Science journal publisher Springer said this week that it's planning on deleting 16 papers from its archives after discovering they were "computer-generated gibberish," according to a recent report by AFP.
"We are in the process of taking down the papers as quickly as possible," Springer said in a statement. "This means that they will be removed, not retracted, since they are all nonsense."
The papers had been submitted to conferences on engineering and computer science, and proceedings were then published in subscription-only publications, according to the German-based publisher.
"We are looking into our procedures to find the weakness that could allow something like this to happen, and we will adapt our processes to ensure that it does not happen again," Springer added.
The news was exposed by French computer scientist Cyril Labbe of the Joseph Fourier University in Grenoble.
Labbe noticed over 100 other "nonsense" papers published by the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE), according to the journal Nature.
"There might have been some conference papers published in our IEEE Xplore digital library that did not meet our quality standards," said IEEE, according to AFP. "We took immediate action to remove those papers, and also refined our processes to prevent papers not meeting our standards from being published in the future."
Labbe is currently busy trying to figure out how to detect fake papers written with a program called SCIgen.
The program was created in 2005 by researchers at MIT. Click here to access the service.
Fake papers were submitted to conferences from 2008 and 2013.
"There are several possible explanations" for the fakes, said Labbe. "One is that people are just testing the system, but if that's the case, they should reveal who they are and they haven't done so," said Labbe. "Another is that the papers are a deliberate fraud to make money."
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