Whether we are talking about climate change, the COVID pandemic, or a plethora of other topics, one phrase has constantly come up: Trust the science.
And while many of us didn’t fall for it to begin with, there is more reason now than ever before to disregard this saying as nothing more than a ploy wielded by those in control to get you to submit to their line of thinking.
As the Wall Street Journal recently reported, Wiley, one of the world’s largest academic publishers, is being forced to shut down 19 different medical and scientific journals.
Why? Well, because, as it turns out, those journals were filled with thousands of fake papers.
If you weren’t aware, there’s a whole black-market industry of what are usually referred to as “paper mills.” Often based in countries like India or China, these paper mills offer to write articles or papers on a variety of topics for anyone willing to buy them.
Unfortunately, these papers aren’t at all scientific, based on fact, or even well-researched or written. In fact, some of them aren’t even written by humans but are AI-generated and designed to get away with plagiarism by changing key phrases like “breast cancer” into “bosom peril.”
Also, unfortunate is the fact that far too many overwhelmed and legitimate academia-based companies like Wiley and their more recently acquired open access Egyptian publisher Hindawi fall prey to buying these paper mill products thinking they are legit.
As the Journal noted, Wiley had to retract a whopping 8,000 articles from Hindawi alone in 2023. Over the last two years, they’ve pulled over 11,300 papers from their combined journals and had to shut down four of them.
Now, 19 more are on the chopping block for the same reasons.
As Wiley President and Chief Executive Wiliam Kissner admits, it will end up costing the publisher about $40 million in revenue in 2024 alone.
And I doubt Wiley is the only publisher with these problems.
So much for trusting the science…
