#papermills — Public Fediverse posts
Live and recent posts from across the Fediverse tagged #papermills, aggregated by home.social.
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Our new 📄 in Current Alzheimer Research looks at a strange, and worrying, phenomenon in scientific writing: tortured phrases. Instead of blood-brain barrier, some papers use bizarre alternatives like blood-brain obstruction or blood-cerebrum boundary.
:doi: https://doi.org/10.2174/0115672050460224260206052444
These are not just language errors, they can signal deeper issues such as weak #PeerReview or even #PaperMills.
#OpenScience #ResearchIntegrity #Bibliometrics #Neuroethics #AcademicPublishing
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I'd not heard of Fengkai Group before I saw their LinkedIn advert. They're offering paid positions to be a guest editor for special issues in SCI- and Ei Compendex-indexed journals (the latter is Elsevier's engineering index). That's weird, I thought.
Csaba Szabo has heard of them: he commented on his guest post on Leonid Schneider's blog about uncovering paper mill activity, at https://forbetterscience.com/2025/05/19/a-sting-inside-a-papermill/#comment-762891, to note the worrying approach Fengkai made to him in May.
Christopher Tang got in similar email in June: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/lets-stand-up-against-unethical-research-behavior-christopher-tang-eur3c
More than 20 of my LinkedIn connections follow Fengkai Group and several are connected to the LinkedIn account that posted the advert.
We all need to be careful not to legitimise questionable organisations by associating with them.
#PublicationEthics #GuestEditors #SpecialIssues #JournalPublishing #PaperMills #AcademicPublishing
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Arundel Cathedral, Sussex, c.1905-10 - John Dickinson Postcard - Paper Sample
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My panel this morning at the European Association of Science Editors (@EASE) conference in Oslo was on the use of new tech in research integrity checks, alongside Caroline Sutton in person and Kim Eggleton and Jane Alfred online.
Our conversation was great (if I say so myself), helped by the chairing by Brian Cody. I thought it would be interesting to see how others here would answer Brian's questions:
1. What are the top research integrity concerns for scholarly publishers, and how much are they discipline-specific?
2. Technical checks can be overwhelming for journals. How to manage manuscript checklists from a process perspective?
3. How do publishers considering new automation / tools decide what's necessary vs nice to have?
4. Case studies of implementing tools.
5. Many tools only apply to English publications. What tools should non-English journals know about?
6. How can publishers and editors get involved in tool development?
7. What is the potential for AI to improve research integrity checks vs human oversight?
#ResearchIntegrity #PublicationEthics #AItools #Automation #EASEevents #EASEoslo #PaperMills #ScholarlyPublishing #ScholComm