No. 001

AI Scientists and the Governance Gap

• AI scientists are changing research: institutions, funders and publishers must respond

  Nature, March 25 2026

  Nature's editorial argues that once AI systems autonomously generate hypotheses, design experiments, and interpret results, the questions of credit, accountability, and governance stop being hypothetical.

• How to build an AI scientist: first peer-reviewed paper spills the secrets

  Nature, March 26 2026

  Nature covers the first peer-reviewed account of an end-to-end AI scientist system, focusing less on what it found and more on how the work was structured.

• Risks of AI scientists: prioritizing safeguarding over autonomy

  Nature Communications, March 2026

  A Nature Communications paper makes the case that safety constraints on autonomous research agents should come before expanding their capabilities.

Peer Review Under Pressure

• AI in peer review: revisiting an 8-year-old debate

  The Scholarly Kitchen, March 16 2026

  Two publishing professionals revisit their 2018 positions. Both now agree that without fixing incentive structures, AI in peer review just scales existing dysfunction.

• Could AI help fix peer review, or will it only make things worse?

  The Scholarly Kitchen, March 18 2026

  A radiology professor warns of a "dead zone" where bots write, review, and read papers with minimal human involvement. The underlying problem is manuscript volume, not reviewer laziness.

• Gemini provides automated feedback for theoretical computer scientists at STOC 2026

  Google Research, March 2026

  Google tested Gemini as a pre-submission proof checker for STOC. 97% of participating researchers found it helpful; one said it caught a bug that invalidated an entire proof.

Tools and Infrastructure

• Introducing the Elicit API

  Elicit, March 2026

  Elicit opened programmatic access to its 138M-paper index. Researchers can now run literature searches and generate reports from their own scripts, not just the web UI.

Integrity and the Scientific Record

• Librarian finds "preposterous number" of fake references in paper from Springer Nature journal

  Retraction Watch, March 6 2026

  A hospital librarian discovered that 12 of 14 references in a published paper did not exist. Springer Nature said checking for hallucinated citations at scale remains an unsolved problem.

• The perils of using generative AI to perform research tasks: editors' and publishers' viewpoints

  The Scholarly Kitchen, March 9 2026

  Editors and publishers agree AI cannot be banned, but flag a growing divide: publishers optimize for throughput, editors worry about deskilling junior researchers who never learn to engage deeply with literature.