This certainly mirrors what I’ve seen on the ground. In the last 10 years, predatory publishers and publication mills went from known issues to the new normal. And yet despite how easy it is to publish, interest in reproducibility seems at an all-time low. It’s jarring, and I’m kind of making a career change out of research as a result, because what I do as a lowly assistant is essentially engineering results and marketing as opposed to anything having to do with discovery or science. I interpret it as capitalism’s going to capitalism.

This has resulted in a 47% growth between 2016 and 2022 in the global number of published papers (Hanson, et.al. 2023). Moreover, we should expect a further spurt of growth following the widespread advent of large language models in late 2022. During the 2016-2022 period there was little net increase in the number of PhD students globally or in the funding of science, both indicators of science activity. Increased paper productivity implies either that scientists became suddenly much more creative over the period, or had spent more time writing, and therefore reviewing papers: an increase in paper productivity but a decrease in scientific productivity.