I think there are two ways to look at it, both of which are true: 1) scientific literature is being polluted with non-peer-reviewed PRs which makes it harder to figure out what is actually well validated, and 2) press releases are being nudged into being a hell of a lot more technically substantive and rich in relevant citations. The first one isn’t great, but as consolation prizes go, (2) isn’t bad.
The peer review community has torched its reputation over the last decade, so it should surprise precisely nobody paying attention that profit-motivated publishers are crawling over what remains of that barrier.
Outside of academia I don't think anyone realizes just how broken the system is.
Citation extortion rings are part of every journal. I had a reviewer from Nature give feedback that I should cite her co-authors work on a topic that had nothing to do with my paper. It got rejected because I wouldn't. It went into archive and has been cited nearly a hundred times now. To add insult to injury Nature News asked to interview me about my work.
I'm a layman surrounded by laypeople and we regularly make fun of peer review. It's far from insider baseball, and verging on reality tv for a small but growing segment of the shitposting nihilistic demo.
I disagree, people who are not expert consumers of information, but do think “arXiv is science stuff” are easily misled, and I trust citations from private companies without strong academic pedigree as worthless at best, harmful at worst.
It’s pretty easy to con investors if you have the same “look” as a real lab.
> I disagree, people who are not expert consumers of information, but do think “arXiv is science stuff” are easily misled
I think you are talking about an extremely small segment of the population, so I don't think we're talking about a very large social impact. I'm also unconvinced that that segment doesn't generally take ordinary tech press releases at face value anyway.
> I trust citations from private companies without strong academic pedigree
OK, but the first two authors on this have doctorates in ML and applied photonics respectively. They don't have peer review on this paper, but I don't think you can say they're lacking in academic pedigree.
> It’s pretty easy to con investors if you have the same “look” as a real lab.
I don't know. My feeling is that the "conning investors who are terrible at due diligence" game is largely unavoidable and mostly a zero-sum competition between con artists. So while it's obviously bad, I'm not convinced that the specifics matter all that much. Fools and their money, and all that.
Are you sure? Are you expert enough to read those papers? How do you achieve large scale integration in waveguides transparent to available laser sources? How does 250nm compare to the integration in your cell phone’s cpu?
And we are decades away from modulatable miniaturized 250nm laser sources. It is typically 1.5um with today’s devices.
Not in this case, no. But in cases where I do have more knowledge, the additional detail makes it much easier to tell if there's anything of substance there, compared to traditional press releases which just make superficial marketing claims with minimal technical detail.
And if this were something more relevant to me, but where I didn't have expertise necessary to look at it, I could reach out to someone with the expertise needed to take a look. The point here is that it's very difficult talk at great length and in great detail about BS without making it apparent to experts that you're talking BS, whereas with a more traditional PR, the best you can often say is "well, if this is anything, these are very big claims."
> I’m worried over this trend of private companies putting press releases into LaTeX templates.
People need to realize once and for all that templates no longer represent quality or truthfulness, if they ever did. Maybe that lesson has to hurt a bit.
I’m worried over this trend of private companies putting press releases into LaTeX templates.