I tried an even harder example on Gemini Pro image generation and this is quite scary/amazing. I asked for a microscopy image of around 20 HeLa cells, GFP tagged 20% nuclear, 10% membrane, +1 nuclear staining, + overlap. Image below and prompt in the following post.

Heading to Innovation & Integrity Days? Don’t miss the 9 Dec #ResearchIntegrity workshops: expert-led, interactive & focused on practical skills. --> Forensic Scientometrics --> Collaboration with Institutions --> Supporting Editors & Reviewers Join us! stm-assoc.org/events/stm-i... #STMinLondon

@hkoers.bsky.social @image-integrity.bsky.social @tonyhopedale.com @danielacuna.bsky.social

"By inventing fake scientists, paper mills can create a ready supply of publications and favourable peer reviews, ensuring more of the mills’ submissions get published [and] increase[d] credibility for paying customers" www.nature.com/articles/d41...

if you see this post, your actions are: - if you have a spare buck, give it to Wikipedia, then repost this - if you don't have a spare buck, just repost your action is mandatory for the world's best source of information to survive

COSIG has a new landing page! Check it out at cosig.net. (Files for COSIG are still hosted on OSF!)

Can we measure trust in scientific publications?, via @lseimpactblog.bsky.social blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsoci... #AcademicPublishing #Expertise #OpenResearch

Adam @clearskiesadam.bsky.social brought this post to my attention and he does a good job of explaining the weaknesses and strengths in the current state of GenAI detection in the text of papers. clearskiesadam.medium.com/genai-detect...

A paper that combines #peerreview & cheese... what could be better? Answer: writing said paper with @abalkina.bsky.social @image-integrity.bsky.social & Marie Souliere. Read on to learn how the Swiss Cheese Model could help peer review & #researchintegrity onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...

A powerful new study, Richardson et al. @pnas.org reveals the scale of systematic research fraud: fake papers are doubling every 1.5 years - ten times faster than real science! Retractions and deindexing can't keep up: 📄 doi.org/10.1073/pnas... #ResearchFraud #Integrity #PaperMills #AcademicEthics

Reese and colleagues are doing incredibly important work to identify large scale credibility challenges for the research literature. The latest report is disquieting.

Today, our article "The entities enabling scientific fraud at scale are large, resilient, and growing rapidly" is finally published in PNAS. I hope that it proves to be a wake-up-call for the whole scientific community. reeserichardson.blog/2025/08/04/a...

hot off the press: huge infestation of crooked editors involved on paper mills unmasked. www.pnas.org/doi/abs/10.1...

Once upon a time, two science journalists had an idea for a blog about retractions. And on Aug. 3, 2010, Retraction Watch launched. And now, 15 years and 6,700 posts later, that work seems more important than ever. Happy 15th anniversary, Retraction Watch.

La haine et véhémence de mes harceleurs (qui prouvent malgré le point exact de l'article) est l'un des premiers moteurs de: - ma motivation à ne pas flancher face à la mauvaise science - mais aussi de la réussite de cet article (nature.com/articles/d41...) 🤣 Changez rien :)

#PaperMills fälschen in großer Zahl Forschungsarbeiten. Wie sehr schadet diese Schattenindustrie dem #Wissenschaftssystem? Wie kann man ihre Methoden erkennen und sie stoppen? – Thema eines Essays von @abalkina.bsky.social‬ und @image-integrity.bsky.social‬: www.laborjournal.de/rubric/essay...

Interesting look at the enormity of the paper mill problem, via @abalkina.bsky.social @image-integrity.bsky.social www.laborjournal.de/rubric/essay...

Jana Christofer and I wrote a piece on #papermills for Laborjournal. We discuss challenges of paper mills and AI for scientific publishing. Science needs immediate solutions to correct it and prevent it from massively produced fraud. @image-integrity.bsky.social www.laborjournal.de/rubric/essay...

This piece nicely summarizes the situation and features thoughts from @elisabethbik.bsky.social, @mumumouse2.bsky.social, @davidsanderssci.bsky.social, @image-integrity.bsky.social and myself.

Great piece from Renee Hoch and Joanna Clarke. „It is likely not a coincidence that in the genAI era publishers are seeing an increase in large-scale publication ethics issues, including peer review integrity rings, authorship integrity issues and paper mills“

Amazing talk this morning by Hub Zwart ‘Trust in science in an era of social fragmentation’ @EMBLEvents #SciSoc2025

The great Prof Csaba Szabo speaking now about the reproducibility crisis #SciSoc2025

Good morning! Looking forward to two days at EMBL, starting today: EMBL Science and Society Conference: In science we trust? @EMBLEvents #SciSoc2025

@cosig.net coverage in Nature news! Collection of Open Science Integrity Guides Anyone can do post-publication peer review. Anyone can be a steward of the scientific literature. www.nature.com/articles/d41...

A group of research-integrity experts has launched a toolkit for researchers that outlines how to spot suspicious scientific papers. https://go.nature.com/43U32fj

Anyone can do post-publication peer review. Anyone can be a steward of the scientific literature. Anyone can do forensic metascience. Anyone can sleuth. That's why we are launching COSIG: the Collection of Open Science Integrity Guides, an open source resource for all of the above. cosig.net

"A literature that's ...polluted with junk is not only no good to anyone, it's a source of real harm, and it lends itself to ... bad-faith attacks on scientific research in general... We need to speak up more about this situation and we need to start cleaning house more vigorously" #Papermills 🧪

What do you think? Is/ should Gatekeeping be the core of scholarly publishing? My new article published in Scholarly Kitchen: scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2025/05/12/g... #ScientificPublishing #AcademicSky #PeerReview #AI #ScholarlyPublishing

The do’s and don’ts of scientific image editing. I think this one paragraph covers about 90% of the queries we get on this kind of stuff. www.nature.com/articles/d41...

"...our current inability to flag erroneous publications quickly and at scale ... results in the research literature representing an ... unsafe workplace." https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/08989621.2024.2428205 @WCRIFoundation @C0PE @peerrevcongress @RetractionWatch...

The do’s and don’ts of scientific image editing Acceptable image-editing practices are partly a matter of common sense. But researchers say journals and funders could help scientists by standardizing policies. @sarareardon.bsky.social reports www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Freiburg, Germany, Central Station Bookshop (right @the center of the shop‘s entryway): “This is a selection of books which are banned at schools in the US“. #UniteAgainstBookBans #FreedomToRead @ala-pla.bsky.social @librarypolicy.bsky.social

OpenAI-generated western blots? And we thought that photoshopping data was bad. This is going to be very hard to pick up... 😟

Unlike Oncotarget and American Journal of Cancer Research whose editors (like @weldeiry.bsky.social) complain about the “weaponizing” of @pubpeer.com, @febspress.bsky.social @image-integrity.bsky.social and @tandfresearch.bsky.social take their work seriously. 👏

Now on arXiv: @deadneanderthals.bsky.social's preprint on paper mill contamination in @tandfresearch.bsky.social's journal Bioengineered. An analysis of 878 papers, of which 226 (25.7%) were identified as problematic. That is a lot! arxiv.org/abs/2503.21267

This is fantastic 😃

The second day of the Cochrane Symposium is opened by Jana Christopher @image-integrity.bsky.social talking about image integrity, paper mills, and the influence of AI. #OpenScience

Our SEM preprint has been updated. Link in thread. Among new revelations, we found that electrochemistry articles that misidentify the SEM instrument used in the study are more likely to make a fundamental error in the characterization of a material's electrical properties. #PaperMills

thanks to @solalpirelli.bsky.social for this nice piece on pseudoscience published by IEEE - and the need for the publisher to step up to the plate and start retracting this garbage if they want to retain any credibility. deevybee.blogspot.com/2025/02/ieee...

Oi…!! That’s my slide, ask me next time before posting please? And yes, seriously this is a genuine excuse we received.

I'm chuffed, spoke on BBC Radio4 today 😊 about AI generated images in scientific papers www.bbc.com/audio/play/m...

“Regardless of style and tactics, everyone in the American scientific community must hold to the principles of independence, peer evaluation, and inclusion. ... We will not turn our backs on them now.” www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

I'm delighted to share our opinion on #papermills published in Nature. Science is flooded with papers from paper mills.Certain steps can be taken, but this is a challenge that neither universities nor journals are ready to face.Some use paper mills to their advantage. www.nature.com/articles/d41...

...on top of these "classic" #papermills, in #CompChem (search: "DFT" and "Solar Cell") we see large-scale citation & review cartels, which flood classic journals with endless variations of worthless, superficial papers. Editor reaction = 0 🙁 #ResearchIntegrity

#researchintegrity key topic in STM innovation. The fantastic post ⬇️ by @phillbjones.bsky.social summarizes the state of play and the hottest tools and trends, explaining the steep upwards trajectory in the field over the past few years.

🧪"A call for research to address the threat of paper mills" 5 key research questions needing resourcing & support Proof: journals.plos.org/plosbiology/... 💙 @abalkina.bsky.social @image-integrity.bsky.social @saraheaton.bsky.social @nhwise.bsky.social, United2Act co-authors and members, COPE & STM

Lots of transitions in academia:

Easter baking with my mum 🐇❤️

Very top-down, this won't work, unless they change the rewarding policies and remove incentives for using mills