The Jist: June 17 to July 7
Get the gist of recent news stories, written by journalists, that cover topics related to scholarly communication.
Hello fellow journalologists,
I’m about to head off on a family vacation, so this will be the last email you’ll receive from me for a while. I’m pressing “pause” on Substack, which means the countdown clock for paid subscriptions will temporarily stop. This allows me to take a proper rest without feeling guilty about failing to fulfil my obligations to you.
With that bit of housekeeping out of the way, here are the news headlines from the past few weeks.
Philosophers call for their journals to require conflict of interest disclosures
Philosophy has long been the punchline to jokes about unemployable majors. Now, philosophers may be getting the last laugh as frontier artificial intelligence (AI) firms increasingly are shelling out eye-watering salaries for their help in tackling some of the technology’s thorniest questions.
Many philosophers welcome the growing demand—which extends beyond AI as industry seeks philosophical guidance on issues ranging from climate change to misinformation. But some argue the discipline’s norms have failed to keep pace. Unlike most scientific disciplines, for example, philosophy journals rarely require authors to disclose potential conflicts of interest such as industry ties. That’s why an open letter released today calls on the field’s journals to begin to mandate such disclosures.
Science (Celina Zhao)
JB: This news story reminded me of one of my favourite parts of The Hitch-Hikers Guide to the Galaxy, a book (1979) and radio series that probably influenced my teenage brain, and sense of humour, more than any other.
Deep Thought — a supercomputer built to answer the Ultimate Question, of life the universe and everything — gave this advice to two philosophers from the Amalgamated Union of Philosophers, Sages, Luminaries, and other Professional Thinking Persons:
And so any philosophers who are quick off the mark, are going to clean up in the prediction business.... You just get on the pundit circuit. You all go on the chat shows and the colour supplements and violently disagree with each other about what answer I’m eventually going to produce. And if you get yourselves clever agents, you’ll be on the gravy train for life.
A good example of life imitating art, perhaps?
Universities are relying on AI-detection software to catch cheating. How well do the programs work?
A growing number of companies say that the tools they have made can identify text that has been written by another AI system. On-the-market products include Copyleaks, GPTZero and ZeroGPT, and those created by Grammarly, QuillBot and Turnitin.
Many AI detectors rely on a measure known as perplexity, which estimates how predictable each word in a sequence is likely to be. Because AI-generated text tends to follow more statistically predictable patterns than does human writing, passages with lower perplexity scores are more likely to be flagged as machine-generated, whereas less predictable phrasing is taken as a signal of human authorship.
Nature (Anna McKie)
JB: I pasted excerpts from a few recent Scholarly Kitchen posts into GPTZero, which decided they were largely written by AI. Is that a fair assessment? Only the authors will know for sure. And therein lies the problem with these tools. I can tell you that none of the text in these newsletters is written with the help of AI, but should you believe me?
British Medical Association could axe up to a third of its staff amid cash crisis
It has decided to shed up to a third of its staff in England as part of a major restructuring of its operations intended to help reduce its recurring deficit. The BMA’s finances are so precarious that it has needed a total of £86.8m in subsidies since 2008 from the British Medical Journal, which it owns, in order to stay afloat, an average of £5.1m a year.
The Guardian (Denis Campbell)
JB: Compare this with some of the largest US biomedical societies, which have deep financial reserves.
Pushback on use of hidden prompts to snare AI peer reviews
Organizers of a prominent neuroscience conference are facing pushback on social media after adding hidden prompts to their papers to catch peer reviewers who are using generative artificial intelligence (AI) to referee papers.
The 40th Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS)—which is slated to take place in Sydney, Australia, in December 2026—bans peer reviewers from uploading papers they referee to AI chatbots, as the practice breaches confidentiality. Reviewers can still use AI chatbots for background research purposes, according to the policy outlined in the conference’s handbook.
To enforce the policy and catch illicit AI use in peer review, the event’s organizers have included deliberately concealed instructions for large language models (LLMs) in papers sent out for peer review.
The Transmitter (Dalmeet Singh Chawla)
Paper mill cancer studies get double the number of citations as genuine papers
Cancer research articles with telltale signs of being produced by paper mills garner double the number of citations than do genuine papers in the field, finds an analysis of tens of thousands of articles.
In a study posted on the preprint server bioRxiv, the authors report that papers that were probably produced by paper mills frequently cite, or are cited by, other potentially fraudulent articles. Paper mills are businesses that produce and sell low-quality manuscripts — often containing fabricated data and results — designed to resemble genuine research.
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The tool flagged 4,085 papers — 12.3% of all of the papers examined — as having characteristics associated with paper-mill articles. The researchers identified potentially fraudulent papers in 19 out of the 20 journals that they examined. Nature Cancer was the only journal in the analysis that had not published any suspicious papers.
Nature (Mohana Basu)
