news.ycombinator.com• Sep 29, 2025• 1 min read
Fake research is doubling every 1.5 yearsPaper mills, which are companies that sell fake papers to academics desperate for publications, have industrialized scientific fraud.A new study shows paper mills now double their output every 1.5 years. Real research, by contrast, only doubles every 15 years. If you follow the math, fake science eventually outnumbers real science.This is a huge problem because scientific literature is upstream of everything: drug discovery, clinical guidelines, and increasingly, AI training data.If fake papers keep scaling, we’re polluting downstream systems, including scientific AI.Peer review was designed for a world where misconduct was rare and individual. It has no defenses against industrialized fraud.Scientific publishing is collapsing. So what comes next?
