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Academic journal forced to retract peer-reviewed AI-generated paper after "rat penis" pics go viral
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this post was submitted on 22 Feb 2024
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It's the "peer-reviewed" part that should be raising eyebrows, not the AI-generated part. How the gibberish images were generated is secondary to the fact that the peer reviewers just waved the obvious nonsense through without even the most cursory inspection.
I've heard some of my more senior colleagues call frontiers a scam even before this regarding editorial practices there.
It's actually furstratingly common for some reviewer comments to be completely ignored, so it's possible someone raised a flag and no one did anything about it.
Frontiers has something like a 90%+ publish rate, which for any "per reviewed" journal is ridiculously high. They have also been in previous scandals where a large portion of their editorial staff were sacked (no pun intended).
They sent me an email once inviting me to be a guest editor. I thought it would be a cool experience and a neat thing to have on the CV.
I mentioned it to my advisor at the time and they told me that frontiers does that pretty often and that these special issues don't amount to anything.
Frontiers isn't alone of course. MDPI is notorious for shitty editorial practices too.
The biggest problem with Frontiers for me is that there are some handy survey articles that are cited like 500 times. It seems that Interdisciplinary surveys are hard to publish in a traditional journal, and as a result 500 articles cited this handy overview article for readers who would need an overview.
The article I checked was in a reasonable quality, and it's a shame I can't cite it just because it's in Frontiers.