Open Science Drowns Science

We plunged further into the Bay of Absurdity when the database for Retraction Watch was found to be a source for scores of fake papers generated by paper mills, likely supplemented by LLM-based writing and formatting tools. But the story goes back further while also continuing, with the most recent finding showing how medical students have been generating thousands of fake papers using a medical records data tool called TriNetX:

In 2025, nearly 2700 publications mentioned TriNetX in the title or abstract, up from just 33 only 5 years prior . . .

Most of these papers appear to be simplistic, quick-hit, box-ticker papers for medical students applying for residencies and hoping to stand out, or at least look on par with peers.

So, what’s the problem? What does it matter if thousands of “meh” papers are filling the cistern of science? Well, as one expert puts it:

My biggest concern is that doctors in 10 years’ time want to look into a particular concept and they go into the literature and everything is just associated with everything.

This is the “ice cream consumption and shark attacks” problem — how they famously correlate, but without causation.

• Another high-profile example complete with HARKing was published in Nature recently. The authors have no expertise in the field and make comparisons and statements nobody in the field would.

Once dozens or hundreds of diagnostic criteria are correlated into false positives and hoovered up into a bunch of LLMs, you have chunky milk going into the text extrusion engines and vanilla pudding coming out. Who can make sense of anything in that kind of world?

The fundamental misconception informs the ideology that “open” is equivalent to “good” or “fair” or “free.” As one academic put it as far back as 2014:

We act — at our peril — as if “open” is politically neutral, let alone
politically good or progressive. Indeed, we sometimes use the word to
stand in place of a politics of participatory democracy. We presume
that, because something is “open” that it necessarily contains all the
conditions for equality or freedom or justice. . . .

. . . or science.

For its part, AAMC, which governs the residency application process in the U.S., is trying to address the problem of quick-and-dirty papers, Howley says. For the coming cycle, it will ask applicants to shift the focus of their publications list “from quantity to quality, emphasizing meaningful contributions, depth of involvement, and the impact of applicants’ work.”

This has been a shift during the OA Era that I didn’t clock until recently — evaluators of academic applications are relying increasingly on publication records at all levels, not just for tenure, including for college applications, medical school applications, and residency and fellowship applications. Publishing a scientific paper has become so easy and testing scores so compromised in differentiating people (do they? should they?) that publication has become overemphasized.

Then we add in the Gold OA model so that paper quantity is a path to profit rather than research quality, and we have a pipeline pumping like mad — academic incentives spread across all areas of academia to publish papers quickly and with little regard for quality or novelty; free data to gin up papers on a whim; LLMs to assemble these data into simulacra of papers; publishers making money with every ounce they squeeze out of their submission streams; and, hefty AI licensing deals on the other side with publishers and AI CEOs both pretending that this “science” is good and worthy and important.

Again and again, it seems the era from 2010-? is going to be one in science where some group or approach will have to come in and dump all the brackish waters we’re using now to fill the science aquifer with sludge.