Another Springer Nature AI Prob

Pity the poor Springer Nature comms team, as company leadership had made their days and nights more than a little difficult this year.

Think about having to deal with all of these things on top of the normal duties of scientific publishing communications:

• Springer Nature targeted by the NIH for high APCs
• Dealing with the failed rehabilitation of Cureus, a journal acquired only a few years ago
• Continued tractability among its journalists for preprints (here and here), despite the whole notion of preprinting going against the main brand promise of Nature itself
• Publishing the OA paper cited in the “Tylenol causes autism” nonsense
• The recent craziness around a bogus autism dataset and an AI-generated image in yet another OA paper (now retracted)
• Being forced to retract an entire book about machine learning because of fake AI-generated citations

And the problems seeming to be accelerating. I just published a compendium of recent AI slop problems, and here we are again.

• Maybe Springer Nature should modify their slogan from:
  • “Through our leading brands, trusted for more than 180 years, we provide technology-enabled products, platforms, and services” to:
    • “We’re rolling the dice on technology-enabled products, platforms, and services papered over with trademarks that were trusted for more than 180 years.”

All this is going on while the publisher has announced — via job postings for a Chief Editor in “a high-profile role within a strategically vital area for the Fully Open Access Brands group” — it is entering the review journals market with an OA review journal (Scientific Reviews).

And now another book is under scrutiny for fake AI-generated citations.

What take the cake is it’s a book on AI ethics: