>> Right now, the YesNoError website contains many false positives, says Nick Brown, a researcher in scientific integrity at Linnaeus University. Among 40 papers flagged as having issues, he found 14 false positives (for example, the model stating that a figure referred to in the text did not appear in the paper, when it did). “The vast majority of the problems they’re finding appear to be writing issues,” and a lot of the detections are wrong, he says.
>> Brown is wary that the effort will create a flood for the scientific community to clear up, as well fuss about minor errors such as typos, many of which should be spotted during peer review (both projects largely look at papers in preprint repositories). Unless the technology drastically improves, “this is going to generate huge amounts of work for no obvious benefit”, says Brown. “It strikes me as extraordinarily naive.”