Related papers: Conduct and Correctness in Mathematical Publishing
In recent paper "Quantifying Inequities and Documenting Elitism in PhD-granting Mathematical Sciences Departments in the United States" (arXiv:2308.13750) by a group of accomplished and/or aspiring mathematicians, the authors use data to…
This article offers a personal perspective on the current state of academic publishing, and posits that the scientific community is beset with journals that contribute little valuable knowledge, overload the community's capacity for…
The current system of scholarly publishing is often criticized for being slow, expensive, and not transparent. The rise of open access publishing as part of open science tenets, promoting transparency and collaboration, together with calls…
An academic scientist's professional success depends on publishing. Publishing norms emphasize novel, positive results. As such, disciplinary incentives encourage design, analysis, and reporting decisions that elicit positive results and…
We survey the reasons for the ongoing boycott of the publisher Elsevier. We examine Elsevier's pricing and bundling policies, restrictions on dissemination by authors, and lapses in ethics and peer review, and we conclude with thoughts…
Scientists in some fields are concerned that many, or even most, published results are false. A high rate of false positives might arise accidentally, from shoddy research practices. Or it might be the inevitable result of institutional…
In response to growing concern about the reliability and reproducibility of published science, researchers have proposed adopting measures of greater statistical stringency, including suggestions to require larger sample sizes and to lower…
Statistics is sometimes described as the science of reasoning under uncertainty. Statistical models provide one view of this uncertainty, but what is frequently neglected is the 'invisible' portion of uncertainty: that assumed not to exist…
Statistics experiences a storm around the perceived misuse and possible abuse of its methods in the context of the so-called reproducibility crisis. The methods and styles of quantification practiced in mathematical modelling rarely make it…
How does the mathematical community accept that a given proof is correct? Is objective verification based on explicit axioms feasible, or must the reviewer's experiences and prejudices necessarily come into play? Can automated provers avoid…
Reflexive metrics is a branch of science studies which explores how the demand for accountability and performance measurement in science has shaped the research culture in recent decades. Hypercompetition and publication pressure are part…
Scientific publishing systematically filters out negative results. We argue that this long-standing asymmetry has become an urgent problem in the era of large language models, which inherit the positive bias of the literature they are…
Recent research in the field of reflexive metrics have studied the emergence and consequences of evaluation gaps in science. The concept of evaluation gaps captures potential discrepancies between what researchers value about their…
Communicating new scientific discoveries is key to human progress. Yet, this endeavor is hindered by monetary restrictions for publishing one's findings and accessing other scientists' reports. This process is further exacerbated by a large…
It is usual to consider that standards generate mixed feelings among scientists. They are often seen as not really reflecting the state of the art in a given domain and a hindrance to scientific creativity. Still, scientists should…
Scholarly peer review is a cornerstone of scientific advancement, but the system is under strain due to increasing manuscript submissions and the labor-intensive nature of the process. Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs)…
Across machine learning (ML) sub-disciplines researchers make mathematical assumptions to facilitate proof-writing. While such assumptions are necessary for providing mathematical guarantees for how algorithms behave, they also necessarily…
Publication bias arises whenever the probability that a study is published depends on the statistical significance of its results. This bias, often called the file-drawer effect since the unpublished results are imagined to be tucked away…
Typical arguments against scientific misconduct generally fail to support current policies on research fraud: they may not prove wrong what is usually considered research misconduct and they tend to make wrong things that are not normally…
The IMU-ICIAM working group's new report on Fraudulent Publishing in the Mathematical Sciences documents how gaming of bibliometrics, predatory outlets and paper-mill activity are eroding trust in research, mathematics included. This short…