The publisher Springer Nature has released an “expression of concern” for more than four hundred papers they published in the Arabian Journal of Geosciences. All these papers supposedly passed through both peer review and editorial control, yet no expertise in geoscience is required to notice the problem:
There is much that could be said about this humiliation of a giant in the scholarly publishing industry, all of which will surely make the late Julius Springer, the company's founder, turn in his grave. All I will note here, is that this extraordinary exploit reveals that in a world where scholarly publishing has been largely handed over to the private sector, the process is no longer subject to the slightest influence of intelligence, human or otherwise.
