Skip to content

ACN - 101321555 | ABN - 39101321555

Australasian Human Research Ethics Consultancy Services Pty Ltd (AHRECS)

AHRECS icon
  • Home
  • About Us
    • Consultants
    • Services
  • Previous Projects
  • Blog
  • Resources
  • Feeds
  • Contact Us
  • More
    • Request a Quote
    • Susbcribe to REM
    • Subscribe to VIP
Menu
  • Home
  • About Us
    • Consultants
    • Services
  • Previous Projects
  • Blog
  • Resources
  • Feeds
  • Contact Us
  • More
    • Request a Quote
    • Susbcribe to REM
    • Subscribe to VIP
Exclude terms...
Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander
AHRECS
Analysis
Animal ethics
Animal Ethics Committee
Animal handling
Animal housing
Animal Research Ethics
Animal Welfare
ANZCCART
Artificial Intelligence
Arts
Australia
Authorship
Belief
Beneficence
Big data
Big data
Biobank
Bioethics
Biomedical
Biospecimens
Breaches
Cartoon/Funny
Case studies
Clinical trial
Collaborative research
Conflicts of interest
Consent
Controversy/Scandal
Controversy/Scandal
Creative
Culture
Data management
Database
Dual-use
Essential Reading
Ethical review
Ethnography
Euthanasia
Evaluative practice/quality assurance
Even though i
First People
Fraud
Gender
Genetics
Get off Gary Play man of the dog
Good practice
Guidance
Honesty
HREC
Human research ethics
Humanities
Institutional responsibilities
International
Journal
Justice
Links
Media
Medical research
Merit and integrity
Methodology
Monitoring
New Zealand
News
Online research
Peer review
Performance
Primary materials
Principles
Privacy
Protection for participants
Psychology
Publication ethics
Questionable Publishers
Research ethics committees
Research integrity
Research Misconduct
Research results
Researcher responsibilities
Resources
Respect for persons
Sample paperwork
sd
se
Serious Adverse Event
Social Science
SoTL
Standards
Supervision
Training
Vulnerability
x
Young people
Exclude news

Sort by

Animal Ethics Biosafety Human Research Ethics Research Integrity

AI paper mills and image generation require a co-ordinated response from academic publishers – LSE (Rebecca Lawrence & Sabina Alam | December 2022)

Posted by Connar Allen in Research Integrity on December 30, 2022
Keywords: Authorship, Breaches, Institutional responsibilities, Journal, Research Misconduct, Research results

The Linked Original Item was Posted On December 15, 2022

A graphic representation of an AI head

The role of AI in the production of research papers is rapidly moving from being a futuristic vision, towards an everyday reality; a situation with significant consequences for research integrity and the detection of fraudulent research. Rebecca Lawrence and Sabina Alam argue that for publishers, collaboration and open research workflows are key to ensuring the reliability of the scholarly record.

The latest iteration of OpenAI’s Artificial Intelligence (AI) chatbot, ChatGPT, and the bot’s almost uncanny capability to write poetry and academic essays that are very difficult to distinguish from human-centric production has recently, and much like other companies linked to Elon Musk, caused a stir in the world of research. This is raising the spectre of AI in the service of research fraud and a race-to-the-bottom in research output and publication. As John Gapper warned in the Financial Times, “…if an unreliable linguistic mash-up is freely accessible, while original research is costly and laborious, the former will thrive”. Does a new age of research desk top paper mills that are in easy reach of everyone anywhere present a real and present danger to research integrity?

Not so long ago we might have dismissed the idea of AI fabricating scientific images so well that humans cannot detect the fraud as being the stuff of science fiction.  Similarly, we would have thought it ludicrous to suggest that an AI could write a scientific paper so well that it could not be easily spotted.  It seems, science fiction is now science reality. This London School of Economics Blog piee discusses a call for a coordinated response to deal with this real threat to science and the scientific record. This begs the question of whether in such a situation, should the AI be listed as a collaborator?  If there are misconduct proceedings in collaborative research, where a collaborator uses AI without the knowledge of their collaborators to what extent should the team be expected to spot if someone in their team has used AI to cheat?

In short, the risk is already with us. In May this year, data sleuth Elisabeth Bik tweeted about how image fraud was being boosted by AI, with Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) technology (where algorithms that closely match the human brain are pitted against each other to produce synthetic data) is capable of producing deepfakes in biomedical literature. Ethics and integrity issues are growing exponentially across scholarly communication. F1000’s and Taylor & Francis’ figures tell a story that is reflected across academic publishing, with such cases representing 34% of ethics cases for F1000 and about 50% of T&F’s ethics cases. Other major issues include duplicate submissions, data integrity, citation manipulation and authorship integrity issues. As Sabina noted recently, the problem is significant, not just because of the volume and extent of the growth in the number of these issues, but also because there are different types of paper mills, and they are all highly adaptive.

“Does a new age of research desk top paper mills that are in easy reach of everyone anywhere present a real and present danger to research integrity?”

Investigating these issues within a context of shifting sands poses many challenges. Nevertheless, publishers play a vital role in ensuring the legitimacy and integrity of what we publish and disseminate across the world. We invest in systems, safeguards and expertise to ensure due process has been applied to the scholarly content we publish. So, when this is manipulated and the integrity of the scholarly record is under threat, it’s vital we take all steps necessary to protect it. Technology is playing an ever more important role for publishers. The ability to detect research integrity and publishing ethics issues needs to be scalable, because some types of misconduct only become noticeable when patterns are detected across a number of different articles and datasets. This is a key area where developers, publishers and other scholarly organisations are collaborating and investing, not just financially, but with time and effort too.

AI paper mills and image generation require a co-ordinated response from academic publishers
The role of AI in the production of research papers is rapidly moving from being a futuristic vision, towards an everyday reality; a situation with significant consequences for research integrity a…

Related Reading

Meta Trained an AI on 48M Science Papers. It Was Shut Down After 2 Days – CNET (Jackson Ryan | November 2022)

Could AI help you to write your next paper? – Nature (Mathew Hutson | October 2022)

Could machine learning fuel a reproducibility crisis in science? – Nature (Elizabeth Gibney | July 2022)

AI-enabled image fraud in scientific publications (Papers: Jinjin Gu Wang, et al | July 2022)

Journals adopt AI to spot duplicated images in manuscripts – Nature (Richard Van Noorden | December 2021)

(US) Suicide Hotline Left Ethics Board Out Of The Loop About Data-Sharing With For-Profit Spinoff – Forbes (Alexandra S. Levine | February 2022)

Where is artificial intelligence taking publishing? – Research Information (Sally Ekanayaka | November 2021)

Can AI be used ethically to assist peer review? – LSE Impact Blog (Alessandro Checco | May 2021)

Should we accept funding for facial recognition research, and other dilemmas?

(US) Google and the University of Chicago Are Sued Over Data Sharing – New York Times (Daisuke Wakabayashi | June 2019)

Ask The Chefs: AI and Scholarly Communications – Scholarly Kitchen (Ann Michael | April 2019)

(US) Safeguards for human studies can’t cope with big data – Nature (Nathaniel Raymond | April 2019)

AI peer reviewers unleashed to ease publishing grind – Science (Douglas Heaven | November 2018)

‘Silicon Valley is ethically lost’: Google grapples with reaction to its new ‘horrifying’ and uncanny AI tech – Financial Post (Mark Bergen | May 2018)

Algorithms Are Opinions Embedded in Code – Scholarly Kitchen (David Crotty | January 2018)

Artificial intelligence in peer review: How can evolutionary computation support journal editors? (Papers: Maciej J. Mrowinski, et al | September 2017)

AI Research is in Desperate Need of an Ethical Watchdog – Wired (Sophia Chen | September 2017)

Should A.I. Have a Role in Science Publishing? – Science Friday (Adam Marcus | February 2017)

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Related Links

Complaints against Research Ethics Monthly

Request a Takedown

Submission Guidelines

About the Research Ethics Monthly

About subscribing to the Research Ethics Monthly

A diverse group discussing a topic

Random selected image from the AHRECS library. These were all purchased from iStockPhoto. These are images we use in our workshops and Dr Allen used in the GUREM.

Research Ethics Monthly Receive copies of the Research Ethics Monthly directly
by email. We will never spam you.

  • Enter the answer as a word
  • Hidden
    This field is hidden and only used for import to Mailchimp
  • This field is for validation purposes and should be left unchanged.
  • Home
  • Services
  • About Us
  • Contact Us
  • Home
  • Services
  • About Us
  • Contact Us
  • Company
  • Terms Of Use
  • Copyright
  • Privacy Policy
  • Company
  • Terms Of Use
  • Copyright
  • Privacy Policy
  • Site Map
  • Site Map

Australasian Human Research Ethics Consultancy Services Pty Ltd (AHRECS)

Facebook-f Twitter Linkedin-in