Is Scientific Communication Fit for Purpose?
problems is scientific misconduct and fraud, which, it is important to note, is perpetuated by scientists themselves. This category includes scientists who use fraudulent data, inappropriately manipulate images, and otherwise fake experimental results. Publishers have been investing increasingly to block bad contributions at the point of submission through editorial review and more is almost certainly needed, likely a combination of automated and human review. Another form of misconduct is the failure to disclose conflicts of interest, which, notwithstanding efforts by publishers to strengthen disclosure guidelines, have continued to be disclosed “too little too late,”
Beyond individual misconduct, there are also organized and systematic challenges. We are seeing “organized fraud” and “industrialized cheating” to manipulate the scientific record to advance self-interests. These choreographed efforts include citation malpractice, paper mills, peer review rings, and guest editor frauds. And, even if it does not rise to the level of misconduct, we have seen the use of methods and practices that make substantial portions of at least some fields impossible to reproduce and therefore of dubious validity. Whether individual, organized, or systematic, all these are threats to scientific integrity.
Hundreds of gibberish papers still lurk in the scientific literature
The issue began in 2005, when three PhD students created paper-generating software called SCIgen for “maximum amusement”, and to show that some conferences would accept meaningless papers.
Springer also sponsored a PhD project to help spot SCIgen papers, which resulted in free software called SciDetect.
The publishers who posted the most SCIgen content were Trans Tech Publications, a Swiss publisher, which published 57 SCIgen papers, Blue Eyes Intelligence Engineering and Sciences Publication (BEIESP), based in India, which had 54; and Atlantis Press, a French publisher that was acquired by Springer Nature this March, with 39.
SCIgen papers are extremely rare: Labbé and Cabanac estimate from their screen that they make up a mere 75 papers per million in the computer-science literature. They are a far smaller problem than are, for instance, suspected paper mills.
the existence of these papers is an indication of the harmful effects of a ‘publish or perish’ culture, and an example of how nonsensical work can still make it into conference proceedings or journals.
https://www.facebook.com/groups/onlinelearningcollective/permalink/761389994491701/
“What the invention of photography did to painting, this will do to teaching.”
AI can write a passing college paper in 20 minutes
Natural language processing is on the cusp of changing our relationship with machines forever.
https://www.zdnet.com/article/ai-can-write-a-passing-college-paper-in-20-minutes/
The specific AI — GPT-3, for Generative Pre-trained Transformer 3 — was released in June 2020 by OpenAI, a research business co-founded by Elon Musk. It was developed to create content with a human language structure better than any of its predecessors.
According to a 2019 paper by the Allen Institute of Artificial Intelligence, machines fundamentally lack commonsense reasoning — the ability to understand what they’re writing. That finding is based on a critical reevaluation of standard tests to determine commonsense reasoning in machines, such as the Winograd Schema Challenge.
Which makes the results of the EduRef experiment that much more striking. The writing prompts were given in a variety of subjects, including U.S. History, Research Methods (Covid-19 Vaccine Efficacy), Creative Writing, and Law. GPT-3 managed to score a “C” average across four subjects from professors, failing only one assignment.
Aside from potentially troubling implications for educators, what this points to is a dawning inflection point for natural language processing, heretofore a decidedly human characteristic.
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more on artificial intelligence in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=artificial+intelligence
more on paper mills in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=paper+mills