Earlier quoted context omitted.
During the whole BLM thing a few years ago my emplyer wanted "to do something" I guess so they added one of those "inclusive language" SaaS buttons. This seems more plausible to me. "Bosom peril" is not in any way a synonym for cancer. But if you think 'cancer' as a word will trigger people then softening it with 'peril' makes sense.
It's not a woke sensitivity thing. They're using spinners, tools designed for spammers years ago (long predating LLMs) that just randomly substitute words from a thesaurus. It works because so many academic journals are write-only media. The only things that actually "read" the papers are machines that check for plagiarism, compute citation counts and do other things used to decide on academic promotions. So it doesn…
Your description of the completely apathetic chain of actors, starting with the journal editors, was depressing to read.
You did not explicitly comment on it, but the situation also implies that even researchers don't really care about research? Like no advisers, or employers or colleagues are reading through these papers?
It feels like more people should have noticed that these journals will print garbage and having an article in a journal like this would not be a positive signal anymore. Maybe it just takes a while?