targeting.ai Society Signal

Merton101 · Category

Science and publishing

5 verified cases

peer review, preprints, conferences, citations, journals. Every case below was checked against its sources by a second model before it entered.

The cases by source date · verified only

Friction removed Science and publishing Academic journals and peer-review systems, US

AI manuscript surge floods academic journals and strains peer review

Submissions rose 42% at Organization Science and 33% across ScholarOne in Q1 2026, desk rejections surged 72%, over 30% of referee reports showed AI involvement, and Organization Science had to expand its deputy-editor bench from six to eleven and roughly double senior editors to about 60.

Who pays: Volunteer academic editors and peer reviewers who must absorb and screen the inflated volume of low-effort manuscripts and referee reports

Scale Speed fast Adaptation detect Latin Times ↗

Friction removed Science and publishing International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR)

AI conference ICLR is drowning in abstracts, with roughly 50,000 submissions before the deadline

Submission volume jumped by 156% in a single year to approximately 50,000 abstracts, resulting in degraded review quality and submission standards.

Who pays: Peer reviewers and academic researchers facing diluted signal and degraded quality standards across the research ecosystem.

Scale Speed fast Adaptation none THE DECODER ↗ KeyNews ↗ Developments Today ↗

Friction removed Science and publishing Academic computer science conferences (NeurIPS, ICLR, ICML, ACL)

Major AI conferences desk-reject papers over LLM-hallucinated citations

Four major machine learning and NLP conferences (NeurIPS, ICLR, ICML, ACL) instituted automated cross-checks of citations against bibliographic databases and desk-rejected submissions with non-existent references, causing over 100 desk rejections at ACL alone, elevated desk-rejection rates at ICLR, and emergency review processes for false positives.

Who pays: Program chairs, senior area chairs, and reviewers spending hours adjudicating flagged references, plus authors navigating erroneous desk-rejections caused by false positives

Scale Speed fast Adaptation verify StrictCite ↗