It Has Become Absurd
An official scholarly publishing blog and a database of retractions get exploited
In interview after interview since our book was published, people are surprised, infuriated, or simply mystified by what we describe — pay-to-play publishing at scale, tech mischief, and more.
Yesterday, we participated in a morning drive-time interview on a St. Louis, MO, station, and scientific publishing’s role in sowing mistrust of science was placed in an even harsher light.
If you need any more evidence that scientific and scholarly publishing has been flooded to failure, look no further than these recent incidents where it’s clear the waters are now so high we may need to shut off the electricity soon or perish:
- The official blog of the Society for Scholarly Publishing was duped into participating in a pseudoscience grift
- The database of retractions assembled by the Center for Scientific Integrity is off-limits for research purposes because it is too heavily associated with AI slop submissions
This is what can happen when you embrace “open” and technology to an absurd degree. You can get played by grifters because for a lot of people, “open” means “open season” and information tech provides great ways to fool people via psyops and sheer repetition.
We’re drowning science in muck and junk.
It has become absurd.
