As I was strolling through Belfast’s Titanic Quarter last summer, I discovered with delight a road called Bell’s Theorem Crescent. It’s named in honour of the Belfast-born physicist John Bell, best known for his eponymous theorem. Despite not being as embedded in popular culture as Schrödinger’s cat, his theorem will certainly ring a bell (forgive the pun) with most physicists.

The story goes back to 1935 when Albert Einstein, Boris Podolsky and Nathan Rosen (EPR) came up with their now-famous thought experiment, which was designed to show that quantum mechanics was, as a description of nature, incomplete. In the EPR scenario, non-local influences can affect the measurement outcomes performed on spatially separated particles.

Given how odd that seemed, some physicists invoked what are known as “hidden variables” to get rid of these non-local correlations and restore local realism. It was in 1964, while working at the CERN particle-physics lab, that Bell showed that no local hidden-variable theory can be compatible with the predictions of quantum mechanics.

This result – Bell’s theorem – is something I was familiar with but I had paid little attention to where it had originally appeared. As I discovered, it was published in a paper called “On the Einstein Podolsky Rosen paradox” in the journal Physics (3 195) in 1964. Also known as Physics Physique Физика, this little-known publication existed only from 1964 to 1968. In fact, Bell’s theorem is the most important result published in it.

The journal was set up by two physicists at Bell Laboratories in the US – Bernd Matthias and future Nobel laureate Philip Anderson. According to A Mind Over Matter – Andrew Zangwill’s 2021 biography of Anderson – they were not too happy with conventional physics journals. “The referees,” Anderson said, “often did a bad job, the editors took too long to make decisions, and too much wrong physics got published.”

Those are complaints you’ll still hear in coffee breaks at most physics conferences today, and they prompted Matthias to contact the media magnate Robert Maxwell, who’d founded Oxford-based publishing house Pergamon Press. Maxwell had figured out that scientific publishing could be a very lucrative business so he helped the two physicists to set up the journal.

A publishing experiment

In their first editorial, Anderson and Matthias called Physics an “experimental journal”, which they hoped would solve the problem of there being “far more good physics written than any physicist can read”. Their solution was to pick only those papers worth the attention of all physicists, which the editors did by reviewing – then accepting or rejecting – every submission themselves. They even paid authors 10 cents a word if their paper appeared in print.

Anderson and Matthias admitted that many physicists had already written to them, criticizing their proposed selection model. They’d been told that their “judgements will be fallible”, that they might be “overimpressed by showiness”, and that they’d end up rejecting excellent work. In response, the pair promised to try their best, accepting they would make mistakes and that their “criteria will be, not better, but different”.

The journal’s criteria clearly succeeded, in that Anderson and Matthias identified the merits of Bell’s paper, which was far from mainstream

These criteria clearly succeeded, in that they identified the merits of Bell’s paper, which was far from mainstream. Keen to find out more about the events surrounding its publication, I contacted Zangwill, who had interviewed Anderson several times for his book. Zangwill shared the following quote, published here for the first time.

“One day,” Anderson recalled, “a paper came in from a guy neither of us had heard of – John Bell. It was about hidden variables in quantum mechanics. Bernd had no clue, but I accepted it with the hope that its publication would spell the death of Bohmian trajectory quantum mechanics. It’s a very famous paper today.”

In 1967 the quantum physicist John Clauser found Bell’s paper after stumbling upon Physics Physique Физика, attracted by its unusual title. Clauser, who shared the 2022 Nobel Prize in Physics, carried out the first Bell test in 1972 with Stuart Friedmann. Their work triggered a long series of experiments that would deepen our understanding of quantum mechanics and catalyse the development of quantum technologies.

Over its short life, Physics did publish work from other notable physicists including Murray Gell-Mann, Leonard Susskind and Leo Kadanoff. In fact, the journal was ahead of its time, with the model of in-house editorial selection for broad interest returning in the 2000s with the Nature series of journals. The inclusive, multi-language title was also well ahead of its day.

Sadly, Physics Physique Физика was discontinued in 1968 after just three volumes

Sadly, Physics Physique Физика was discontinued in 1968 after just three volumes. According to what Anderson told Zangwill, it stopped “not because it lacked submissions, but because they had promised contributors rapid publication and Maxwell kept increasing the time between the appearances of successive issues”. Maxwell’s aggressive pursuit of profit might also have played a role.

The journal has since been archived by the American Physical Society and is freely accessible online. One can only wonder what might have happened if Anderson and Matthias had picked a different name for their journal.

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In 2008 the US author Neal Stephenson published a speculative fiction novel called Anathem. Set on the fictional planet of Arbre, the story follows an order of monks, mostly isolated from the rest of the world, who every so often open up their doors to receive information on the state of the outside world.

In the book, Stephenson explores a Dark Age of the Internet, in which companies flood the network with plausible-sounding-but-false information in a ploy to force consumers to buy the firms’ own tools for distinguishing truth from falsehood.

Initially, this “crap”, as Stephenson calls it, had to be made by humans, but eventually the process is run by a so-called “Artificial Inanity”, which is able to create hundreds or thousands of bogus versions, or “bogons”, for every legitimate document.

Today, we face our own version of Stephenson’s Dark Age as our information landscape increasingly fills with AI slop, now going beyond AI-generated videos of uncanny kittens or images depicting politicians and celebrities in outlandish situations.

With the rise of chatbots powered by large language models (LLMs), our search results, social-media feeds and even scientific journals are getting polluted with data that, at first glance, appears relevant and plausible but contains no value beneath its gilded veneer.

As LLM-generated slop infects our previously trusted knowledge base, we face an information landscape that is quickly rotting beneath us.

As scientists, we must position our work in relation to other recent research. Yet that task gets harder when we have to sort out the real from the hallucinated. As LLM-generated slop infects our previously trusted knowledge base, we face an information landscape that is quickly rotting beneath us.

Where we could once track an idea to a paper with human authors (who bore consequences for acts of fraud), we face a future where we have to question whether an article’s authors, institutions or experiments ever existed, on top of evaluating its scientific merits.

This is not a hypothetical danger. In 2024 a team led by medical researcher Almira Osmanovic Thunström at the University of Gothenburg invented a fictitious medical condition called “bixonimania” and publicized it through posts on Medium and two pre-print papers.

Their goal was to test whether AI chatbots would pick up and propagate word of the fake disease, which they duly did. The researchers even tried to insert information that made the work obviously fake. This included acknowledging a colleague from Starfleet Academy, thanking the University of Fellowship of the Ring for funding, and even writing early on in the article that “this entire paper is made up”.

Trapped in a bog

As physicists, we are not immune to the dangers of information rot. A flood of LLM-generated articles prompted arXiv in May to announce consequences for authors whose submissions have “incontrovertible evidence that the authors did not check the results of LLM generation”, including having “hallucinated references”. Those consequences include a one-year ban from arXiv and the requirement, thereafter, that any submitted paper must already be accepted at a “reputable peer-reviewed venue”.

I initially welcomed the news. Harsh consequences are one way to discourage LLM usage, especially for sloppy shortcuts. But the more I reflect on it, the more I realize that arXiv’s consequences could eventually fall even on those who are not using LLMs to write their papers.

Relying on shortcuts is easy. Say you’re writing a literature review and paper A, which you’ve read and trust, has a fact you want to cite – but you notice that paper A cites paper B for this fact. It’s simple to scroll down to the reference section and copy paper B’s citation into your own citations (I would be lying if I said I’ve never done this myself).

But as the information landscape rots, this shortcut could run you afoul of policies like arXiv’s. What appears to be a valid citation – maybe even containing the names of authors you know personally – can be hallucinated.

We must double down on the skills that make us experts – our scientific judgement, information literacy, communication skills and careful scholarship.

Or it could be entirely fake, as a team of researchers who cited one of the “bixonimania” pre-prints in a peer-reviewed article discovered. Their paper was justifiably retracted by the journal editor, over their objections. By simply copying a reference without double-checking it, you can unintentionally join ranks alongside LLM users. Worse, you open yourself and all of your co-authors to being banned from arXiv.

I am not suggesting that arXiv’s policy is flawed. Rather, I argue that those who intend their writing to be AI-free must be vigilant. We must double down on the skills that make us experts – our scientific judgement, information literacy, communication skills and careful scholarship. We should lean into practising these skills – and teaching them – even though they are precisely the skills that AI companies claim LLMs can replace.

In Anathem, a character simply hand-waves away their Internet full of bogons, but we have no such solution. Instead, as our information landscape rots, we find ourselves trapped in a bog. To get out, we must plan each step carefully and take none for granted. What appears to be solid ground may well prove treacherous. Moving safely is a slow process, full of checking and double-checking as we painstakingly build out paths and tools we can trust.

Simply choosing not to use an LLM when writing is no longer enough. We have only our own scholarly skills to sort the bogons from the ground truth. We will all have to slow down if we want out of the bog.

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Congratulations to Margaret Harris for winning the “Feature of the Year – specialist audience” award from the Association of British Science Writers (ABSW). The Physics World online editor was cited for her article “The physics Nobel prizes you’ve never heard of”. The ABSW describes the article as: “A refreshing angle to Nobel prize reporting. It was an eye-opener, told a great story and gave some deep historical context to the murky world of who wins the Nobels and why.”

In the run-up to each year’s Nobel prize announcements, Physics World editors explore aspects of the award that have often been neglected. As well as her award-winning article from 2025, Harris has argued the case that Lise Meitner should have won a Nobel for her work on nuclear fission (“Overlooked for the Nobel: Lise Meitner”). On a lighter note, Harris has described an e-mail exchange with physics laureate Brian Josephson about his tongue-in-cheek “paper” on mattress rotation (“How to rotate your mattress like a physics Nobel prizewinner”).

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At the turn of the 21st century the open access (OA) movement proposed an inspiring idea: to make scientific knowledge freely available to everyone, everywhere. In what became known as the Budapest Open Access Initiative, the movement aimed to challenge scientific publishers who continued to raise subscription prices, sometimes without justification. This, OA proponents suggested, was increasingly undermining poorer countries and institutions, who often could not afford the subscriptions.

A quarter of a century on, numerous institutions – both national and international – have strongly promoted the transition from the subscription-based model to OA. But to what extent has this transition actually taken place?

In a recent post on his Journalology blog, publishing consultant James Butcher showed that while open-access publishing increased rapidly from 2000 to 2023, by 2024 it had stagnated if not reversed, with papers in subscription-based journals increasing. Gold OA – where an article processing charge (APC) is paid by the author to make the paper immediately freely available to read – showed a decline compared to hybrid OA, in which a traditional, subscription-based journal makes individual articles freely available to the public.

Butcher offers China as a possible explanation for the trend. The country now has the fastest-growing scientific output, accounting for roughly 25% of all research articles published annually – up from about 13% a decade ago. This rapid expansion of Chinese research activity is influencing the pace of the global OA transition. Data indicate that Chinese researchers rarely publish OA in hybrid journals, tending instead to publish either in fully OA journals or, more commonly, in subscription-based journals.

The data clearly show that the global transition to OA is only feasible once Chinese researchers significantly change their publishing practices. However, this shift entails a major financial challenge for China.

Historically, China has paid considerably less in institutional subscription fees than Europe, Japan or the US. As China’s research output continues to grow, publishing a greater share of papers as OA would impose increasingly high costs, making traditional subscription journals a financially attractive alternative for many researchers.

The reassessment of the open-access model is not limited to China. In 2018 cOAlition S – a consortium of national research agencies and funders from 12 European countries – launched Plan S, which proposes that publicly funded research is made immediately available in full OA without embargo. The consortium has now released a new strategy for 2026–2030 that adopts a more flexible approach, supporting alternatives to paywalled journals without explicitly aiming to replace them.

If these trends consolidate, the OA model may face additional, often overlooked obstacles: coexistence of different publication traditions and the unequal distribution of publication costs across countries and institutions. Both factors hinder progress toward a fully OA system.

Access all areas

OA is a noble concept but, unfortunately, what works in theory does not always withstand the complexity of the real world. APCs today can exceed $10,000 and are paid by the authors’ own research funds. It is worth emphasizing that a good journal has far more readers than authors, so distributing costs among readers is much more equitable than placing them on authors.

We are also in a paradoxical situation where publishers could be collecting both APC revenues and subscription fees. Many publishers are now signing Transformative Agreements with institutions, designed to eliminate this “double dipping” by bundling reading fees and open-access publishing costs into a single contract.

In practice, we have moved from a system of “free to publish, pay to read” to one of “free to read, pay to publish” where the burden of cost has shifted from institutions to individuals. This radical transformation has not eliminated inequality. On the contrary, it paradoxically risks deepening it, producing effects that run counter to the original goals of the OA movement.

OA has also inadvertently promoted the rise of predatory journals, which continue to prosper, while, in the meantime, an entirely different major challenge has emerged: artificial intelligence (AI). Generative AI systems are trained on massive volumes of text, including OA scientific articles. In other words, the scientific community is providing free data to large tech companies, which use them to develop proprietary models that generate large profits.

OA articles are often published under Creative Commons licenses that allow reuse, even for commercial purposes. Yet AI models often do not cite their sources or attribute authorship. Thus, publicly funded knowledge is exploited for private profit, but academic institutions, researchers and publishers often do not receive any recognition in return, not even symbolic.

If AI tools can be properly regulated, however, they can help accelerate scientific progress by using open, high-quality data. Still, the question of whether the benefits of OA outweigh the drawbacks remains largely unanswered.

Taking responsibility

OA has not been a total failure, but neither has it lived up to the high hopes it once inspired. With OA we have gained broader access, but at the cost of new imbalances. We have often sacrificed quality for quantity. And above all, we have largely forgotten that science is not just about sharing, but also about recognition, responsibility and fairness.

OA remains an idea with remarkable potential but only if we resist its most rigid and dogmatic interpretations, which consider it as an unquestionable good. Initially, only the advantages were acknowledged but now, after a quarter of a century, we are beginning to recognize its downsides.

Identifying problems is the only way to develop solutions: without a proper diagnosis, there is no effective cure. Resolving the persistent and emerging challenges of OA is now urgent, especially as the expanding role of Chinese research introduces new and unexpected dynamics into global publishing given their fondness for the subscription model.

There is no magic solution. Improving OA in scientific publishing requires shared responsibility across the research community. Researchers should engage responsibly in publishing and peer review, develop a better understanding of the complexity of the editorial process, and reject unethical practices.

Universities must reform evaluation systems by prioritizing research quality over publication volume, remove perverse financial incentives, and strengthen training in publishing ethics at the earliest stages of scientific careers.

Publishers should ensure fair and institutionally supported publication costs, enhance editorial and peer review standards, and actively counter predatory publishing.

At the policy level, funding agencies and governing bodies can foster greater accountability by supporting ethics training, and develop traceability and compensation mechanisms for AI use of OA content. Agencies could also invest in sustainable community-led models such as diamond OA platforms, in which research articles are published free to read and free to publish, with publishing costs subsidized by universities or government grants.

No-one wants to go back. But if we truly aspire to a science that is open, fair and sustainable, scientists must acknowledge the problem and take responsibility for addressing it.

The post An open access future is only possible by addressing its problems appeared first on Physics World.

Data are at the core of science, but traditional journal articles normally deliver a distillation of the raw data gathered by the authors. While the movement towards open access to data is widely supported by researchers and funding agencies, a 2024 study by IOP Publishing revealed that many scientists still encounter a wide range of practical, ethical and technical barriers when it comes to sharing their data.

As a result, the publisher has launched a free online course that aims to give early-career researchers the practical skills and confidence they need to share and manage research data effectively.

To talk about the course and IOP Publishing’s open data policy I am joined by Laura Feetham-Walker, who is head of publishing strategy and performance at IOP Publishing.

IOP Publishing is a wholly owned subsidiary of the Institute of Physics and it publishes Physics World.

• You can register for the free course here: “Open Data Excellence“

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Bloomsbury has 14,087 titles listed in agreement between AI startup and authors over use of their work

The publisher of Harry Potter has received a multimillion-pound payout as a beneficiary of a $1.5bn (£1.12bn) copyright settlement between the AI startup Anthropic and thousands of authors over the use of their protected work to power chatbots.

Bloomsbury, which is home to the bestselling novelists Sarah J Maas and Susanna Clarke as well as JK Rowling, said it had 14,087 titles listed within the settlement, with a proposed compensation of about $3,000 a title.