To some degree. When Wiley (old, big publisher) bought Hindawi (young, fast-growing upstart Open Access publisher), they quickly discovered that the entire publishing house was infiltrated by paper mills. They retracted thousands of papers, and closed many journals. However, some of their own journals are also heavily infiltrated by paper mills, and those had far fewer retractions.

Conversely, another young upstart, MDPI, has very few retractions even though they also have a high number of paper mill productions, including some that they know about very well and have "investigated".

Wiley is obviously a much more serious publisher than MDPI, albeit more hesitant to clean their old house than the newer that they bought.

Computer science, by the way, has a far higher rate of retractions for academic misconduct than other disciplines, and it's not because it's so easily replicated, it's because it's rampant with fraud. I'll give you an example of ridiculous verbiage that somehow stays in the academic literature thanks to the non-efforts of IEEE and an academic community that will publish anything but read nothing. You don't need a replication study to see that this isn't a serious academic work. It's most likely a patchwork of plagiarised text that's been fed through some paraphrasing filters to avoid automatic detection.

But yeah, psychology is surely not serious and computer science is very smart.

The title of the story is "GPT-Fabricated Scientific Papers Found on Google Scholar by Misinformation Researchers", you blithering imbecile. It's the starting point of the discussion.

Entirely untrue. The people dealing in fabricated papers are professionals. You can't just submit a generated paper to a journal, not even one published by MDPI, Frontiers or IEEE, and expect to have it published. You need to have friendly peer reviewers, i.e. a network of other crooks, preferably ones with credible credentials. And of course, these people will want something in return, perhaps citations to their own rubbish papers as much as money. And citations get you promoted, or a new job.

There are plenty of scam artists working as full professors, and they can do this because:
1) Publish and perish means no one has time to actually read their work, as they are too busy writing.
2) As productive and highly-cited researchers, they are particularly valuable to their institutions (as long as no one reads their work).
3) Reporting them is entirely ineffective. Publishers will ignore you, also see 2).

Oh, and did I mention that these guys cite each other? That means that a journal with a medium to strong papermill infestation will have a higher impact factor than one with editorial oversight. For instance, the most highly cited paper in IEEE Sensors Journal the last few years is obviously part of such a citation cartel. Removing the papermill presence would ruin their "impact" and hurt their credibility.

There is the Retraction Watch Database, which is directly supported by reference managers Zotero and EndNote. Whenever a reference in your library is retracted and shows up in the database (it's not complete), the reference manager notifies you.

If you're a researcher and aren't using a reference manager, you're probably not very good at your job.

Not really. Not at all, actually. There are still plenty of subscription journals, and many of them have the same problem with paper mills as open access journals have. They are also often as unwilling to fix their problems.

The problem is publish or perish – you need to publish to further your career, no matter how weak your findings are. Your quality as a researcher is usually evaluated on output, both in volume and in the supposed quality of the journals you publish in (ranked by the rate of citations to the papers published in the journals), and in some cases also on how many citations your publications have attained.

Paper mills take care of having your name put on publications. Then they publish other works citing your paper. Now you're a cited author! And also, the journal gets more citations, elevating it in the rankings (yes, this is how fucked things are). Some papers are pure gibberish: https://doi.org/10.3390/s22166...

I was following you on Twitter and then I jumped ship when Trump was allowed back on and moved over to Mastodon.social. I'm still trying to figure out what to do there as "my people" have not moved over there and I've been finding it hard to find like-minded people. My main approach has been looking at the global feed and trying to see if there is anything of interest. It's a SLOW process. Occasionally (once a month or so) there is a single post of interest and someone I can follow.

I've also tried searching hashtags, but most of my interests come up empty, so I haven't gotten much out of that either. The other approach has been to look at who my follows follow. I keep hoping that the Fediverse takes off and some of the bigger names come over. (Thankfully George Takei is someone who did) Still, I have to say, having Twitter off my rotation has been instructive in how it feels to remove the pressure to post from a social media platform. Which brings me to the last point... So far, the things I've posted on my on Mastodon.social have not garnered any responses. I think I just don't have any visibility. I'm a whimper in the sea of toots, so people who would find my toots interesting don't see me.

Anyway... I get you and understand your reasoning. I wish you the best and will continue to look for your toots as time allows. I miss the old days. But every social media platform I've been on since 1988 has always gone the same route: fun --> noisy --> commercial --> spammy --> leadership change to less competent leaders --> implosion --> gone. Maybe the Fediverse will move to the fun stage in the next few years.

Yes, well, that's capitalism for you.

Most Americans have no choice in insurer. And their choices are controlled by a powerful cartel that colludes to keep prices high. There is no competition in the health insurance field.

No American gives a rats ass about the "choice" of insurer. They want a choice of doctors and services, but really, and I can not stress this enough, REALLY hate all insurance companies. More than they hate the government even!