“I have seen the future of science. It is ruled by bitter competition instead of collaboration, pageantry instead of exploration. Bright minds beginning careers in science will be taught to debase their training for drudgerous pursuit of meaningless metrics. Those willing to toil over genuine questions will necessarily lose out to those that can furnish cheap answers. . . .”

Reese Richardson reports on a recent study he did with Spencer Hong, Jennifer Byrne, and Luís Nunes Amaral, entitled “The entities enabling scientific fraud at scale are large, resilient, and growing rapidly.” That’s a title that doesn’t mess around! Richardson writes: 1. Editors abuse their positions of authority to collude with authors to publish problematic articles en masse. . . . certain authors seem to have a preference for having their articles handled by these flagged editors. For PLOS One, we identify a network in which these flagged editors were all handling each other’s submissions to the journal. 2. Networks of image duplication can be thousands of articles wide and these articles tend to appear in the same journals at around the same time. . . . articles connected by shared images also tend to get published at around the same time and in the same venue. This suggests that paper mills are capable of both producing articles and getting them published in a highly coordinated…