2w ago

Fake papers are contaminating the world’s scientific literature, fueling a corrupt industry and slowing legitimate lifesaving medical research.

theconversation.com Fake papers are contaminating the world’s scientific literature, fueling a corrupt industry and slowing legitimate lifesaving medical research

‘Paper mills’ are contaminating the world’s scholarly output with fake papers that hinder research. Lifesaving biomedical fields are especially hard hit.

Fake papers are contaminating the world’s scientific literature, fueling a corrupt industry and slowing legitimate lifesaving medical research

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I really think that a federated system for scientific publication could sense. Each "journal" is a separate instance, federated with all others. A department, a school, a research institute, whatever could host it. You manage submission, editing, peer review, etc. through the system.
- What do you mean exactly by federated in this context?
  What is getting federated in your ideal scenario?
  
  I think what they mean is every journal behaves like an instance on lemmy, federated with eachother. One journal not living up to your standards, block them on your instance etc. Like lemmy
  
  What does "instance" in this case refer to?
  Does he mean something along the lines of advanced search filter/engine? because it can be done now, using the usual tools.
  There is no way that I could think about his comment and make sense of it.
  
  Each journal hosts its own papers, but can also provide access to every other paper from journals they work with.
  
  So, Lemmy is comprised of several instances of itself that can all be accessed by each other so long as they are “federated” with one another. This is designed to keep the power to censor or push an agenda out of the hands of any one person (like what’s going on with Reddit, twitter/x, and meta).
  Lots of people on here see a similar set up as a panacea for the problems in all kinds of information distribution. That’s why the person you’ve been talking to is proposing the idea for scientific publishing.
  I don’t think it would solve any issues of veracity. The current system allows for various publications to be seen as more or less accurate/ rigorous.
  The real problem with academic publishing is the expense and IP laws that are an issue for other fields as well.
  
  You can already follow the journals you want via RSS.

9 comments