Frontiers, ChatGPT, and Tufte

Let’s be honest — Frontiers is a sketchy publisher. The litany of misbehavior, bullying, and exploitation is long — they are willing to destroy careers, collude with regulators, game citations, and engage in bulk publishing schemes in order to make money.

The problems they create distort the scientific communications system in a number of ways, and the practices now seem baked into the culture there — so much so, that even little things they do are annoying, cluttering the information space with gunk.

Two new features rolled out around their special issues exemplify these lazy, thoughtless approaches — shoddy summaries generated by ChatGPT, and metrics using data display techniques Edward Tufte would certainly condemn.