Sir

Your Editorial “Ethics and fraud” (Nature 439, 117–118; 2006) does not address the problem of ‘publish or perish’.

Researchers are increasingly put under pressure to publish papers to further their career and access resources. But the fact that there are millions of pages published every month, only a few percent of which are worth reading, seems as much a fraud as the Hwang case. Are you wasting your time any more reading something fraudulent than reading something worthless? Neither helps the student or researcher wanting to do something concrete. It seems we have to read ten papers to get the one that really gives us something. The information is fragmented — distributed across hundreds of publications, around the world, many of them inaccessible.

I suggest slowing down the paper-publishing machine by limiting the number of journals that publish original research, asking more peer-reviewers to read preprints and opening up preprint manuscripts for public discussion.