Entities enabling scientific fraud at scale (2025)
doi.org310 points by peyton 5 days ago
310 points by peyton 5 days ago
It kinda skips over how large mainstream journals, with their restrictive and often arbitrary standards, have contributed to this. Most will refuse to publish replications, negative studies, or anything they deem unimportant, even if the study was conducted correctly.
So much of this started with the rise of the peer-review journal cartel, beginning with Pergamon Press in 1951 (coincidentally founded by Ghislaine Maxwell's father). "Peer review" didn't exist before then, science papers and discussion was published openly, and scientists focused on quality not quantity.
I'm not sure that the system was ever that near to perfection: for example, John Maddox of Nature didn't like the advent of pre-publication peer review, but that presumably had something to do with it limiting his discretion to approve and desk-reject whatever he wanted. But in any case it (like other aspects of the cozy interwar and then wartime scientific world) could surely never have survived the huge scaling-up that had already begun in the post-war era and created the pressure to switch to pre-publication peer reivew in the first place.
A deeper issue from the post-war era and science according to Dr. David Goostein, then vice-provost of Caltech from 1994: https://web.archive.org/web/20240213233731/https://www.its.c...
"The crises that face science [from the ending of exponential growth in science funding after the Cold War period] are not limited to jobs and research funds. Those are bad enough, but they are just the beginning. Under stress from those problems, other parts of the scientific enterprise have started showing signs of distress. One of the most essential is the matter of honesty and ethical behavior among scientists.
The public and the scientific community have both been shocked in recent years by an increasing number of cases of fraud committed by scientists. There is little doubt that the perpetrators in these cases felt themselves under intense pressure to compete for scarce resources, even by cheating if necessary. As the pressure increases, this kind of dishonesty is almost sure to become more common.
Other kinds of dishonesty will also become more common. For example, peer review, one of the crucial pillars of the whole edifice, is in critical danger. Peer review is used by scientific journals to decide what papers to publish, and by granting agencies such as the National Science Foundation to decide what research to support. Journals in most cases, and agencies in some cases operate by sending manuscripts or research proposals to referees who are recognized experts on the scientific issues in question, and whose identity will not be revealed to the authors of the papers or proposals. Obviously, good decisions on what research should be supported and what results should be published are crucial to the proper functioning of science.
Peer review is usually quite a good way to identify valid science. Of course, a referee will occasionally fail to appreciate a truly visionary or revolutionary idea, but by and large, peer review works pretty well so long as scientific validity is the only issue at stake. However, it is not at all suited to arbitrate an intense competition for research funds or for editorial space in prestigious journals. There are many reasons for this, not the least being the fact that the referees have an obvious conflict of interest, since they are themselves competitors for the same resources. This point seems to be another one of those relativistic anomalies, obvious to any outside observer, but invisible to those of us who are falling into the black hole. It would take impossibly high ethical standards for referees to avoid taking advantage of their privileged anonymity to advance their own interests, but as time goes on, more and more referees have their ethical standards eroded as a consequence of having themselves been victimized by unfair reviews when they were authors. Peer review is thus one among many examples of practices that were well suited to the time of exponential expansion, but will become increasingly dysfunctional in the difficult future we face.
We must find a radically different social structure to organize research and education in science after The Big Crunch. That is not meant to be an exhortation. It is meant simply to be a statement of a fact known to be true with mathematical certainty, if science is to survive at all. The new structure will come about by evolution rather than design, because, for one thing, neither I nor anyone else has the faintest idea of what it will turn out to be, and for another, even if we did know where we are going to end up, we scientists have never been very good at guiding our own destiny. Only this much is sure: the era of exponential expansion will be replaced by an era of constraint. Because it will be unplanned, the transition is likely to be messy and painful for the participants. In fact, as we have seen, it already is. Ignoring the pain for the moment, however, I would like to look ahead and speculate on some conditions that must be met if science is to have a future as well as a past. ..."
Interesting. This is also freely available as PDF, by the way: https://doi.org/10.1029/97EO00213
Peer review existed before 1951 in the US at least. See for example Einstein’s reaction to negative reviews when he tried to publish in Physical Review in 1935 https://paeditorial.co.uk/post/albert-einstein-what-did-he-t...
> coincidentally founded by Ghislaine Maxwell's father
A crazy world we live in where Robert Maxwell's daughter is more notorious than he is.
Fun fact, he almost got the worldwide console rights to Tetris back in the 80s, and tried going to Soviet officials to get those rights. To the point he's the antagonist of a recent "Tetris" movie that came out.
Never knew of the guy but what a terrible sounding person from his Wikipedia at least.
Shit apple doesn’t fall far from the shit tree I guess.
>Pergamon Press in 1951 (coincidentally founded by Ghislaine Maxwell's father)
perhaps a bit off-topic, but what is coincidental about this and/or what is the relevance of Ghislaine Maxwell here?
It's useless, but I'm ashamed to admit I found this tiny piece of trivia interesting.
Like the paywall blocking many scientific arti6, perhaps it would be best if we released also the Epstein Files?
I believe by saying it is coincidental they are saying there is probably no relevance, just an interesting piece of trivia, why put out this interesting piece of trivia? Because maybe someone will be able to make an argument of relevance.
It's more than coincidental, but tangential to the point. It shows crime runs in families.
Ghislaine's father (Robert Maxwell) was also a terrible person but for different reasons.
Robert Maxwell was a crook, he used pension funds (supposed to be ring-fenced for the benefit of the pensioners) to prop up his companies, so, after his slightly mysterious death it was discovered that basically there's no money to pay people who've been assured of a pension when they retire.
He was also very litigious. If you said he was a crook when he was alive you'd better hope you can prove it and that you have funding to stay in the fight until you do. So this means the sort of people who call out crooks were especially unhappy about Robert Maxwell because he was a crook and he might sue you if you pointed it out.
I imagine it's the interesting peculiarity that the same people seem to crop up over and over and over again. Six degrees of Kevin Bacon or something, except it's like one or two degrees. As George Carlin said, "it's a big club, and you ain't in it"
For example Donald Barr (father of twice-former US Attorney General Bill Barr) hiring college-dropout Jeffrey Epstein whilst headmaster at the elite Dalton School
Additional fun facts about Donald Barr: he served in US intelligence during WWII, and wrote a sci-fi book featuring child sex slaves
Also the Epstein-Barr virus causes Mono, the clone of .NET, which was created by Bill Gates, known associate of Epstein, whose father was president of the Washington State Bar Association. And you know who else works in Washington? Join the dots, people.
We call people who make connections like these "conspiracy theorists," until they're right, at which point we call them "right". And somewhere in between, if they manage to get a job, we call them "Simpsons writers."
>We call people who make connections like these "conspiracy theorists," until they're right
They are never right, but boy do they love to pretend they are.
They are never right, even when they are right; they are only right 50 years down the road....at which point no one cares..
If you want to know more about the history of Pergamon Press there's a great Behind the Bastards episode on Robert Maxwell (Ghislaine Maxwell's father) - who himself was a scumbag in a variety of ways that were entirely distinct from Ghislaine Maxwell's brand of scumbaggery - that covers this. Might even be a multipart episode - it's a while since I've listened to it, but I have a feeling it's at least a two parter.
"Coincidental" means random, with no causal connection being explicitly claimed. It just means that two things share some characteristic (such as being relatives.) The thing that is coincidental is that the person who founded the company being discussed is also the father of another person who current events have brought into prominence.
It's why you would say something like "more than coincidental" if you were trying to make some causal claim, like one thing causing the other, or both things coming from the same cause.
So, "What is coincidental about that?" is a weird question. It reads as a rhetorical claim of a causal connection through asking for a denial or a disproof of one.
sorry.
what is the relevance to the discussion about journals and peer review is my main question.
if i randomly mentioned that your name appears to be an alternate spelling of a 3-band active EQ guitar pedal, coincidentally sharing all of the letters except one, in my reply to you, most people would be confused. that is how i felt when randomly reading "Ghislaine Maxwell" in this context of journals and peer review.
People have always been fascinated by where they might find monsters. This one so happens to be in our history, so many will find it noteworthy.
100% this.
What is currently called "peer review" didn't exist back then, back then the meaning of "peer review" was just the back and forth happening in the open academic literature. Note the inevitable lack of finality in the original concept of peer review, a discussion in the scientific community could go on for 100's of years before being finally resolved. The current concept of "peer review" is closer to the concept of a delegation of some opaque ministry of truth composed of some opaquely selected experts (who often truly intend well) to settle in a short duration the finality.
Some measurements or experiments or questions to be settled can be very actionable and provide highly accurate results, others require much longer gathering of data to draw a clear picture.
The modern concept of "peer review" tries to sell the idea of almost immediate finality, like an economic transaction. In reality it is selling just the illusion, and creating lots of victims ranging from truth, individuals, departments institutions, or even entire fields (think of the replication crisis in psychology) along with any patients or others they treat.
I wish you had highlighted or bolded "cartel", which is exactly how those industry players act.
>scientists focused on quality not quantity.
I know a PhD professor doing post doc or something, and he accepted a scientific study just because it was published in Nature.
He didn't look at methodology or data.
From that point forward, I have never really respected Academia. They seem like bottom floor scientists who never truly understood the scientific method.
It helped that a year later Ivys had their cheating scandals, fake data, and academia wide replication crisis.
When I read something in a textbook I blindly believe it, depending on the broader context and the textbook in question. Is that a bad thing?
People are constantly filtering everything based on heuristics. The important thing is to know how deep to look in any given situation. Hopefully the person you're referring to is proficient at that.
Keep in mind that research scientists need to keep abreast of far more developments than any human could possibly study in detail. Also that 50% of people are below average at their job.
There is a vast difference between a student reading from a textbook and a researcher / scientist reading studies and/or papers.
As a student you are to be directed* in your reading by an expert in the field of study that you are learning from. In many higher level courses a professor will assign multiple textbooks and assign reading from only particular chapters of those textbooks specifically because they have vetted those chapters for accuracy and alignment with their curriculum.
As a researcher and scientist a very large portion of your job is verifying and then integrating the research of others into your domain knowledge. The whole purpose of replicating studies is to look critically at the methodology of another scientist and try as hard as you can to prove them wrong. If you fail to prove them wrong and can produce the same results as them, they have done Good Science.
A textbook is the product of scientists and researchers Doing Science and publishing their results, other scientists and researchers verifying via replication, and then one of those scientists or researchers who is an expert in the field doing their best to compile their knowledge on the domain into a factually accurate and (relatively) easy to understand summary of the collective research performed in a specific domain.
The fact is that people make mistakes, and the job of a professor (who is an expert in a given field) is to identify what errors have made it through the various checks mentioned above and into circulation, often times making subjective judgement calls about what is 'factual enough' for the level of the class they are teaching, and leverage that to build a curriculum that is sound and helps elevate other individuals to the level of knowledge required to contribute to the ongoing scientific journey.
In short, it's not a bad thing if you're learning a subject by yourself for your own purposes and are not contributing to scientific advancement or working as an educator in higher-education.
* You can self-study, but to become an expert while doing so requires extremely keen discernment to be able to root out the common misconceptions that proliferate in any given field. In a blue-collar field this would be akin to picking up 'bad technique' by watching YouTube videos published by another self-taught tradesman; it's not always obvious when it happens.
> There is a vast difference between a student reading from a textbook and a researcher / scientist reading studies and/or papers.
Not really. Both are learning new things. Neither has the time or access to resources to replicate even a small fraction of things learned. Neither will ever make direct use of the vast majority of things learned.
Thus both depend on a cooperative model where trust is given to third parties to whom knowledge aggregation is outsourced. In that sense a textbook and prestigious peer reviewed journals serve the same purpose.
Papers in any journal (even or especially Nature, depending on your prior) should have a significantly larger degree of skepticism shown towards them than statements in reputable textbooks (which also should not be taken as complete gospel). Papers are a 'hey, we did a thing once, here's what we think it means' from a source that is very strongly motivated to do or find something novel or interesting, even if you trust that there is no fraud they are not something to approach uncritically.
> If you fail to prove them wrong and can produce the same results as them, they have done Good Science.
Not really in my humble opinion. Sure, the Popperian vibe is kind of fundamental, but the whole truncation into binary-valued true/false categories seldom makes sense with many (or even most?) problems for which probabilities, effect sizes, and related things matter more.
And if you fail to replicate a study, they may have still done Good Science. With replications, it should not be about Bad Science and Good Science but about the cumulation of evidence (or a lack thereof). That's what meta-analyses are about.
When we talk about Bad Science, it is about the industrial-scale fraud the article is talking about. No one should waste time replicating, citing, or reading that.
This is a good point. It is not humanly possible to verify every claim you read from every source.
Ideally, you should independently verify claims that appear to be particularly consequential or particularly questionable on the surface. But at some point you have to rely on heuristics like chain of trust (it was peer reviewed, it was published in a reputable textbook), or you will never make forward progress on anything.
> When I read something in a textbook I blindly believe it, depending on the broader context and the textbook in question. Is that a bad thing?
It is if what you read is factually incorrect, yes.
For example, I have read in a textbook that the tongue has very specific regions for taste. This is patently false.
> Keep in mind that research scientists need to keep abreast of far more developments than any human could possibly study in detail. Also that 50% of people are below average at their job.
So, we should probably just discount half of what we read from research scientists as "bad at their job" and not pay much attention to it? Which half? Why are you defending corruption?
The problem is that you can't just verify everything yourself. You likely have your own deadlines, and/or you want to do something more interesting than replicating statistical tests from a random paper.
> The problem is that you can't just verify everything yourself.
So the problem is reduced to "I believe what I want! This person said it and so I think it's true!"
Sounds like politics in a nutshell.
No, it's not. It's reduced to "I trust people from a respectable scientific journal with 150 years of history".
> Sounds like politics in a nutshell.
Again, no. It sounds like the division of labor. The thing that made modern human societies possible.
Division of labor. Dividing labor between the "i'll pay you to work" and "I'm paid to work"
The jokes write themselves,