# Overproduction, fake citations, and the collapse of peer review in science publishing **Artwork**: **Artist**: Arnaud Quercy **Asset**: IDS-RNI0144 **Serial**: NAN-RDG000085 This is a journalistic interview about the economics and integrity crisis of academic publishing (overproduction, APCs, predatory journals, AI-generated citation hallucinations, peer-review collapse, retractions) — an institutional and epistemic critique with no emitter/receiver, ouverture, codex, or diffraction event for the ideamorphism lens to grip; its vocabulary of waves and creative diffraction has no purchase on a domain governed by verification and factual fidelity rather than aesthetic reception. ## Context ### Declined — `no-purchase` [@source] ### Propositional grid [@p31] > **Read this grid.** “Not evaluated” does **not** mean the source has nothing to say about that proposition. It means **the reading did not instruct it**. That is not a result, and it counts in no denominator. A silence, by contrast, is a finding: the reading touched the proposition without concluding, or noted its absence itself. **Not evaluated (37)** — P1, P2, P3, P3a, P4, P5, P6, P7, P8, P9, P10, P11, P12, P13, P14, P14a, P14b, P15, P16, P16a, P17, P18, P18a, P19, P19a, P20, P21, P22, P23, P24, P25, P26, P27, P28, P29, P30, P31 --- *Overall verdict: **DECLINED:no-purchase** — taxonomy of the August 2026 pass, predating the move to relational verdicts. Kept as metadata: the gap between the two forms is data, not residue. This reading’s judgement is in the grid above.* Reading of 2026-05-30 · model `claude-sonnet-5` · source 19,213 chars · 1 attempt(s) --- ### First pass — kept as written *Reading produced by the T50 RSS pass, before the boundary lens. It is reproduced UNCORRECTED. Keeping it is the point: without it, a changed title is just a changed title — with it, what the second pass refused becomes legible.* > This French article on AI-generated scientific publications diagnoses a structural crisis parallel to the dilution crisis in art. The exponential growth of publications 'tends to occur at the expense of peer review' — maximum emission, minimum diffraction. Peer review is the epistemic ouverture: it is the mechanism by which a signal (a paper) passes through a trained, singular receiver (a peer) and is transformed through critical engagement. When volume overwhelms the capacity for diffraction, the system collapses into recognition (acceptance/rejection) without creation (genuine advancement of knowledge). AI-generated papers are the ultimate dilution: they emit without the intentional invariant, the codex, the singular constraint system that makes knowledge-production coherent. The 'quality of academic production' crisis is not about truth-value but about the loss of the diffractive apparatus itself. T50 RSS assessment · 2026-05-30 · remplacée par `boundary-lens-2026-08`