The scientist Me-Lo I Nvent O and the prime numbers of pregnant girls: a mathematician exposes the rip-off of predatory magazines | Science | EUROtoday

Mathematician Pascual Diago, uninterested in receiving 10 emails a day with invites to publish his research in unusual scientific journals, determined to attempt one final November. His specialty is educating faculty arithmetic, however he accepted the request for a publication in gynecology and obstetrics, the Clinical Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology. It took a couple of minutes to generate with ChatGPT a six-page delirious textual content about supposed experiments to take away anxiousness with mathematical metaphors from 60 pregnant girls and their fetuses. In the references of the article, he included non-existent research, 4 of them signed by the writer Me-Lo I Nvent O. The work was revealed a couple of days later.

Diago, a professor on the University of Valencia, explains by telephone that his intention is midway between the joke and the denunciation of the so-called predatory magazines, fraudulent publications that current themselves as prestigious and publish something in trade for cash. It is a rising enterprise. The record of predatory magazines exceeded 20,000 this Tuesday, based on the depend of the specialised firm Cabells. Five years in the past there have been 15,000. Seven years in the past, 10,000. No critical establishment takes them under consideration, however the figures present that they’ve made a spot for themselves on the earth scientific system.

The examine revealed by Diago, full of sq. roots, is unintelligible, even to himself. “I don’t even know what it’s about, it doesn’t make any sense. I’ve tried to understand it a couple of times and I think it’s about the effect of teaching prime numbers during pregnancy on children’s mathematical learning,” he explains, laughing. The professor, born in Castellón 43 years in the past, included specific indicators that every thing was a farce, resembling scientists’ surnames that had been performs on English phrases related to dishonest: Cheatillo, Sneakydez, Trickón, Sneakarez.

The journal Clinical Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology He instantly accepted the examine, however requested Diago to incorporate references to 4 research by the identical writer: Jamshidkhan Chamani, a professor on the Islamic Azad University, a non-public establishment in Iran. Demanding unjustified mentions is a typical trick to artificially inflate a researcher’s CV, as proven within the case of the present rector of the University of Salamanca, Juan Manuel Corchado, whose group has had 75 research retracted on account of these fraudulent practices. Diago was requested to quote research on the supposed medicinal properties of turmeric, jujube seeds, citrus peel, and a substance obtained from spinach and different crops. They had nothing to do with the textual content concerning the “fascination” of pregnant girls with prime numbers that ChatGPT had written.

In addition, a sure Robbie Williams demanded from Diago a previous deposit of three,000 {dollars} (about 2,500 euros) in an account related to the publishing home Heighten Science Publications, domiciled in a home on the outskirts of the American city of East Windsor. The mathematician responded with a textual content sprinkled with tune titles by English composer Robbie Williams and hooked up a false cost receipt generated by synthetic intelligence, with the emblem of Cheatbank from Spain, which might be translated because the Cheating Bank of Spain. “I told myself: I’m going to put something that is impossible to believe,” he recollects. His examine was revealed instantly and remains to be there greater than two months later, within the Clinical Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology.

Diago recounted his journey for the primary time on January 30 on the web site of Retraction Watch, an American group specialised in fraudulent practices in science. The mathematician doesn’t conceive the enterprise mannequin of predatory magazines. “I don’t know if there is anyone stupid enough to pay $3,000 to publish in a magazine that is totally false and can be easily seen,” he displays. “In some private universities there are bonuses, bonuses for production, but I don’t know if they would accept this. In the public one, of course, these studies are of no use to you,” he provides.

Professor Eva Méndez, director of the meta-research group for open science on the Carlos III University of Madrid, encourages individuals to insurgent towards these scams. “I think that, more and more, researchers would have to waste our time doing things like this, not only because it seems terribly fun to me, and at the same time terribly sad, but because it must be shown that artificial intelligence only escalates a problem inherent to the system,” he says.

Global science operates underneath the strain of “publish or perish”: scientists should publish research ―papersin slang― to aspire to promotions and wage will increase. This tradition of maximizing manufacturing has been mixed with the widespread dedication to open science: earlier than it was the readers who paid to learn a examine accessible underneath subscription, now it’s the researchers themselves who should pay the writer, often round 2,500 euros, to publish a piece accessible at no cost to everybody.

“Fraud is not an accident, but a logical byproduct of how we evaluate and communicate research in a system paper centrist absurd in the 21st century. We have to stop and reflect deeply on all this, if we don’t want tons of papers facts and reviewed by artificial intelligence”, explains Méndez. The professor harshly criticizes the so-called Transformative Agreements – “transformaTIMOS”, she jokes -, by which public institutions pay hundreds of millions of euros to private publishers to be able to publish studies in their journals. “The one who loses is always the same: the researcher. In this case, only time, but often also money and, in the process, the good science we do loses credibility,” Méndez laments.

On January 20, the professor participated in a convention on the challenges that synthetic intelligence poses for scientific integrity, organized by the Spanish Research Ethics Committee on the Ministry of Science, in Madrid. The president of the committee, Jordi Camí, drew consideration to the huge present scientific manufacturing: 3.5 million research revealed annually in some 45,000 journals, with “a minimum of 2.5 billion dollars” paid yearly to publishers. “The fraud industry is flooding the entire classical universe of scientific publications. This fraud will grow, because the big problem, the pressure to publish, continues to set the tone. And generative artificial intelligence has emerged as a miraculous elixir,” Camí warned.