Criticisms of universities and their lack of formal training of PhD students are nothing new – 20 years ago, I personally heard this many times while giving talks on publishing at some of the top research universities in the UK, Australia and Western Europe. At the time it seemed shocking, but not surprising. Very little information seemed to shared by universities about how their faculty could publish their research, despite the fact that the resulting publications were the very thing universities were judged on to show their worth.
The feeling at the time was that it was almost unseemly, or perhaps trivial to actual educate young academicson how to actually get published. It was as if it was part of the game; it was a rite of passage for emerging scholars to figure out how to get that ‘four-star publication’, whatever that actually meant. The fact that programs were never set up has not only meant that young scholars are still as ill-prepared for the challenge of publishing as they ever were, it has also meant there is a yawning gap where AI training might have been introduced.
Gold standard?
Some emerging scholars will, of course, figure things out and go one to enjoy long and esteemed careers. Others, however, find themselves the targets for alarming developments in predatory behavior across the whole of scholarly communications. One such scam was highlighted by James Butcher in his excellent Journalology offshoot newsletter The Jist this week, where he shared a story from 404 Media about a company called ‘Research Gold’, which sells services to medical researchers for reviews, meta-analyses and “peer-review ready manuscripts”. The company has a list of supposedly genuine PhD reviewers who they employ to carry out the “100% human-written, never AI” work.
However, you guessed it, they are not real – the whole thing has been set up using AI.
While we should not be surprised, the sheer chutzpah is breathtaking; seeking to deceive researchers not only into using such services is one thing but using AI to do it while claiming it is doing the very opposite takes some beating. The fact that few researchers will be taken in by this scam is not the point. It is just one example where at every turn, because there is research funding money to be spent on supporting research and publishing activities, there is therefore money to be scammed. And because there has been so little training into how things should work, it makes many researchers vulnerable to this and other predatory-type scams.
Train the trainers
Elsewhere in the newsletter, James suggests that while publishers do have a great responsibility when it comes to integrity questions and how AI is employed during the research and writing up process, there is at least as great a responsibility on researchers themselves – and the institutions who employ them and facilitate their research – to ensure they are trained on how to use AI responsibly. It appears from a number of recent reports that this is being done haphazardly at best, with substantial confusion as to where exactly researchers stand on how to employ AI for research purposes.
Adding to this confusion is the fast-paced nature of AI, with new frontier models and access opportunities changing all the time. In a recent Pew Research Center poll, the majority of young adults in the US (55%) said they were more concerned than excited by AI, which is the opposite of what you would expect about a fast-emerging new technology. Whatever the answer is to the information gap on how to responsibly and consistently use AI for research and publishing, simply leaving individuals to fend for themselves and potentially fall prey to the predators is surely not part of it.
Photo by Jorge Alvarado on Unsplash
