Publisher retracting more than 30 articles from paper mills - Retraction Watch
( August 30, 2021; Retraction Watch )
The publisher SAGE is in the process of retracting more than 30 papers across three of its journals after determining that they were churned out by paper mills — prompting the company to take a closer look at its policies and procedures.
The suspect papers were initially flagged by Elisabeth Bik and others as part of a group of some 400 articles that showed signs of having been milled. As we reported in March, a dozen of the articles were hit with expressions of concern — prompting some head-scratching from Bik, in particular, about why they weren’t being retracted outright.
A useful reminder that the problem of inauthentic content is not unique to Steem. A few thoughts:
- Inauthentic content is a hard problem for all platforms.
- It extends beyond just plagiarism, and also includes things like dishonesty and fraud, "spun" and "deep fake" (AI generated) content.
- Plagiarism might actually be the easiest form to solve, with something like a LifeLock model that protects content instead of identity.
- The people with the biggest incentive to guard against plagiarism are the content producers, so maybe it would make sense for someone to launch an anti-plagiarism subscription service, where they charge a monthly fee to content producers and search multiple platforms for protected content that was originally produced by their subscribers.
- Such a service could also assist with having the content taken down or negotiating licensing/use agreements.
- On Steem, downvotes have shown to have limited value against inauthentic content. They might be augmented with other solutions:
- Alternate rewards distribution algorithms could be considered, in order to reduce the incentive for producing inauthentic content.
- In order to protect the value of their investment, large (top-10? top-50? top-100?) stakeholders could consider funding an anonymous bounty system, where people could report suspected problematic content. This might even be funded by the Steem Proposal System (SPS).
- I have often thought that Steemit would be a good platform for the type of work that Elizabeth Bik (referenced in the Retraction Watch article) publishes on Twitter.
Read the rest from Retraction Watch: Publisher retracting more than 30 articles from paper mills
Check the #penny4thoughts tag to find other active conversations.
Publishing inauthentic content is one of the big problem for every blogging platform but it was an excellent way to prevent it what you explained. Thank you.
It goes beyond milling; most so-called scientific papers can't be reproduced. "Publish or die" is taken way too seriously and is detrimental to science
Definitely the platforms in this case steemit has to harden in terms of plagiarism, since this harms it, one of the ways is to improve the programs that detect plagiarism.
A community should be created to end plagiarism and to down vote them who are posting inauthentic content.
I think that sometimes when you want to have a lot of profit you close your eyes only to the quality of the materials used, and this is how you lose not only money but also the trust that customers had, you can lose a lot by saving a little
Related, it also seems to me that many problems like this arise when people prioritize short-term gains over their own long-term best interests. Maybe someone can get away with shady behavior a few times, but eventually it's almost certainly going to catch up with them.
It is difficult coming up with something original, and it kinda hurts badly when someone borrows it without the appropriate credits. So plagiarism is a big no on any platform.
No blogging site shouldn't show any softness to a people who plagiaries. Before steem was very strict against plagiarism but now i see less effort against it on steemit.
Thanks for the reply!
I think there's actually a lot of effort at combating plagiarism here, especially from the @endingplagiarism account.
IMO, it's just a really hard problem, because it's very time consuming to identify plagiarism, automation is not very reliable, there's a real risk of retaliation, and there are only a small number of accounts that have enough stake to represent any sort of deterrent.
This is part of the reason why I thought of a quorum sensing solution a while ago and why I suggested an anonymous bounty program up above.
A person who plagiaries is one kind of thief. Inauthentic article damage a good platform. It also hamper the writter creativity and enthusiasm. We should take proper step to prevent plagiarism.
Steem should not allow inauthentic contents, it is not good for any blogging site.
Plagiarism is the product of people "dry coconut" without principles and without values. Greetings.