Today, Dan Larhammar, Uppsala University and former president of the Academy, and Bernhard Sabel from Otto von Guericke University in Magdeburg, Germany, have published the Stockholm Declaration, which outlines a number of proposed countermeasures against fake science, often produced by AI. This growing problem was discussed early this summer at a workshop held at the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.
“Science relies on integrity and trustworthiness. But scientists under career pressure are lured to purchase fake publications from ‘paper mills’ that use AI-generated data, text and image fabrication. The number of low-quality or fraudulent publications is rising to hundreds of thousands per year, which—if unchecked—will damage the scientific and economic progress of our societies.”
This is the start of the Stockholm Declaration which also presents an action plan with specific recommendations to deal with the problem. These include new non-profit publishing models, adjustment of the incentive systems to merit quality, not quantity, and the implementation of mechanisms to prevent and detect fake publications and fraud.
Published in Royal Society Open Science
The action plan is drafted by Bernhard Sabel and Dan Larhammar and is the result of discussions at the workshop held at the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in June this year. You can find the text published in the journal Royal Society Open Science in full here.
The workshop was supported financially by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences and Knut and Alice Wallenberg Foundation, Stockholm, Sweden, as well as the non-profit foundation Sciii gGmbH, Berlin, Germany.
The Secretary General at the Academy, Hans Ellegren, has also written in Swedish about the problem with fake science today on his blog.