#co-authorship

#co-authorship

The mystery of the missing scientists began with a Silver Alert. In late February, a retired Air Force major general named Neil McCasland left his house in New Mexico for a walk and never returned.

Modern scientific societies are increasingly vulnerable due to their dependence on membership fees and journal subscriptions, which are being challenged by the rise of virtual networking and open-access publishing.

The Martuwarra Fitzroy River is one of Australia's last-remaining relatively intact, undammed tropical river systems. For now. The river faces many threats, for instance, from water use in agricultural irrigation.

An editor expressed concern, stating that the Shy Girl incident could happen to any publisher, highlighting the industry's need for vigilance regarding the authenticity of submissions.

The format has ginormous link cards at the bottom of the AI summary, which include a thumbnail of no apparent value, the site name, favicon, description, and title.

Computer programs that check mathematical arguments have existed for decades, but translating a human-written proof into the strict programming language of a computer is extremely time-consuming, often taking months or even years.

"We hope that by taking strong action against violations of agreed-upon policy we will remind the community that as our field changes rapidly the thing we must protect most actively is our trust in each other."

The upcoming U.S. release of the horror book Shy Girl was canceled by publisher Hachette Book Group just weeks ahead of its release due to suspicion of AI use in its making.

Hachette remains committed to protecting original creative expression and storytelling. The company requires all submissions to be original to the authors and that the authors disclose whether AI is used during the writing process.

Google AI mode has added an 'Ask about this' option above the sources where all URLs are displayed. Clicking on 'Ask about' here automatically pulled a new prompt into the search box.

On 13 January 2026, Bandcamp published "Keeping Bandcamp Human", declaring that "music and audio that is generated wholly or in substantial part by AI is not permitted on Bandcamp", alongside a strict prohibition on AI-enabled impersonation of other artists or styles. The post invites users to report releases that appear to rely heavily on generative tools, and it explicitly reserves the right to remove music "on suspicion of being AI-generated".

The SoA said the absence of any government measure to compel tech companies to label AI-generated output meant readers were struggling to distinguish between books written by a human, and machine-generated work based on AI models trained on copyrighted work without permission or payment.

Within a couple of years of ChatGPT coming out, I had come to rely on the artificial-intelligence tool, for my work as a professor of plant sciences at the University of Cologne in Germany. Having signed up for OpenAI's subscription plan, ChatGPT Plus, I used it as an assistant every day - to write e-mails, draft course descriptions, structure grant applications, revise publications, prepare lectures, create exams and analyse student responses, and even as an interactive tool as part of my teaching.

In 2023, Australia abandoned its expensive and bureaucratic scholar-led research-assessment programme. New Zealand followed suit soon after. The hope, according to a transition plan unveiled by the Australian federal government's Department of Education and the research sector, was to find a "more modern, data-driven approach". In the United Kingdom, where financial pressures on universities are especially acute, there are similar calls to reform the Research Excellence Framework (REF), the country's performance-based research-funding system.

A few years ago, I put together what I felt was a truly innovative concept, which I presented in a conference poster at an international meeting in my field. After the presentation, I spoke to another early-career scientist about my work and how it might apply to their findings. Two years later, they scooped me by publishing a preprint paper that presented my idea, with many of the same verbal formulations and an identical flow of ideas, without any acknowledgement or attribution to my work.

That was a year or so ago, and my first brush with what generative AI could do. Like many, I started using it for fun: planning trips, finding nineteenth century authors I could recommend to fantasy-loving students (a genre I don't read), and making a holiday card starring my dog, Harry. But as work piled up, I didn't have time for new toys, so now I use AI for work.

The important shift is that software contribution itself is becoming programmable,

I'm less interested in topics than in questions, and I'm less interested in publishing than I am in curation. When I've testified before Congress or dealt with an appropriations bill or a budget negotiation, this question, of what is the return on investments when you're doing R&D, comes up quite often. It's been asked by economists in very formal ways since at least the 1950s, but the data and the methods that were available were really not very strong.