Comment by w10-1
The opportunity here is to automate detection of fake data used in papers.
I could be hard to do without access to data and costly integration. And like shorting, the difficulty is how to monetize. It could also be easy to game. Still...
The nice thing about the business is that market (publishing) is flourishing. Not sure about state of the art or availability of such services.
For sales: run it on recent publications, and quietly ping the editors with findings and a reasonable price.
Unclear though whether to brand in a user-visible way (i.e., where the journal would report to readers that you validate their stuff). It could drive uptake, but a glaring false negative would be a risk.
Structurally, perhaps should be a non-profit (which of course can accumulate profits at will). Does YC do deals without ownership, e.g., with profit-sharing agreements?
Elizabeth Bik (who is known for submitting such reports to journals) has a nice interview about this problem[0], which covers software as well.
> After I raised my concerns about 4% of papers having image problems, some other journals upped their game and have hired people to look for these things. This is still mainly being done I believe by humans, but there is now software on the market that is being tested by some publishers to screen all incoming manuscripts. The software will search for duplications but can also search for duplicated elements of photos against a database of many papers, so it’s not just screening within a paper or across two papers or so, but it is working with a database to potentially find many more examples of duplications. I believe one of the software packages that is being tested is Proofig.
Proofig makes a lot of claims but they also list a lot of journals: https://www.proofig.com/
[0]: https://thepublicationplan.com/2022/11/29/spotting-fake-imag...