Borrowing the idea of ‘bug bounties’ from the technology industry could provide a systematic way to detect and correct the errors that litter the scientific literature.
Archived version: https://archive.ph/UnQ19
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Ok but first pay researchers to publish. Like WTF why aren’t they already?
I think this is more about AI spamming the scientific world with literal trash.
https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/fcell-11-1339390-1.pdf
AI is a literal plague and people are gobbling it up. It’s so damn broken and shit right now it’s not even funny.
Wait was that image published in a journal? That’s insane. No reputable journal would ever let that go, so I’m sure it wasn’t a reputable one.
My understanding is that it was submitted, reviewed and published then revoked when the absurdness was noticed. This isn’t the first thing I’ve heard about terrible articles being published generated by ai. I wish I could remember the other one. It was recent too.
This is what the publishers (the peer reviewed journals) used to do, right? I thought they got other research teams to comment on papers and even try duplicating some kinds of experiments before publication. Maybe that’s just within certain disciplines? Maybe I’m nuts.
They ASK overworked people to do this for FREE. Not the duplicating part though, that would be very expensive in most cases and require its own funding.
On reading more about it, I realize you are right that they were/are rarely paid by journals, but it used to be a prestigious part of your academic career, so it fit in as a normal and valued part of your research work, while being paid by their university or institute or whatever.
In fact, there are platforms that allow authors to pay to have their articles reviewed, but this is felt to be not gaining traction because the researchers’ bosses consider it moonlighting instead of an essential part of the common work of advancing scientific knowledge.
I know in the 2000s my research advisor asked us to analyze papers and replicate methods and measurements from other groups on occasion, sometimes because he was a reviewer and sometimes just because it developed specialized skills in our field. We (and he) only worked so many hours each week, regardless it was research or review, and were paid a stipend/salary so we were all definitely getting paid for our time. The key was that the university “allowed” us to spend time on this sort of community service/professional development, by which I don’t mean they really closely accounted for anything, but just didn’t have a breakneck publish or perish vibe.
