WAME Newsletter #128, June 25, 2025

Linked content is freely available unless otherwise indicated. Providing the links does not imply WAME's endorsement. Please send any suggestions for content or format to [email protected]. See the Index Page for Newsletters 2020-2025 and the WAME Newsletter Compilation for content from earlier newsletters. Covid-19 content is also available.

Ed Note: This month brings another series of shocking developments, particularly the US administration's actions against science funding and publishing freedom, declaring that authors with government grants may not be permitted to publish in major medical journals and their work may undergo review and control that "amounts to censorship". (WAME's policy on Geopolitical Intrusion on Editorial Decisions states, "Editorial decisions should not be affected by the origins of the manuscript, including the nationality, ethnicity, political beliefs, race, or religion of the authors. Decisions to edit and publish should not be determined by the policies of governments or other agencies outside of the journal itself.")

Editors should be aware that the U.S. National Institutes of Health [NIH] Public Access Policy (see this link for a Q&A) will take effect July 1, 2025, requiring NIH grantees to deposit their manuscripts in full in PubMedCentral on the date of publication. 

For more insights into how paper mills work, see Nature's investigation, but don't miss the gripping sting operation an editor conducted to learn about how editors are paid to publish. 

Lest you think there is no uplifting news, try The Roles and Responsibilities of Scientific Journals in Research Governance: Editorial Policymaking at Nature and Springer Nature (1995–2023). And Nature is publishing all peer reviews and author responses along with research papers. Interesting reading to you. 

ACADEMIA AND RESEARCH

"America is ceding the lead in creating the future...As the Trump administration continues to drastically defund and dismantle basic science in America, the United States is presenting other countries with opportunities to take the lead in seeing farther ahead, anticipate where scientific and technological prowess is going, and create the future, while the United States stands on the sidelines...Moreover, this will trigger a massive transition for the global scientific community and alter the framework that shapes how the world’s economies connect and grow. Measured by its share of published research, the United States was already falling behind before the latest cuts and attacks. For example, the percentage of papers published in Science with at least one corresponding author with funding from the US federal government has been declining over the past 7 years (2018 to 2024), decreasing from 54 to 44%. By contrast, the number of published papers originating from China has doubled during this time."

"Strangling intellectual independence...American higher education is now at risk—not because of any single rival, but because of two self-inflicted wounds...One blow has been the federal government’s ideologically driven cuts to research funding at universities...The other jab has been the ideologically driven attacks on academic freedom at state universities, as typified by recent legislation in Texas...giving the state’s political appointees control of faculty governance as well as the design of curricula across its public university system, one of the largest in the country...This extreme form of control—described by state political leaders as necessary to ensure academic accountability and eliminate political advocacy—amounts to censorship...Why would world-class researchers stay in US universities under these conditions? Why would the best international students come to institutions under siege when other countries offer stability, funding, and respect for academic expertise?"

"Stand Up For Science Open Letter" signed by more than 10,000 individuals to date: "We view this Executive Order as an escalation of the ongoing assault on science. The first six sections employ common scientific language to spell out a 'gold standard' for science that would not strengthen science, but instead would introduce stifling limits on intellectual freedom in our Nation’s laboratories and federal funding agencies...Throughout the document, scientific language is hijacked, and ideas are turned on their heads. Section 7 outlines the selection of a 'senior appointee designated' by the head of the every agency to 'evaluate alleged violations' of the 'Gold Standard Science' edict. This will be the 'sole and exclusive means of evaluating and …addressing alleged violations' overseeing the 'use, interpretation and communication of scientific information.'"

"Unpacking claim Trump admin ordered scientists not to publish research without approval: A Trump executive order could change long-established principles that say political appointees cannot 'suppress or alter' scientific findings."

"Trump’s NIH Chief Lets Loose on Fauci, Vaccines and Covid Cover-Ups: Jay Bhattacharya discusses pandemic fallout and his plans for American science in Trump 2.0."

White House acknowledges problems in RFK Jr.'s 'Make America Healthy Again' report...Kennedy's wide-ranging "Make America Healthy Again" report, released last week, cited hundreds of studies, but a closer look by the news organization NOTUS found that some of those studies did not actually exist."

U.S. National Institutes of Health "cuts quash $323 million for neuroscience research and training" 

"The U.S. Government Is Starving Its Own Scientists of Knowledge...The National Agricultural Library canceled many journal subscriptions to save costs, leaving [U.S. Department of Agriculture] staff without access."

"Funding competition sabotages science...Senior scientists spend around 45% of their time on administrative activities relating to the acquisition and management of funding... Low success rates and reliance on funding can also create incentives for questionable research practices, such as salami slicing...to falsely boost CVs...the Volkswagen Foundation and the Swiss National Science Foundation use lottery procedures in the final decision-making stage—after the peer review process—to allocate funding. These lottery systems (tiebreaker lotteries) aim to reduce biases in the selection process and improve fairness among applicants who make it to the final round."

"Data released in this year’s independent Nature Index Research Leaders tables shows a shift in global research landscape...China has extended its lead in research output, according to data released in the latest Nature Index Research Leaders (data refers to full year 2024 data only - see notes to editors). The country’s Share, the Nature Index’s key metric of author contribution to high-quality research, reached 32,122, a 17% increase on 2023, with the region now having eight institutions in the top 10 compared to 7 in 2023. Asian countries as a whole enjoyed greater dominance, with drops seen from Western institutions in the number of top positions held within the rankings."

"New study shows that China is now a global powerhouse of clinical research...A new study based on data from multiple clinical trial registries shows that more than 11,000 interventional clinical trials were registered in China in 2023, around 50% more than in the United States." The article notes that trialists in China are neither required to make study results public nor register trials prospectively.

"Does collaboration outside academia lead to greater scientific impact?..Scientists with strong reputation and high levels of peer recognition get the most out of these collaborations...This is in line with Merton’s cumulative advantage theory, also known as the Matthew Effect, which posits that recognised scientists are more likely to benefit from additional resources and opportunities. How scientists engage with non-academics also matters. Our analysis showed that the positive relationship between engagement and scientific impact is stronger in the case of joint research projects – where both sides are actively involved in most or all aspects of the research process – as opposed to consultancy and contract research, where it is the non-academic partner who typically sets the terms, defines research goals and time schedules in a demand-driven arrangement."

Paywalled: 

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE (AI) / LARGE LANGUAGE MODELS

"To ‘publish or perish’, do we need to add ‘AI or die’?...Native fluency in academia’s lingua franca, elite education and early immersion in academic norms give them a kind of structural advantage – one that others learn to live with but can rarely overcome...One of the most visible changes brought by co-intelligence tools is the quiet redistribution of cognitive labour. Tasks that once demanded painstaking effort – rewording awkward phrases, translating ideas into academic English, drafting outlines – can now be semi-automated. Clarity and speed are no longer tied solely to personal skill or linguistic fluency but to how fluently you can direct and shape the output of large language models. And if what we currently call “excellence” is in part the ability to produce clean, persuasive texts efficiently, then excellence potentially stands to be more equitably shared...In my view, AI literacy should be treated not as a technical add-on but as a core academic competency – on a par with information literacy or source evaluation...Some universities, particularly in the UK and US, have already accepted that and have established AI literacy programmes...But other institutions, particularly in Central and Eastern Europe, remain hesitant, still seeing AI use as suspect or even unethical. Some journals and ethics boards have also been cautious."

"Can AI help authors prepare better risk science manuscripts?...This perspective reports on evaluations of two experimental AI systems: (i) a “Screener” available at http://screener.riskanalysis.cloud/ that gives authors feedback on whether a draft paper (or abstract, proposal, etc.) appears to be a fit for the journal Risk Analysis, based on the guidance to authors provided by the journal (https://www.sra.org/journal/what-makes-a-good-risk-analysis-article/); and (ii) a more ambitious “Reviewer” (http://aia1.moirai-solutions.com/) that gives substantive technical feedback and recommends how to improve the clarity of methodology and the interpretation of results...The Screener was generally rated as useful. It has been deployed at Risk Analysis since January of 2025. On the other hand, the Reviewer had mixed ratings, ranging from strongly positive to strongly negative."

"Most AI researchers reject free use of public data to train AI models... A global survey found that only one in four respondents believe AI companies should be allowed to train their models on any publicly available text or images. The majority favour more restrictive approaches, including the requirement for explicit permission from content creators."

"We Need AI Standards for Scholarly Publishing: A NISO Workshop Report...last month, NISO (National Information Standards Organization...) hosted a series of workshops for scholarly publishing leadership to identify and prioritize efforts to address some of the challenges around AI and interoperability...A report detailing the output of these workshops was published by NISO."

"Take Nature’s AI research test: find out how your ethics compare: What’s your view on using AI for peer review and for writing research papers?"

"AI and Publishing: Death, Revolution – or Oblivion?...Relatively fewer people are concerned with an issue which seems to me quite central: every year fewer and fewer researchers are reading original articles. AI summarisation, and the overall increases in article generation have meant that fewer researchers have time or energy to read the bulk of new material published in their discipline. The resulting paradox – more and more articles produced but less less human readers – seems to me to add up to a perfect “death of publishing“ argument. My view, for the past five years, has been that we will create a self publishing environment in which acts of verification, peer review and value estimation take place quite separately from the initial appearance of scholarly findings as self posted articles in pre-print servers, in blogs or in other postings. The commercial activity will not be in publishing, it will be in software and data services."

"Please Plagiarize My Work...I don’t mean I want a student to copy and paste my latest law review article and pass it off as their own...But when it comes to the burgeoning capabilities of generative AI, our fixation on traditional notions of authorship and plagiarism is becoming a significant barrier to realizing perhaps the greatest proliferation of knowledge generation and sharing this world has ever seen. In my research on how legal frameworks can accelerate the development and adoption of AI, I see this firsthand. We stand on the precipice of a revolution in thought and expression, yet we hesitate, clutching tightly to outdated norms centered on individual credit rather than collective progress."

"And Plato met ChatGPT: an ethical reflection on the use of chatbots in scientific research writing, with a particular focus on the social sciences...we explore Plato’s myth of Theuth and Thamus, questioning if chatbots can improve science. From an interdisciplinary perspective, and according with Plato, we conclude LLM-chatbots cannot be considered as authors in a scientific context. Moreover, we offer some arguments and requirements to accept hybrid articles."

49 "Australian Authors’ Sentiment on Generative AI"; Related: "New research reveals Australian authors say no to AI using their work – even if money is on the table"

"Web-scraping AI bots cause disruption for scientific databases and journals: Automated programs gathering training data for artificial-intelligence tools are overwhelming academic websites." Related: "Are AI Bots Knocking Digital Collections Offline?...A bot will land on a page, download everything it can, and then follow every link on the page in search of new data...The swarms tend to overload servers. That results in slower response times for normal users. Eventually, the volume will knock the server offline entirely. The good news is that the damage is not permanent."

Paywalled:

AUTHORSHIP

"False authorship: an explorative case study around an AI-generated article published under my name...Of the 53 examined articles with the fewest in-text citations, at least 48 appeared to be AI-generated, while five showed signs of human involvement. Turnitin’s AI detection scores confirmed high probabilities of AI-generated content in most cases...The analysis also revealed fraudulent authorship attribution, with AI-generated articles falsely assigned to researchers from prestigious institutions."

"Why restrictive academic authorship practices perpetuate inequality...when we tried to publish a position paper, most high-ranking journals rejected both the large number of authors and the idea of group authorship. This exposed hierarchies in authorship and raised uncomfortable questions: who gets named? Whose voices are amplified? Who is overlooked?"

"When your science is attacked, how do you cope?"

"Beyond Borders: How Publishers are Navigating the Challenge of Diversifying Their Author Base...Not many publishers we talked to currently use local-language marketing to reach new author communities...Tailoring content and campaigns to regional audiences in their native languages can dramatically improve engagement and trust. Whilst the language of research is often English, communicating with authors, libraries, and other stakeholders in their local languages shows respect and can move the conversation forward much more quickly."

CONFLICTS OF INTEREST

"A literature review of non-financial conflicts of interest [NFCOIs] in healthcare research and publication...the balance of evidence and arguments suggests that (1) NFCOIs are meaningful conceptual entities like FCOIs [96%], (2) they require management [76%], and (3) disclosure is necessary but insufficient [55%] or necessary and sufficient [27%] as a management strategy."

"Journal corrects nearly 100 papers after authors fail to disclose they are on the editorial board...Wiley has issued a mass correction at one of its journals after finding nearly 100 papers with undisclosed conflicts of interest related to submissions by board members and relationships between authors and journal editors."

DIVERSITY, EQUITY, INCLUSION, ACCESSIBILITY, ACCESS

"Gender pay gaps and inequity at science publishers...Elsevier’s median pay gap for 2024 is 32.8%, maintaining its position as worst performer among peers over all eight years of mandatory reporting, and tracking only a slight improvement of seven percentage points over time. In fact, the ratio of Elsevier’s pay gap to the UK average has worsened – from 2.2 times in 2017 and 2.4 in 2020 and 2021 to now 2.9 times the UK average in 2024. Peer companies such as Springer-Nature and Wiley have decreased their pay gaps by 26% (to 9.5%) and by 18% (to 17.7%), respectively, and the BMJ has never reported a gender pay gap over 12%. Wellcome reports for 2024 a pay gap of 15.7%, down from a high of 20.8% for 2017...The pay differences in our sample of publishers compare unfavourably to related sectors. Global Health 50/50 reported a decline from 12.7% to 10.8% between 2017 and 2022 in the median pay gaps of 43 UK-based global health organisations [10]. In the global health care sector overall, the International Labour Organization and WHO reported a gender pay gap of 24% favouring men in 2022 [11]."

"Understanding the gender gap in peer review at Nature Portfolio journals...Analysing self-reported author and reviewer data for articles across Nature Portfolio journals, (includes Nature, the Nature Research and Review journals, Nature Communications, the Communications journals, and the NPJ series), we find that men far outnumber women, making up 65% to 90% of authors and reviewers, depending on whether it is original research or commissioned review-type articles, on the discipline and on the selectivity of the journal. Women are least represented in the most selective journals (12%-15% for Nature and the Nature Research journals versus 22%-23% for the Communications journals and the NPJs) and in the physical sciences (around 10% for physics, chemistry, materials and engineering versus 20%-30% in life sciences, medicine and psychology)...Close to 14.7% of original research articles with women corresponding authors are sent out to review versus 13.4% for men corresponding authors. Similarly, around 14.8% of original research articles authored by women corresponding authors get accepted versus 13.9% for men. Given the sample size and the fraction of corresponding authors choosing not to disclose their gender, these differences are not statistically significant. Our analysis therefore finds no evidence that women corresponding authors are less likely to have their manuscripts sent out to review or get accepted for publication."

"Female authorship trends in a high-impact Canadian medical journal: a 10-year cross-sectional series, 2013–2023...From 5805 included articles, women comprised 47% of first authors and 43% of last authors (p<0.001), both significantly lower than men (p<0.001). Female first authorship increased by 17.7% and female last authorship by 10.5% over the study period (both p<0.05 for trend), reaching a majority (58%) and near parity (48%) in 2023, respectively. Female editor-in-chief and higher proportion of female coauthors were associated with higher odds of female first and last authors; female last authors were additionally associated with higher odds of female first authors."

"How much of HERstory is in the HIStory of the Journal of Applied Physiology [J Appl Physiol]?...To address this, we reviewed every article published in the [J Appl Physiol] from 1948 to 2023. ...Across the [J Appl Physiol's] 75 yr, relative to human research studies the percentage of female research participants was 34% and the percentage of studies including female research participants was similar... Furthermore, there were 10 times as many studies with only male versus only female research participants (5,757 vs. 559 studies)...The percentage of female authors over the [J Appl Physiol] history was 20% or four times more male authors compared to female authors (73,885 vs. 18,782 authors)... All measures of female research participants and authors increased over the [J Appl Physiol's] history."

"European Accessibility Act: Navigating the Challenges of EAA Compliance...Key challenges identified: navigating legal ambiguity, managing back content, technical and workflow challenges, limited resources, vendor alignment"

"Launch of the C4DISC Toolkit for Disability Equity...The toolkit covers essential topics such as: Inclusive Practices: Implementing best practices for creating an inclusive workplace. Disclosure: Considering the details of when and how to disclose a disability at work. Accommodations: How to request and handle accommodation requests"

EDITING

"RFK Jr. threatens to bar government scientists from publishing in leading medical journals...Kennedy said the New England Journal of Medicine, the Journal of the American Medical Association and The Lancet...were 'corrupt' and publish studies funded and approved by pharmaceutical companies...'Unless those journals change dramatically, we are going to stop NIH scientists from publishing in them and we’re going to create our own journals in-house,' he said." See also "RFK Jr threatens to stop US scientists from publishing in major medical journals" [paywall]

"How Scientific Journals Became MAGA’s Latest Target: Evidence of political bias, corporate influence and fraud has made the field vulnerable"

"In its flagship journal, the [US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention] keeps publishing papers after firing scientists who made the research possible"

"US veterans agency orders scientists not to publish in journals without clearance...Senior officials at the US Department of Veterans Affairs have ordered that VA physicians and scientists not publish in medical journals or speak with the public without first seeking clearance from political appointees of Donald Trump...The edict...came hours after the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine published a perspective co-authored by two pulmonologists who work for the VA in Texas. 'We have guidance for this,' wrote Cashour, a former Republican congressional aide and campaign consultant, attaching the journal article. 'These people did not follow it.' The article warned that cancelled contracts, layoffs and a planned staff reduction of 80,000 employees in the nation’s largest integrated healthcare system jeopardizes the health of a million veterans seeking help for conditions linked to toxic exposure – ranging from Vietnam veterans exposed to Agent Orange to veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan who developed cancer after being exposed to smoke from piles of flaming toxic waste."

WAME policy: "Geopolitical Intrusion on Editorial Decisions: Editorial decisions should not be affected by the origins of the manuscript, including the nationality, ethnicity, political beliefs, race, or religion of the authors. Decisions to edit and publish should not be determined by the policies of governments or other agencies outside of the journal itself."

"COPE statement on external influence on editorial decisions...COPE wishes to express its strong support for and solidarity with authors in all disciplines, journal editors, and publishers and stress its unwavering belief that undue influence by any political, corporate or social entity is against the core ethical principles of editorial independence and academic freedom"

"Debate: Journal Editors Do Not Need To Worry About Preventing Misinformation From Being Spread": The pro: "In the context of scholarly publishing, ‘misinformation’ could originate from ‘published knowledge’...Thus, here, misinformation is a badly modified version of knowledge, which is created after publication or communication of research...misinformation comes into play in the ‘use of the research’ stage of the research system. And, editors do not, and also cannot, deal with misinformation because they essentially operate in the ‘communicating research’ space." The con: "if there is one group that should excel in recognizing misinformation in science, it is science editors. Misinformation is one of the major threats to modern society...every citizen has an obligation to fight it. In my opinion, the most highly skilled among us have the strongest obligation. We, the science editors, are not only advocates of science; we are also among the most highly skilled in recognizing when science is misused. Therefore, we need to worry the most about misinformation being spread."

"Publishing as knowledge clubs: ASSAf Statement on the Recognition of Editors and Peer Reviewers...why [do] academics edit and/or peer review journals and books [?]...To address these questions, the Academy of Science of South Africa (ASSAf) liaised with editors of South African scholarly journals in developing a consensus statement...the Statement’s conclusions and recommendations are: •Good peer review is crucial to significant intergenerational research. •Universities, beneficiaries of scholarly journal work, should support editors and reviewers with time and recognition in performance appraisals. •Reward systems should recognise editors and reviewers who maintain and build their disciplines. •Editing, review and active editorial board work should be recategorised from ‘academic leadership’ to the ‘research’ category."

"Can a better ID system for authors, reviewers and editors reduce fraud? STM thinks so: Unverifiable researchers are a harbinger of paper mill activity. While journals have clues to identifying fake personas — lack of professional affiliation, no profile on ORCID or strings of random numbers in email addresses, to name a few — there isn’t a standard template for doing so. The International Association of Scientific, Technical, & Medical Publishers (STM) has taken a stab at developing a framework for journals and institutions to validate researcher identity, with its Research Identity Verification Framework, released in March. The proposal suggests identifying 'good' and 'bad' actors based on what validated information they can provide, using passport validation when all else fails, and creating a common language in publishing circles to address authorship...[For example,] [a]sking researchers to validate a recognized institutional email address, or to log in through their institution’s identity management system...have users sign in with ORCID, and use so-called 'Trust Markers' stored on their ORCID record...Official government documents like passports and driver’s licences could be another option....Where none of these options is possible, the editorial system could fall back to manual checks, some of which are also being used today. Examples include direct contact with individuals or asking colleagues to vouch for them."

U.S. National Institutes of Health [NIH] "Public Access Policy: Q&A for Authors...We’ve received many questions from authors, librarians, and research administrators about the NIH decision to accelerate implementation of its public access plan, going into effect on July 1, 2025. The policy will now require all NIH grantees to deposit research articles upon acceptance, for immediate public availability on the date of publication through the NIH public access repository, PubMed Central...Several major commercial publishers (including mega-publishers Elsevier, Springer Nature) per their publicly stated policies, at present require embargos for deposit of articles in public access repositories, and there are no indications that these publishers will change their policies to accommodate the NIH on July 1...It seems likely that many publishers will try to route authors to paid OA whenever they realize the author has a zero-embargo deposit obligation during (or even after) the publication process...Accordingly, authors should pay close attention to publisher policies before submitting."

"The Roles and Responsibilities of Scientific Journals in Research Governance: Editorial Policymaking at Nature and Springer Nature (1995–2023)...Scientific journals develop and enforce editorial guidelines that are a component of governing science. In this essay, the former editor-in-chief of Nature reflects on several prominent examples of how scientific journals have been involved in setting and judging ethical norms in scientific research. Editors, in consultation with external experts, can balance transparency and public trust, stakeholder engagement, inclusive consultation, and access to research to address concerns surrounding dual-use research, societal harms, and research integrity."

"Conspiracies in Academia? Stand Up Against Defamations of Open Access Journals!...[I]nstead of receiving congratulations for the successful transition to OA, we, the editors and the independent Editorial Management Office, have experienced negative rumors, attacks, and defamations against both [International Journal of Public Health] and [Public Health Reviews]. The first attack reached SSPH+[Swiss School of Public Health, publisher of the two journals] in early 2023 when both journals appeared on an anonymous 'black list' of supposedly predatory journals [6]. The anonymous leadership of the predatory.org attack placed both journals on a long list of what they considered “predatory journals,” despite the fact that none of the criteria of predatory journals featured on that website applied to the SSPH+ journals. Unable to take legal action against anonymous persons, SSPH+ could intervene only via an anonymous email listed on their website. After several weeks, the SSPH+ journals were removed from this 'black list,' which still runs its anonymous defamation campaign against a range of journals, including respected titles in the public health sciences. Unfortunately, this was just the beginning."

"Ensuring Scientific Rigor in Research: Why Sports-Related Publicly Obtained Data Fall Short...Common sources cited for demographic and injury information include fantasy sports websites, player profiles, weekly injury reports, and betting forums, to name a few. The National Football League (NFL) and other professional sports have extensive data collection platforms that are extremely detailed and include epidemiology and outcomes. Recent articles by stewards of the NFL database have highlighted concerning discrepancies between their data and that of studies based on POD [publicly obtained data]...Neither [Foot & Ankle International] nor [Foot & Ankle Orthopaedics] will consider submissions that include sports-related injury, treatment, or recovery data obtained from PODs."

"Why we're no longer funding journal publications... In all my discussions with scientists across every sector, exactly zero think the journal system works well. Yet we all feel trapped in a system that is, by definition, us...I help oversee billions of dollars in funding across several science and technology organizations. We are expanding our requirement that all scientific work we fund will not go towards traditional journal publications. Instead, research we support should be released and reviewed more openly, comprehensively, and frequently than the status quo...This policy is already in effect at Arcadia Science and Astera Institute, and we’re actively funding efforts to build journal alternatives through both Astera and The Navigation Fund."

ETHICS

"Ethics and integrity in uncertain times: The newly launched PREPARED Code presents a much-needed framework to ensure that research during pandemics is trustworthy and accessible to all...Preparedness — developing the systems and tools to enable an effective response at all levels ahead of the next pandemic — is key. With that mindset, the PREPARED initiative, an effort funded by the European Commission, UK Research and Innovation and the Swiss State Secretariat for Education, Research and Innovation, developed the PREPARED Code. The aim of this code is to provide an ethics framework to support researchers, research ethics committees and research integrity offices throughout a pandemic."

"‘We can’t tell if we’re being persuaded by a person or a program’: When researchers secretly used AI bots on Reddit to study how AI can influence human opinion it became a landmark moment for research ethics...[A] team of researchers at the University of Zurich...conducted a study to manipulate Reddit users without their consent. The researchers’ aim was to see if a large language model AI (known as an LLM) could be as persuasive as a human...Initially, the research was approved by the university's ethics board to make values-based arguments, but it quickly went further, using artificial intelligence (AI) to generate personalised replies based on guesses about users’ age, race, gender, politics and location. The researcher never sought approval for this shift in their methodology – a clear violation of the ethical oversight process...The researchers disclosed 34 bot accounts after the conclusion of the study." Related coverage here and here

IMPACT, INDEXING, MEDIA

"Journal Citation Reports 2025: Addressing retractions and strengthening research integrity...Starting from this year’s JCR release, we will exclude citations to and from retracted content when calculating the JIF numerator, ensuring that citations from retracted articles do not contribute to the numerical value of the JIF. However, retracted articles will still be included in the article count (JIF denominator), maintaining transparency and accountability." Related: "Clarivate to stop counting citations to retracted articles in journals’ impact factors" and "The Upcoming Journal Citation Reports Release and Changes to Uphold Research Integrity in 2025"

"‘Scholarly impact without trustworthiness means nothing’: how Clarivate is clamping down on bad actors in academic publishing...We have a first-level screening of every journal in the Web of Science that looks at top-level journal characteristics, for example, a sudden increase in size or a change in author demographic. We compare it against the journal’s previous activity and all other journals in a given category. If we see something that looks off, we will then do a deep dive using two other tools [to] look at whether the content in the journal is appropriate to what its stated scope is and whether the references are appropriate – they’re the two criteria that we tend to see, especially with paper mill content....Now, the most common reason we are delisting journals is for inappropriate citations, which takes a much deeper dive to find; people are becoming sneakier...And it’s not just journals, we’re also seeing a lot of fake conference proceedings."  

"Citation Contamination by Paper Mill Articles in Systematic Reviews of the Life Sciences...Of the total of 200 000 systematic reviews, 299 incorporated at least 1 retracted paper mill article into the evidence synthesis (contamination rate, 0.15%). Among them, 256 (85.6%) included a single retracted article, and 43 (14.4%) included multiple such articles. Of 1802 author affiliations associated with the contaminated reviews, 660 (36.6%) were from institutions in China. Of 385 total citations, 124 (32.2%) occurred after retraction, including 13 occurring more than 500 days after the retraction date. Oncology was the most affected field (48 of 299 [16.1%]). Five reviews each included 5 or more retracted articles, all published in journals under questionable publishers."

"Scopus indexed a journal with a fake editorial board and a sham archive...'[T]he editorial team' and many members of the editorial board are fake names...[and] How could a journal with a domain registered in December 2023 be indexed in Scopus in July 2024, when Scopus requires at least two years of regular publication for newly launched journals before indexation? (They did remove that rule in August 2024, after this journal was indexed.) The likely answer: The journal backdated the archive and filled it with papers that are probably fabricated and 'authored' by nonexistent researchers for issues starting in 2021 through the second issue of 2024 to demonstrate its continuous and regular publication...It also shows that fraudsters now don’t need to buy a journal indexed in Scopus to publish problematic papers, as happened with many journals like Migration Letters and Journal of Namibian Studies. It is enough to create a fake journal with a fake editorial board and a fake archive to be indexed in one of the leading databases." Follow up: "Elsevier removes journal from Scopus after Retraction Watch inquiry"

Springer Nature White Paper "Demonstrating journal value beyond rankings ...Our white paper shows that journals with lower impact factors are widely used and contribute meaningfully to the global research landscape, supporting specialised fields and fostering inclusivity...Through this white paper, we aim to demonstrate that supporting OA in all journals, not just those with high JIFs, is essential to building a more equitable and inclusive research environment. "  

"Are groundbreaking science discoveries becoming harder to find?...What Funk, Leahey and Park reported in 2023 is that the number of disruptive papers annually remained constant from 1945 to 2010, even as the number of academic articles ballooned, so that average disruption has fallen...If true, this implies that throwing more money and people at research hasn’t led to commensurate gains in breakthrough work...They measure disruption by examining citation patterns...But citations are a tricky metric to rely on, say some researchers. One issue is that citations don’t reliably signal that a paper has intellectual influence."

"The Zombie Scientific Archive...The rise in bad bot activity specifically has the potential to damage academic integrity, Tim Ayling, Cybersecurity Specialist at Thales, tells QS Insights Magazine. 'They can be used to manipulate academic metrics, such as citation counts or journal impact factors. For example, some entities might deploy bots to generate fake citations or inflate the visibility of specific papers, skewing the evaluation of academic work,' he explains."

"The pressure to quantify research is erasing conceptual depth...In universities, as in many other sectors, there is a growing emphasis on what can be counted. Researchers are increasingly expected to translate complex ideas into measurable findings that satisfy funders, journals and institutional benchmarks. The same logic that drives performance metrics in healthcare, standardised testing in education or impact assessments in public policy has become central to academic life. This shift affects what is researched, how it is framed and which findings are deemed legitimate. Over time, these proxies become institutionalised, and we risk mistaking the measurement for the phenomenon itself."

“Citation issues cost these 20 journals their impact factors this year: Twenty journals lost their impact factors in this year’s Journal Citation Reports, released today, for excessive self-citation and citation stacking. Nearly half of the journals on the list are from well-known publishers MDPI, Sage, Springer, Taylor & Francis and Wiley."

"Researchers who ‘pivot’ into new fields should not be given a citation penalty... According to the analysis, the negative effects of pivoting can be found in most research fields...Hill and colleagues, for example, found that the penalty is attenuated when researchers publish their new work in a journal that they have already published in, reaching a familiar audience." Related comment: "Shifting research focus comes with the risk of reduced impact" [paywall]

Paywalled:

PAPER MILLS, SELLING AUTHORSHIPS, BUYING EDITORS

"Authorship for sale: Nature investigates how paper mills work...In March, Omar, a biomedical researcher, posted a request in a private Facebook group for researchers. He was seeking to have his name added to a paper in the field of artificial intelligence (AI) and medicine, in exchange for a payment...The paper mills that make this their business have various techniques to take advantage of desperate or lazy researchers and to trick publishers: some operate as a marketplace in which extra authorship slots on already--accepted papers are up for grabs. Others take published papers and use AI to tweak text and graphics to escape plagiarism detectors. Still more generate entirely new data sets and text, without the inconveniences of any real laboratory work...Because papers are often mass--produced, typical signs include familiar text, duplicated images, suspicious e-mail addresses, implausible collaborations[1] and irrelevant citations. Another red flag is 'tortured phrases' resulting from attempts to hide plagiarism[2] (examples include 'profound neural organization' instead of 'deep neural network', and 'subterranean insect settlement' instead of 'ant colony'). Paper mills have also submitted, and occasionally been successful in publishing, plagiarized or duplicated papers."

"The Black Market of Publications in Peru: Paper Mills and Authorship for Sale...In May 2023, as the first case...‘two Peruvian companies have been tasked with fabricating authors and reputations in exchange for a hefty price. They manufacture books, articles, essays, and theses...the cost of acquiring authorship of a book, thesis, or scientific article ranges from 7,000 to 12,000 soles (approximately USD 1,900 to USD 3,000)...Another case, reported in two television segments from October 2023, exposed the commerce of authorship through instant messaging groups (Telegram and WhatsApp). The manuscripts offered correspond to articles already accepted in prestigious journals...As a consequence, legislative changes were promoted. In November 2023, Congressman Edward Málaga proposed two bills to classify authorship trafficking and other fraudulent research practices as serious offences, leading to the suspension of up to 5 years and, in severe cases, the expulsion of the researcher...those who commit fraud—thus obtaining illicit profits at the expense of the scientific community—could face prison sentences ranging from 1 to 6 years."

An editor conducts a papermill sting operation: "For Better Science...Csaba Szabo, professor of pharmacology at University of Fribourg in Switzerland, was contacted by a Chinese papermill offering him money. All Csaba had to do to earn between $1500 and $5000 a pop was either to ghost-write papers for the papermill or to make sure their products get published in a journal where he is editor. He even received a ready manuscript, and was told he will be paid as soon as the paper is accepted. The question is: how many professors would have reacted differently from Dr Szabo? How many members of editorial boards at Elsevier, MDPI or Frontiers are happily lining their pockets with papermill money as you read these lines?...Despite growing concern, surprisingly little is known about how these operations actually function." Dr Szabo conducts a "sting" and "Julia" replies: "If our client wants a research article with IF 4-5 and purchases all author positions, and their institution does not allow adding foreign authors, our price is 5000 USD. If the client requires a review article or a meta-analysis, our price will be 5000±1000. will be 5000 * 80% = 4000 USD. and we will pay after acceptence...Regarding the first type of collaboration, we need you to write the manuscript and submit it. Payment will be made after the article is accepted. The second type of collaboration is that our client’s manuscript will be sent to you for evaluation. You would assess whether you can help us submit it to a journal where you serve as an editor. If the article is successfully accepted, we will pay you a submission fee." Szabo writes, "Our WhatsApp exchange revealed a predatory scheme involving scientific ghostwriting, authorship-for-sale, and manipulation of the peer-review process via bribery. The sale of authorship — especially fraudulent authorship — is textbook scientific misconduct, particularly since its goal is to pad CVs, strengthen grant applications, or secure academic promotions. Second, the messages — although phrased in flowery terms and use words like 'collaboration' — clearly reveal attempted bribery and editorial manipulation. 'Julia' implies that I could act as an editor and be paid for getting papers accepted in journals I am affiliated with. This is a direct violation of conflict-of-interest policies and, in the context of a public university, could amount to criminal abuse of office. Privately profiting from editorial influence breaches institutional codes of conduct, national research integrity guidelines, and international anti-corruption rules. Then there’s ghostwriting — another serious violation...It deceives reviewers, funders, and readers about who actually conducted and wrote the research."

PEER REVIEW

"Transparent peer review to be extended to all of Nature’s research papers...Since 2020, Nature has offered authors the opportunity to have their peer-review file published alongside their paper. Our colleagues at Nature Communications have been doing so since 2016. Until now, Nature authors could opt in to this process of transparent peer review. From 16 June, however, new submissions of manuscripts that are published as research articles in Nature will automatically include a link to the reviewers’ reports and author responses...The full story of a paper is, of course, more complex, involving many other contributors...Peer review improves papers. The exchanges between authors and referees should be seen as a crucial part of the scientific record, just as they are a key part of doing and disseminating research."

"Crediting early-career researchers in peer review...Beginning this month, Nature Methods is rolling out a new project aimed at strengthening peer review: a formal co-reviewing initiative to recognize early-career researcher contributions. We also discuss our introduction of a reporting checklist to improve the transparency and reproducibility of light microscopy studies."

"Rethinking Peer Review in the AI Era: Announcing the Theme for Peer Review Week 2025...we are pleased to announce the official theme for Peer Review Week 2025, to be held from 15–19 September 2025:..'Rethinking Peer Review in the AI Era' challenges us not just to adapt, but to lead, by shaping systems and standards that align technological advancement with the integrity of scholarship."

"Apparent [US National Cancer Institute] director candidate wants ‘open, respectful’ post-publication peer review while promoting anonymous site that calls sleuths a ‘mob’"

"‘More of the same’: Journals, trade website refuse to correct critiques of book on Alzheimer’s fraud...Investigative journalist Charles Piller’s latest book, Doctored: Fraud, Arrogance, and Tragedy in the Quest to Cure Alzheimer’s, came out in February...some Alzheimer’s researchers have criticized the book in reviews published in JAMA, The Lancet Neurology, and the website Alzforum...Piller and Schrag say they respect that others are entitled to their opinions, but expressed concern that some of these reviews contain inaccuracies that downplay their findings. And the journals and Alzforum have refused to publish responses they submitted or make corrections they requested."

"Peer review protip: even if you’re SURE the author made an elementary mistake, hedge your review"

Paywalled: "Social Media and Peer Review: An Ethical Glance at Sharing Reviewer Credentials

PREDATORY, DECEPTIVE, AND PSEUDO-JOURNALS

"Prevalence of predatory journals in OpenAlex...For the time being, there are two on-board tools for OpenAlex users that may assist in content delimitation. The first is the selection of journals listed in the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ). DOAJ does basic quality checks on journals that apply for inclusion.[4] The second is the CWTS Core source filter...We sampled a total of 400 journal titles from [Cabells Predatory Reports] and looked them up by source search on OpenAlex. We were able to find 146 of such predatory journals in OpenAlex. This is a share of 36.5 % with a 95 % confidence interval of 32 to 41 %."

"Being a victim of a predatory journal...After a case report I submitted was rejected by several high-impact journals, I received an invitation from a case report journal. In my submission, I clearly mentioned that I work without any funding and would not be able to pay any fees. I requested that if the journal required payment, they should not proceed. Despite this warning, the journal sent me a proof within a couple of days. I was shocked—how could the peer review and publication process be completed so quickly? I again appealed, stating my inability to pay. The journal ignored my requests and proceeded to publish the article, then sent me an invoice with an exorbitant fee. When I protested, I received threatening emails stating that they would take serious action and damage my reputation in India. I was devastated...When I discussed this concern with my son who is a doctor in the USA, he was outraged and confirmed that I had become the victim of a predatory journal. He wrote to the publisher and blocked their correspondence...Since this episode, I have not attempted to publish again."

"Predatory journal? How the publishing elite weaponise vocabulary: The term is used by established actors to discredit newcomers and preserve their turf, writes Prof. Emmanuel Andrès," Editor in Chief of Journal of Clinical Medicine (J. Clin. Med.).

Paywalled: "ICMJE Should Create a Certification System to Identify Predatory Journals"

PREPRINTS

"The state of preprinting in Europe and the Netherlands...There are substantial differences in preprint adoption between European countries. The adoption of preprinting is relatively low in countries in Southern Europe (Italy, Portugal, and Spain) and Eastern Europe (Poland and Ukraine)...Switzerland stands out as the country with the highest preprint adoption in many disciplines...Interestingly, even within a discipline, there can be large differences between universities in the adoption of preprinting. For instance, in physics, mathematics, and chemistry, Leiden University has 85%, 62%, and 33% preprinted outputs, respectively, while only 7%, 13%, and 4% of the outputs of Erasmus University Rotterdam in these disciplines have been preprinted...However, the broad scope of the disciplines also hides important information. In the physics discipline, for example, a majority of the outputs of Leiden University deal with astronomy research. In contrast, most of the physics outputs of Erasmus University Rotterdam are interdisciplinary studies at the interface between physics and medicine, authored by researchers from Erasmus MC, the medical centre of the university...Statistics at the global level show that preprinting is widely practiced in astronomy, while it is still relatively uncommon in medicine. The difference between Leiden University and Erasmus University Rotterdam in preprint adoption in the physics discipline is in line with these global patterns."

"Are All Papers Created Equal?...Instead of using citations as a proxy for importance, Preprint Watch classifies scientific papers based on their epistemic role—where they fall in the broader arc of scientific development. The tool doesn’t care how many people are reading a paper. It’s looking for signs that a preprint may indicate the early stages of a conceptual shift."

PUBLISHING

"The Open Access Journals Toolkit: new languages, new editorial board members, new horizons"

"Open-access revolution is squeezing scientific societies’ budgets, survey shows: Decline in journal revenues puts scholarships, advocacy, and other activities at risk...Even with open-access fees averaging about $2000 per paper among publishers of all types, societies tend to make less money than under the subscription model...many societies have outsourced publishing operations to corporate giants such as Elsevier and Springer Nature in return for a negotiated percentage of revenues or profits. But with average revenue per paper dropping, commercial publishers’ terms have become less generous over time...Some societies have settled for contract renewals providing 20% to 40% less money than they received in the past."

"Reading the Leaves of Publishing Speed: The Cases of Hindawi, Frontiers, and PLOS...Hindawi’s collapse was one of the most consequential events in the recent history of scholarly publishing...The turnaround time gap between special issue and regular papers should have alarmed editors and publishers alike...By 2022, special issue papers were accepted 56 days faster than regular papers (123 days vs 67 days)...Overall, [PLOS ONE] has been publishing papers in about 235 days in the last three years, as opposed to 183 days for most of 2019 and 2020. A slowdown of 52 days might not be a big deal for one paper, but it translates to nearly 3,000 years of additional wait-time annually for a journal the size of PLOS ONE."

"Reclaiming academic ownership of the scholarly communication system" from the European University Association: "[U]niversities are encouraged to reflect on six key considerations, ranging from a critical evaluation of the expenditure on commercial research publishing and information products and services, strengthening institutional publishing services and infrastructures, cooperation and engagement with stakeholders and researchers, and the need to accelerate the reform of research assessment." Related: "What is a University Press?"

"When society publishing suffers, research suffers...A white paper called Safeguarding the Future of Society Publishing, published on 28 May by my company Research Consulting with support from the US-based Copyright Clearance Center, lays out the challenges. Of the 66 societies we surveyed, 56 per cent reported that since 2019 their revenues from peer-reviewed journal programmes have remained flat or declined."

"Beyond the oligopoly: Scholarly journal publishing landscapes in Latin America and Europe... This study examines scholarly journal publishing in...Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, Finland, Mexico, Poland, and Turkey...Our findings show that educational institutions are the dominant publishers in most countries, accounting for over 75% of journals in Colombia and Brazil and over 50% in Mexico, Argentina, and Poland...Commercial publishers play a minor role, with their highest shares in Turkey (12.1%) and Poland (8.2%). Regarding database coverage, OpenAlex indexes over 50% of journals in most of the covered countries, while WoS and Scopus index only a small fraction. These results challenge the assumption of a globally uniform publishing system and highlight the need for bibliometric research to consider ways to improve the use of data sources and analysis methodologies so that national publishing structures are also included." [preprint]

"The Case for Government-Backed Science Publishing...One option is for government agencies like the National Institutes of Health or the National Science Foundation to sponsor high-quality, peer-reviewed journals. These agencies already operate rigorous peer-review systems. Editors and production staff could be paid, and researchers competing for federal funding could be required to complete a modest number of reviews annually as a condition of grant eligibility or employment. Other inefficiencies deserve attention. Authors spend countless hours reformatting manuscripts for different journals. One estimate suggests $230 million worth of researchers’ time is wasted annually on formatting alone. Outdated submission portals compound the problem. A centralized submission system—developed by a consortium of funding agencies—could streamline the publication process, reduce costs, and restore control to academic institutions and research sponsors. While the transition would require upfront investment, the long-term savings could far outweigh current spending on subscriptions and publication fees."

"A New Concept for the Direct Funding and Evaluation of Scientific Journals (2025)...Scientific publishing should be financed and controlled according to the same general principles used to support publicly funded research. To this end, we are proposing a new funding concept for the operation of scientific journals. It suggests long-term public funding as a continuous task and – as a new element – quality control by the scientific community through journal evaluations and reevaluations. The technical operation for the provision of scientific publications can be carried out via publicly funded platforms or awarded to commercial service providers in a competitive process. Quality assurance should remain the sole responsibility of the scientific community. The new funding procedure should preferably be used to transfer already existing successful journals to a non-profit environment to ensure the scientific community’s sovereignty."

"Plan S: Annual Review 2024...The consultation revealed broad support for “Towards Responsible Publishing” principles related to preprint posting, open peer review, and open licensing - practices which cOAlition S organisations may wish to advance through supportive policies. Additionally, findings underscored the need for global collaboration to transform recognition and reward mechanisms, particularly between research funders, research performing organizations, and universities, to include a wider set of research outputs. Stakeholders also expressed the desire to shift spending within the scholarly communication system toward more responsible practices."

"DIAMAS project releases Diamond Open Access Recommendations and Guidelines...The DIAMAS (Developing Institutional Open Access Publishing Models to Advance Scholarly Communication) project has released a framework of actionable Diamond Open Access (OA) Recommendations and Guidelines tailored to the needs of institutions, funders, sponsors, donors, and policymakers." Recommendations are here.

"Federating diamond OA in Europe and beyond: the European Diamond Capacity Hub (EDCH)...The EDCH will coordinate diamond open access (OA) capacity centres in Europe and consolidate and align the diamond OA organizations that provide services and tools to diamond OA outputs in Europe."

"SciPost at a crossroads...For 9 years now, thanks to your involvement, SciPost has grown into being recognized as an essential open science infrastructure...Our sustainability is however under threat. Our business model is virtuous by design and affordable by construction, but can only succeed with sufficient goodwill and support from academic organizations...Only 147 out of 1351 (a mere 11%) benefitting organizations have sponsored us. Only 8 out of 73 countries have contributed positively to our balance. In one case, the USA, our expenditures exceed the support by more than 200k euros - more than a half-year's worth of activities for our entire operations."

"Toward Science-Led Publishing...The current dynamic of scholarly publishing prioritises the wants of the publishing industry over the needs of the research community...We propose three elements of a science-led publishing approach that would accelerate research communication, incentivise collaboration between authors, editors and reviewers, and create a more transparent and equitable research landscape."

How do different currencies affect APC changes? (from Delta Think) "After our previous analysis of the effects of inflation on APCs, we received a question about the effects of currency exchange rates... With the US dollar (USD) having weakened over the last few months, the institution found buying services priced in non-USD currencies to be significantly more expensive by the end of April 2025 compared with the start of the year."

Paywalled: "Publishing deals are ‘unsustainable’, warn northern universities"

RESEARCH EVALUATION

"Explosion of formulaic research articles, including inappropriate study designs and false discoveries, based on the NHANES US national health database...We found evidence that research failed to take account of multifactorial relationships, that manuscripts did not account for the risks of false discoveries, and that researchers selectively extracted data from NHANES rather than utilizing the full range of data available. Given the explosion of AI-assisted productivity in published manuscripts (the systematic search strategy used here identified an average of 4 papers per annum from 2014 to 2021, but 190 in 2024–9 October alone), we highlight a set of best practices to address these concerns, aimed at researchers, data controllers, publishers, and peer reviewers, to encourage improved statistical practices and mitigate the risks of paper mills using AI-assisted workflows to introduce low-quality manuscripts to the scientific literature." Related: "AI linked to explosion of low-quality biomedical research papers" [paywall]

"Fraudulent studies are undermining the reliability of systematic reviews: on the prevalence of problematic images in preclinical depression studies...We flagged 112 papers with problematic images, suggesting that one in five papers within the research field (19%) presenting data in image form suffers from these issues...Of the 1035 papers we screened, 132 met all of our requirements for being included in our systematic review. Ten of these were flagged with image issues...On average, the studies scored a 3.2 out of 11 (range: 2–5) [on the ARRIVE guidelines checklist], which suggests that there was a high risk of bias—a higher score indicates more efforts to mitigate sources of bias. Unfortunately...the average score for all 132 studies included in the review was 2.9...We would argue that any report featuring inappropriate duplications of images—no matter the type of duplication—should be excluded from evidence synthesis in both meta-analyses and systematic reviews."

"‘A big win’: Dubious statistical results are becoming less common in psychology...A recent analysis of 240,355 psychology papers reports that 'fragile' statistical results—a potential marker of poor research practices or samples that are too small—decreased substantially between 2004 and 2024."

"‘Anyone can do this’: Sleuths publish a toolkit for post-publication review...The Collection of Open Science Integrity Guides (COSIG) aims to make 'post-publication peer review' more accessible, according to the preprint made available online today. The 25 guides so far range from general – 'PubPeer commenting best practices' – to field-specific – like spotting issues with X-ray diffraction patterns."

“'Non-Markovian' and 'directional' errors inhibit scientific self-correction and can lead fields of study astray: an illustration using gardening and obesity-related outcomes...Basic errors are both (a) Markovian, meaning that whether the error occurs does not depend on any factors before the study at hand (e.g., honest coding errors), and (b) uninfluenced by common biasing factors outside the study that may exert influence in the same direction and away from the truth (e.g., a cultural norm or expectation). Non-Markovian errors are those for which the likelihood or nature of the error depends on prior errors within other studies, such as a junior researcher replicating an incorrect methodology used regularly by a more senior scientist in the field. We sometimes also refer to such errors as being 'correlated,' by which we mean a dependency of this type, not a statistical correlation. Biased Markovian errors are those for which a common force leads to consistent bias in the same direction across many studies, but the errors remain Markovian because they do not depend on prior errors in a sequence of studies. We argue that basic scientific errors may resist correction, but in principle can be mitigated by the general scientific progress within a field. In contrast, biased Markovian and non-Markovian errors may be more likely to lead an entire domain of study astray because they produce sequences of studies that are probabilistically linked, either directly or indirectly, through erroneous constructs. In other words, these errors are more likely to propagate errors."

"Population Recruitment Strategies in the Age of Bots...Using a combination of text blasts and in-person recruitment, we enrolled 1367 participants, with text blasts proving the most effective strategy (∼60% of participants). Midway through recruitment, we identified 544 potential bots that completed the screener, with duplicate IP addresses and geotags from outside the recruitment area serving as strong indicators of bot activity. At baseline, 112 participants failed FFQ data quality checks, prompting follow-up by research assistants. Our automated duplicate and FFQ APIs saved countless hours of staff time."

"The Center for Scientific Integrity, the parent nonprofit of Retraction Watch, has launched a new initiative...the Medical Evidence Project will leverage the tools of forensic metascience — using visual and computational methods to determine a paper’s trustworthiness — to rapidly identify problems in scientific articles, combined with the experience and platform of Retraction Watch to disseminate those findings."

RESEARCH REPLICATION, REPRODUCIBILITY, TRANSPARENCY, DATA

"New WHO rules: Protocols and results of all clinical trials must be published within 12 months...all interventional trials, including trials that were terminated early, must make their protocols and results public on trial registries within a year of trial completion. To facilitate the rapid publication of results directly on trial registries, WHO’s guidance identifies eight new items that all registries should add to their platforms. These include a field for uploading or linking the 'most recent study protocol and statistical analysis plan,' and several fields intended to capture key trial outcomes including adverse events."

"The White House Gutted Science Funding. Now It Wants to ‘Correct’ Research...President Trump has ordered what he called a restoration of a 'gold standard science' [read the order here] across federal agencies and national laboratories. But the May 23 executive order puts his political appointees in charge of vetting scientific research and gives them the authority to 'correct scientific information,' control the way it is communicated to the public and the power to 'discipline' anyone who violates the way the administration views science. It has prompted an open letter, signed by more than 6,000 scientists, academics, physicians, researchers and others, saying the order would destroy scientific independence. Agency heads have 30 days to comply with the order."

"What does Trump’s call for ‘gold standard science’ really mean?...the order on Restoring Gold Standard Science gives a political appointee the power to decide when those findings need to be 'corrected' and to take disciplinary action against those seen as the perpetrators of misinformation. 'And putting that power in the hands of a political appointee who doesn’t need to consult with scientific experts before making a decision is very troubling.'"

"Knowledge under siege...The popularity of books by people like [Malcom] Gladwell suggests a strong market for science to be explained in simple, straightforward language. Ernest Rutherford, a pioneer in nuclear physics, famously quipped: 'A theory that you can’t explain to a bartender is probably no damn good.' We need more capable spokespeople who can explain science to bartenders and the rest of us."

"Open Science: An Antidote to Anti-Science...In this critical moment for US science, the only viable defenses against these attacks on science are transparency and rigorous accountability. The global scientific community has been moving toward a more inclusive, democratic, and open approach."

"A commitment to best practice in research methods and reporting...Quoting single, unreliable, or outdated studies to refute a rigorously evaluated body of evidence has become something of a social media and political phenomenon...The loser in online scientific skirmishes is any sense that methods matter and that understanding the totality of the evidence base, or as much of it as you can access, is central to contextualising any single study. Where this behaviour leads is problematic. It can be used to overstate the benefit of interventions or to cast doubt where little doubt exists. Such positioning might benefit political, corporate, or academic agendas, but it ends up causing harm to people and the planet. The most glaring recent example is the impression created by the US government that we don’t know the relation between the MMR vaccine and autism, when many well conducted studies, including randomised controlled trials, have supported the vaccine’s safety." Related: "A Convenient Piece of Junk Science: RFK Jr. is prepared to rework the FDA’s official assessment of the abortion pill mifepristone based at least in part on a questionable report" and "The Scientific Literature Can’t Save You Now" [both paywalled]

"Science’s reform movement should have seen Trump’s call for ‘gold standard science’ coming, critics say: Efforts to improve the rigor of research may have unwittingly handed the administration a way to attack science...The 23 May order points to a 'reproducibility crisis' and high-profile cases of data falsification. It calls for science to be transparent and reproducible, and to acknowledge uncertainty...But the 'crisis' narrative was overblown, Bak-Coleman and others say. 'Suddenly the whole conversation changed from "some of these fields are having certain issues" to "science is in crisis,"' says University of Idaho metascientist Berna Devezer. That was unwarranted, she says. For a start, some of the problems driving psychology’s replication issues—such as fuzzy measurements of ill-defined concepts—do not plague many scientific fields. And she asks whether questionable research practices are widespread enough even within psychology to support claims of a crisis."

"NIH-funded replication studies are not the answer to the reproducibility crisis in pre-clinical research...I would argue that conducting systematic replication studies of pre-clinical research is neither an effective nor an efficient strategy to achieve the objective of identifying reliable research...The enterprise of science progresses by means of a messy combination of error-correction, replication, and accumulation of corroborating lines of evidence, the latter of which is vital for any work with the potential to change medical care or health policy...I believe the focus should be upstream of publication, before irreplicable studies get into the published literature."

"'It’s messy and it’s massive': How has the open science debate developed in the post-COVID era?...Participants saw the pandemic as revealing the powerful role of traditional incentive and reward structures, exposing a certain inertia in the scientific system. While the crisis prompted temporary shifts in norms, these do not appear to have created a more permanent shift towards open practices...Open data was seen as crucial for understanding the spread of COVID-19, but there were concerns that data sharing remained limited beyond this specific context."

"If open science is the answer, what’s the question?...The idea of data sharing for replication and verification is based on the notion that data is free-standing and that anyone correctly analysing the same data set will come to the same results. I’m not sure this is the case for quantitative data in the social sciences, but I’m certain that it isn’t the case for qualitative research. For example, given a single qualitative data set, a researcher with a psychosocial analytic approach may come up with quite different research findings to one who approaches the data from a critical realist or interpretive perspective. Neither will be 'wrong'; they are providing different angles on the data."

Paywalled: "French trial sponsors are urged to bolster clinical trial transparency"

RETRACTIONS

A case of confusing retraction coding: "More than 20 years after publishing a letter saying a set of papers should be retracted — and PubMed marking them as such — the journal has finally retracted the articles...In 2004, Contraception, the journal of the Society of Family Planning and published by Elsevier, published a letter to the editor about an audit of the clinical studies conducted in Indonesia. It found 'incorrect data' had been included on case report forms, which were in turn included in the databases for some of the studies. As a result of the audit, study investigators and the sponsoring company, NV Organon, 'jointly concluded that the results of these studies cannot be considered valid and that the publications of the results should be retracted.'...The journal probably linked the papers to the letter to the editor when indexing it for PubMed, and marked them as retracted articles in the indexing file. At least, that’s how they show up in the PubMed entry for the letter. But the journal didn’t take the step of retracting the articles at the time, so they remained unmarked on the Contraception website" until May 30, 2025, when they were retracted -- 21 years later. See COPE's Retraction Guidelines for how it should be done.

"Predicting retracted research: a dataset and machine learning approaches...The Llama 3.2 base model achieved the highest overall accuracy. The Random Forest classifier achieved a precision of 0.687 for identifying non-retracted articles, while the Llama 3.2 base model reached a precision of 0.683 for identifying retracted articles. Traditional feature-based classifiers generally outperformed most contextual language models, except for the Llama 3.2 base model, which showed competitive performance across several metrics."

"India’s retraction crisis casts shadow over science research...India stands at a critical juncture in its journey toward becoming a knowledge superpower. With initiatives such as the National Research Foundation prioritising research-driven innovation, the country has set ambitious goals. However, this vision is under threat as the academic evaluation system increasingly rewards superficial metrics rather than genuine quality...Ranking frameworks must incorporate retraction penalties. QS, NIRF, and Times Higher Education should adjust scores to reflect research integrity, using metrics like the ratio of retracted papers to total publications. Institutions with high retraction rates should face scrutiny and attract penalties rather than accolades...Institutions, on their part, must prioritise quality over quantity."

"Editors won’t retract talc and cancer article J&J says is false in court...A lawyer representing a unit of Johnson & Johnson in May asked editors of the Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine to retract a paper on cases of mesothelioma associated with cosmetic talc, following the court-ordered release of the identities of the people described in the article...The journal evaluated the allegations according to guidelines from the Committee on Publication Ethics and found the author’s reply, also delivered via a lawyer, 'satisfactory.'"

Paywalled: 

SCIENTIFIC INTEGRITY AND MISCONDUCT

"New analysis from Springer Nature reveals widespread international disparities in research integrity training...Researchers in China (79%) and Japan (73%) reported the highest access to training across all career levels, followed by Australia (68%), the US (56%), India (53%), the UK (51%), and Brazil (27%). However, access does not necessarily correlate with integrity outcomes—countries with the lowest training access, such as the UK and Brazil, also report the fewest retractions. Across all countries, 84–94% of researchers support mandatory research integrity training at some point in their careers. Few researchers (7–29%) in any country surveyed are required to demonstrate understanding via a mandatory test to pass; assessments often rely on a simple test of self awareness, in training discussion or group work."

"Aligning Scientific Values and Research Integrity: A Study of Researchers’ Perceptions and Practices in Four Countries [Belgium, China, the Netherlands, and Vietnam]...Chinese participants perceived 'fabrication of personal qualification and achievement in funding application' as the most unacceptable behavior, while participants from the other three countries rated it relatively less unacceptable. Participants from the Netherlands considered 'non-disclosure of conflict of interest' as highly unacceptable, whereas participants from China and Vietnam rated it as less unacceptable...participants [self-]reported the lowest frequencies of committing non-adherence to research ethics and [fabrication, falsification, and plagiarism], with 5.5% of participants admitting to ethical violation in research and 6.9% admitting to fabrication at least one time. Self-reported rates of committing falsification and plagiarism were slightly higher, at 14.2% and 18.6%, respectively...The highest rates of self-admitted research misbehavior were found in 'co-authoring out of mutual benefit' (48.8%) and 'deleting data point based on pure gut' (43.1%)."

"Fostering Accountability: How Institutions Can Promote Research Integrity with Practical Tools and Knowledge...Institutional accountability for research integrity means going beyond enforcing regulations, teaching required responsible conduct of research courses, and responding to allegations of misconduct...Everyday actions of setting the tone, defining success, articulating values and expectations, and providing resources are crucial foundations of an institutional working culture that consistently values rigor, reproducibility, belonging, and integrity. Providing and normalizing engaging, relevant professional development programs is one way to be proactive about supporting all organizational members to be accountable for work cultures that buttress research integrity."

"Science in the Gray Zone" podcast

Paywalled:

Sources of content include Retraction Watch, Journalology newsletter, Scholarly Kitchen, and Healthcare Information For All (HIFA) listserve.

Margaret Winker, MD
eLearning Program Director and Trustee, WAME