US publisher Wiley this week suspended 19 academic journals served by its Hindawi subsidiary, at the center of a long-running academic publishing scandal.
In December 2023, Wiley announced that it would stop using the Hindawi brand, which it acquired in 2021, following the company’s decision in May 2023 to close four of its magazines “to prevent systematic manipulation of the publishing process.”
Hindawi’s journals have been found to publish articles from paper mills – organizations or groups of individuals who attempt to undermine the scientific publishing process for financial gain. For the past two years, a Wiley spokesman said The registryThe publisher has withdrawn more than 11,300 articles from its Hindawi portfolio.
As described in a Wiley-authored white paper published last December, “Combating Publication Manipulation at Scale: Hindawi’s Journey and Lessons for Academic Publishing,” paper mills rely on various unethical practices – such as using AI in manufacturing of manuscripts and image manipulations. and gaming the peer review process.
The Hindawi affair coincided with the departure of Wiley President and CEO Brian Napack in October 2023. In its earnings report for the second quarter of 2024 [PDF] Last December, Wiley admitted that the $18 million decline in scholarly publishing revenue was “primarily due to disruptions in Hindawi publishing.”
In January, Wiley signed United2Act – an industry initiative to combat paper mills.
However, concerns about the integrity of scientific research are not limited to Wiley publications. A study published in Nature last July suggests that up to a quarter of clinical trials are problematic or completely fabricated.
The increasing availability and sophistication of generative AI is not the only factor contributing to the crisis in academic publishing, but AI tools make counterfeiting easier.
“The industry is aware that AI is being used by paper mills to generate fraudulent content,” a Wiley spokesperson told us. “We recently introduced new screening technology to help identify articles with potential misuse of generative AI before publication.”
According to a preprint article published in February, the volume of submissions to ArXiv in the three main categories increased significantly between 2019 and 2023 – a period that roughly coincides with the introduction of tools like ChatGPT. Computer science papers increased by 200 percent in these four years, followed by physics papers (45 percent) and math papers (22 percent).
However, academic publishers seem to want to take advantage of the benefits of AI writing support without the drawbacks. Last October, for example, Springer Nature launched Curie – an AI-powered writing assistant designed to help scientists whose native language is not English. Therefore, better tools are required [PDF] to detect generative AI output – a demand that has been answered by recent efforts to improve watermarking of AI content – and which some researchers say won’t work.
A Wiley spokesman described the decision to close the 19 magazines as part of the previously announced plan to integrate the Hindawi and Wiley portfolios and as distinct from the paper mill issue.
“As part of this integration and as is customary, we have reviewed our magazine portfolio and decided to close 19 Hindawi magazines that no longer serve their communities,” the spokesperson said The registry.
“It is important to distinguish between the journal closures occurring now as part of our portfolio integration and the four journals that closed in May 2023. The journals that closed in May 2023 were so heavily influenced by the paper mills that it was in the interest of the scientific community to shut them down immediately.”
Meanwhile, in Wiley’s third-quarter 2024 earnings report, the publisher noted that its learning division’s revenue is expected to be at the higher end of forecasts due to “content rights deals for training AI models in the fourth quarter.” ®