Fake scientific papers are alarmingly common

Paper mills are a $3-4 billion dollar industry that is growing rapidly. That money isn't coming from nowhere. There are a lot of fake papers, and the fake paper industry is growing steadily.

So then the question becomes "where are those fake papers being published, and by whom."

You can converge on answers to those questions in a lot of ways. The fake paper detection method is suggested as one tool to aid journals tackle fraud.

If you don't think the conditions are valid, well, ok. But why not? How would you improve on the validation methodology? Obviously having more known fakes would be nice.

Saying the article is "bigoted nonsense" doesn't make a lot of sense without more information (to be fair, I might be lacking crucial context). Are the authors known bigots with history of pushing bigotry? What I read seemed to be a sincere attempt to improve scientific publication practices by identifying the scope and scale of the fraud problem, while also developing means to address it. That doesn't strike me as bigoted nonsense.

That said, the headline of the article is pretty click-baity, and shame on science's editors for that.

1) committed deceiver that started working in this field for years and that somehow managed to not get caught (pretty rare).

2) fake science articles that get published but has absolutely no impact on scientists because scientists don't progress based on randomly found articles, but by meeting the authors in workshops, exchanging with them, ... which make a one-off fake article with fake author totally irrelevant.

If you are a junior scientist, the articles you read are mainly the ones recommended by senior scientists around you, and if you are a senior scientist, you are part of a community, you know the people who publish, and if you see a random article coming from nowhere, you may read it just in case, but you don't let it mislead you or change significantly your own research just based on reading it.

I think it's a flaw on some lawman people when they discuss "fake articles being published": they don't realize how small "having an article published" impact the field. Presenting it in workshop and debating with colleagues does, but what the layman person has in mind will never maintain the illusion.

One day I'll have saved enough to take a year off and I'll build that POC.

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Re CAP, the reason I think that consistency is the problem: It creates high value targets for corruption. Somebody or something has to arbitrate against whatever alternative would threaten consistency. That's a position of power, and too often its one that's easier to retain by abusing that power than by taking your role as arbiter seriously.

The power that comes from being an emergent authority on a topic--where the system arrives at consensus not because its design requires it, but because the thing we're agreeing on really has that much merit--that's a different kind of power. You can't squat on it and abuse it, people will just stop trusting you. The only thing to do with that power is to use it to continue striving towards something worthwhile (the difference being that people are now trying to help you). If this was our model for group coordination, I think we'd end up with leaders of a different temperment.

That's what we should all want for power. It should be hard to get and easy to lose.