm’s predictions. Here’s a question: Why are there 2 multi-squillion-euro detectors at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider?

The practice of preprinting in the life sciences has grown rapidly. In addition to accelerating scientific publication, preprinting also has the potential to open new avenues of communication among researchers. For example, preprint peer review offers tremendous potential for changing the culture of scientific assessment, broadening participation, and enhancing the robustness of scholarship.

Timed for Peer Review Week 2023, we’d like to announce that GigaByte Journal has integrated a novel ‘Publish, Review, Curate’ (PRC) peer-review model, in partnership with eLife.

There are those who demand journal peer-review be paid extra on top of academic salaries. Let’s have a look at the financials of that proposal. The article linked above confirms common rates of academic consulting fees, i.e., anything between US$100 per hour for graduate students and US$350 per hour for faculty. Taking a conservative US$200 as an easy, lower-bound estimate for, say, a post-doc hour seems to cover most cases.

I was a bit shaken to read this short article, Submit It Again! Learning From Rejected Manuscripts (Campbell et al. 2022), recently posted on Mastodon by open-access legend Peter Suber. For example: Let’s pick this apart a bit. “Because they recently published a similar article” ? What is this nonsense.

Also… what is an API? The Papermill Alarm API, is a service which you can send some article metadata to and which will return an alert telling you if the paper looks like past papermill-products. Anyone can use it, but it definitely helps to have the support of an IT or data professional.

Years ago, when I was young and stupid, I used to read papers containing phylogenetic analyses and think, “Oh, right, I see now, Euhelopus is not a mamenchisaurid after all, it’s a titanosauriform”. In other words, I believed the result that the computer spat out.

Last week, a paper I wrote on the subject of peer-review fraud was published in the journal Scientometrics (free link here, preprint here) . It was an interesting project to work on. I found a lot of examples where one referee would write a report during peer-review and then another referee would write an identical report in some other peer-review of some other paper.