This author and her collaborator developed a tool to flag potential issues in papers. It appears to be FOSS, and based on a well-understood piece of bioinformat

This author and her collaborator developed a tool to flag potential issues in papers. It appears to be FOSS, and based on a well-understood piece of bioinformatics code. "Nature" doesn't run material from cranks and misfits, so hopefully this will start a serious discussion. Going forward, should journals, or the peer-reviewers they engage, test new papers with this tool? Sure, it turns up false positives and false negatives, so its results cannot be interpreted mindlessly. It is also possible to game a tool like this. But it seems obvious some authors are already gaming the system. Undergrad teachers use software tools to check student writing for plagiarism. Shouldn't information-based science use similar tools? We hackers can contribute to this kind of effort by encouraging and supporting open-source inspectable tools. Maybe there's even a business opportunity around maintaining and using the tools.