We’re throwing billions of dollars’ worth of research on a digital compost heap. This needs to stop.

A new investigative report by journalists at Science and Retraction Watch lifts the lid on what appears to be a concerted effort by one university to game the current science publishing system.

The story focuses on Saveetha Dental College in Chennai, India, which requires hundreds of undergraduates to write manuscripts on research they’ve done as students. That sounds like a fine exercise for the class. The twist is that these student manuscripts then get published in bottom-of-the-barrel journals. While that alone generated over a thousand publications from the college last year, the real impact of this scheme comes from the students’ apparent habit - likely prompted - of including citations to large numbers of other studies published by researchers at the same school.

Which contains more information: a five-minute video or a five-page document?

As anyone who’s had to pay for excess cellular bandwidth knows, the video contains far more raw data than the text file. That doesn’t mean it has more information, though.

What if the video shows someone reading a Dr. Seuss book aloud? Most of the raw data in the video would just be a binary encoding of the speaker’s picture, and a tiny bit of motion around their mouth. The audio track would contain moderately paced speech in delightfully simple rhymes. In five minutes of viewing, the audience would easily get the point. Now imagine that the five-page document we’re comparing it to is a scientific research paper. Comprehending it – fully receiving its information – might require an hour of patient study, or longer if the reader isn’t an expert in the field.