Daily summary: Robots reconstruct Pompeii frescoes from hundreds of fragments

On the scaling of paper-mill research ethics: a joint action plan for the next 2022 London-based journal, Taylor & Francis, and Deborah Kahn

Taylor & Francis is among the publishers that are making use of such tools, and Alam says that a growing number of ethics cases — instances of potential misconduct that are flagged for further investigation — are being escalated to her team. According to Alam, about half of the cases are related to paper mills. Her team saw the number of ethics cases increase more than tenfold from 2019 to 2022 — and so far this year, there have been almost as many cases as during the whole of 2022. She says it seems to have been commercially successful and scaled up.

Efforts to tackle the increasing number of fake papers are being stymied by Text- and image-generating tools.

It was discussed at the summit how to tackle the issue of paper mills more broadly, by organizing awareness weeks for researchers and finding ways for publishers to share relevant information with one another without breaching data-protection rules.

Sabina Alam, director of publishing ethics and integrity at Taylor & Francis, a publisher based in Abingdon, UK, agrees but says that such standards will take time to implement. She believes it would be difficult for it to be an overnight flip, because many institutions don’t have the resources to offer data-management infrastructure. We don’t want to penalize research.

Currently, requirements for submitting raw data vary significantly between publishers, says Christopher. Establishing a uniform set of requirements for the submission of raw data across publishers, taking into account differences between fields of research, could therefore be helpful, she says.

During the summit it was proposed to require authors to provide the raw data from experiments, possibly with digital watermarks, which would enable publishers to confirm that the data are genuine.

Kahn says that, although there will undoubtedly be positive uses of AI to support researchers writing papers, it will still be necessary to distinguish between legitimate papers written with AI and those that have been completely fabricated. “We have to really look at how we identify those things, and how we make sure that people have actually done the research. And there are various ways we can do that,” she says.

The first time a group of people came together, to co-create a set of actions to counter the problem was, according to Deborah Kahn, who is a researchintegrity consultant in London. The group intends to publish its joint action plan soon.

At the UNITED2ACT summit, which was convened by the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE), several people were present, among them, Christopher and Abalkina. The summit brought together international researchers as well as representatives from funding bodies and publishers.

Source: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-01780-w

Transcranial electrical stimulation can improve brain functions: a survey of meta-analysis studies on language-generating AI tools and an analogy with ChatGPT

Language-generating AI tools such as ChatGPT pose a similar problem. “As soon as you have something that can show that something’s generated by ChatGPT, there’ll be some other tool to scramble that,” says Christopher.

The Federation of European Biological Societies Press in Germany has an image-data-integrity analyst named JANA Christopher who has seen fake images generated by artificial intelligence. She says that it’s a challenge to be able to show that images are not created by humans.

After years of debate over whether non-invasively zapping the brain with electrical current can improve a person’s mental functioning, a massive analysis of past studies offers an answer: probably. Transcranial electrical stimulation (TES) involves sending a painless, weak electrical current to the brain through electrodes on the scalp. A meta-analysis of more than 100 studies examining one type of TES found that the technique brings about moderate improvements in attention, memory and problem solving. But not everyone is convinced. “The problem I have with this paper is that it lumps together studies that are effectively different interventions,” says neurologist Alvaro Pascual-Leone.

Equality of peer review for authors hiding their names and affiliations in a collaborative study of avian flu outbreaks in the United States and Mexico

US officials have authorized the vaccination of the critically endangered California condor (Gymnogyps californianus) against a type of avian flu that has killed hundreds of millions of birds around the world. It is the first time in the country that a bird has ever been given the vaccine against the virus. There is no guarantee that the vaccine will work, although it has been developed for chickens. But there are only around 540 condors left, after a heroic effort to save them from extinction in the 1980s and 90s. “This authorization opens the opportunity to add another tool for how we address this threat,” says Ashleigh Blackford, the California-condor coordinator at the US Fish and Wildlife Service.

Seven US states this week finally agreed on a plan to cut their use of water from the iconic Colorado River, which supplies water to more than 40 million people in the United States and Mexico. The river, battered by overuse, drought and climate change, has been drying up. The plan is welcome by scientists but only a short term fix for a much bigger problem.

Hiding authors’ names and affiliations from peer reviewers helps to equalize the publishing playing field for researchers. In a trial at the journal Functional Ecology, more than 3,500 papers were randomly assigned to double-blind review. Authors from low-income and non-English speaking countries have the same outcomes regardless of whether or not they hid their identities. The reviewers from high-income countries were more likely to ask for manuscripts to be re-written because they knew who they were.

Source: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-01781-9

How to avoid pandemics, warn your fellow scientists and keep you away from e-mailing them, writes Aditya Simha

It can be traumatic to be ghosted by another scientist, writes leadership researcher, Aditya Simha. It’s impossible to know why a person has stopped replying to your e-mails, so don’t blame yourself, he advises. Do follow the ‘three strikes and you’re out’ rule — don’t e-mail the ghoster more than three times — and allow yourself to move on.

Collaboration and openness are essential to minimize the risks of future pandemics, argues virologist Marietjie Venter on behalf of the 27 members of the World Health Organization’s Scientific Advisory Group for the Origins of Novel Pathogens. She explains how they are helping to understand how new infections come about and how to prevent them. She writes that investigations should not be seen as a responsibility of one country and that geopolitics should not interfere with or block these. Scientists and governments should make available all data, research and reports that can help.

A robot equipped with soft humanoid arms helps to reconstruct Pompeii’s shattered frescoes. anonymous peer review equalises the publishing playing field and is why California condors will be vaccine against avian flu.