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Alexander Honkala's Notebook

Frontiers in Cell & Developmental Biology - Midjourney Edition

In theory the papers published in the Frontiers family of journals go through a rigorous peer review process. In practice, this doesn't work out so well. The Frontiers group has extensive guidelines for good peer review, trying to ensure fair and balanced reviews with rapid turnaround times so that exciting new papers can be published quickly. A new paper published in the Cell & Development Biology imprint, however, shows that this process is only as good as the people involved:Who amongst us has not wanted to know more about the function of dislocttal stem ells in the biology of rat testtomcels or about how we can study the function of iollote sserotgomar cells in a retat?You may also have questions about the role of JAK/STAT signaling in iollote ssprotgomaregenesis, but luckily the authors have you covered:As you can see, JAK interacts with JAK interacts with JAK interacts with STA and TAT. While JAK/STAT signaling does get complicated with multiple members of each protein family participating in complex heteromerization for signaling functions, this is not an especially informative figure, not least because it was made with Midjourney.If you want to read the full paper, you can find it here: Cellular functions of spermatogonial stem cells in relation to JAK/STAT signaling pathwayBut the bigger question is: how did this happen? This paper was written by authors, submitted to an editor at Frontiers who should have, in theory, at least looked at the paper, and then been examined by at least a few peer reviewers before it was approved for publication. At every stage, someone failed and, in doing so, called into question not just the provenance of the paper (did the authors really write it or are we looking at edited GPT-generated text?) but also the validity of other findings published in Frontiers journals and in other journals because, even if, say, Nature has much more rigorous peer review standards than Frontiers, they are still susceptible to being gamed with faked images and Photoshopped Western blots. While more fraud in scientific publishing is being caught than ever before, we still do not have good data on how pervasive it is and, as such, don't know how well we're doing overall in fighting against it. What do you think? How can RH and other emerging experiments in scientific communication cut down on these issues and help both researchers and the public trust that the findings being presented are based on real data fairly interpreted and rigorously reviewed?