Alison Stribling has learned a lot about infectious disease since she transferred onto Covid-19 response at the health department in Contra Costa County near San Francisco. One of her discoveries: How vital fax machines are to US pandemic response. Across the country, labs and health providers report new Covid-19 cases to local health departments. At Contra Costa Health Services, officials use the data to start contact tracing or send extra help in certain cases, such as at a care home or to an infected health care worker. On a typical day in Contra Costa, only around half of those reports arrive electronically; the rest, as many as hundreds, flow in via the fax line, creating a Sisyphean reading list.

In recent years, the field of academic publishing has ballooned to an estimated 30,000 peer-reviewed journals churning out some 2 million articles per year. While this growth has led to more scientific scholarship, critics argue that it has also spurred increasing numbers of low-quality "predatory publishers" who spam researchers with weekly "calls for papers" and charge steep fees for articles that they often don't even read before accepting. Ten years ago, a few students at MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab (CSAIL) had noticed such unscrupulous practices, and set out to have some mischievous fun with it. Jeremy Stribling MS '05 PhD '09, Dan Aguayo '01 MEng '02 and Max Krohn PhD '08 spent a week or two between class projects to develop "SCIgen," a program that randomly generates nonsensical computer-science papers, complete with realistic-looking graphs, figures, and citations. SCIgen emerged out of Krohn's previous work as co-founder of the online study guide SparkNotes, which included a generator of high-school essays that was based on "context-free grammar."