>The assertion of the authors is that this stuff getting published means the whole field is worthless. Which is of course ridiculous. Perhaps, but we're undoub

>The assertion of the authors is that this stuff getting published means the whole field is worthless. Which is of course ridiculous. Perhaps, but we're undoubtedly in the midst of a crisis of confidence in the process of scientific publication. From the reproducibility crisis to the Diederik Stapel affair to the paper mills in China, almost every field is being severely undermined by weak or deliberately fraudulent research. Frankly, I've almost given up on the scientific literature as a source of useful information, because I can't really trust most of it. The tools and processes of scientific publication just aren't fit for purpose. My Google Scholar and PubMed searches are overwhelmed with obviously junk papers from pay-to-play journals. Citation is no longer a credible metric because of citation rings. Established high-impact journals have reasonable quality standards, but they still get bamboozled with junk and a paper doesn't come with the supporting evidence I would need to evaluate its validity in any meaningful way. The signal-to-noise ratio of academic publishing is collapsing, and it's bringing down trust in the scientific method with it. We need major reform and we need it now, because the credibility of science as a whole is under dire threat. The AllTrials campaign has made significant gains in reducing publication bias in medical research, but we need to go much further. We need a publish-by-default model, where everything associated with a research project is published and failure to do so is treated as academic misconduct. We need gold open access, we need full datasets, we need source code, we need rough drafts and lab notes and reviewer's comments. Equally importantly, we need to fix the cultural pathology of publish-or-perish that's driving the proliferation of poor-quality research.