If your week flew by — we know ours did — catch up here with what you might have missed.
The week at Retraction Watch featured:
- Physicist in Iraq fired over publishing scam claims fake Columbia affiliation in new paper
- Sex pay ban paper earns a retraction after a long and winding road for an unhappy author
- Editors of Courant math journal to leave Wiley, establish new roots with independent publisher
- Computer science society creates new research integrity role to address case backlog
In case you missed the news, the Hijacked Journal Checker now has more than 450 entries. The Retraction Watch Database has over 65,000 retractions. Our list of COVID-19 retractions is up to 650, and our mass resignations list has more than 50 entries. We keep tabs on all this and more. If you value this work, please consider showing your support with a tax-deductible donation. Every dollar counts.
Here’s what was happening elsewhere (some of these items may be paywalled, metered access, or require free registration to read):
- “Taylor Swift teaches botany: a Brazilian university accuses a Spanish university of plagiarizing a teaching method.”
- The New England Journal of Medicine retracts key study of Amgen’s drug Tavneos.
- “Scientists decry conference’s use of hidden prompts to snare AI peer reviews.”
- Science retracts genome paper at authors’ request after they found they “created rare artifacts” and “mistakenly interpreted them as evidence.”
- Dean in Bulgaria under investigation by university is a candidate for rector. See our previous coverage.
- “Holding Science to Account: A Qualitative Study of Practices and Challenges of Watchdog Science Journalism,” coauthored by our Ivan Oransky.
- Three companies in China testing medical devices “copied the results of another study or created falsified or otherwise invalid data,” says the FDA.
- “NPR Retracts Article That Mistakenly Said Justice Alito Would Retire.”
- “Beyond Denial: How Oil Execs Shaped a Landmark Climate Study.”
- U.S. House Science Committee members floated ideas to combat grant fraud during a hearing on the False Claims Act, a topic our Kate Travis mentioned when she testified in front of the same subcommittee in April.
- “Responsible research evaluation: integrating quality, leadership, and integrity in national systems. The case of Peru.”
- “University launches investigation into its faculty member’s paper allegedly containing AI watermarks in graphics.”
- “Thermo Fisher’s Response to Antibody Image Controversy Sparks Outcry From Researchers.”
- Predatory conferences part two: “are you being scammed?”
- “The world is moving on from paying publishers — India should too.”
- “Paper mill cancer studies get double the number of citations as genuine papers,” preprint finds.
- “China launches first English-language data journal.”
- “French research thrown into turmoil by a multifaceted crisis” that includes funding, publishing volume, and AI.
- “Research integrity in the age of AI“: A podcast episode by The Lancet.
- “The reproducibility crisis: is science deceiving us?”
- “Nobel winner and mRNA vaccine pioneer criticises career-driven publications that lack scientific novelty.”
- “Artificial intelligence in scientific review and writing: What should we be doing?” asks editor.
- “Watchdog complaint raises questions about animal research” at Texas university.
- A look at “ the hybrid figure of the ‘researcher-publisher,’ who plays an essential but often overlooked role in scientific communication.”
- High Country News finds errors in “Pinecone Cowboys” story, annotates article with the results of the investigation.
- “Despite Public Break With Russia, Springer Continues Publishing Russian Journals.”
- “Clarivate has decided to discontinue publication of Research Professional News, with the final publication scheduled for December 31, 2026.”
- “Why paying peer reviewers works, according to a journal’s editor-in-chief.”
- “Digital research repository arXiv to start new chapter as nonprofit.” (Note: Our Ivan Oransky is on the arXiv board of directors.)
- Two journal editors on the “elephant in the room: impact factor.”
- Ecologist said his poll found “acknowledgements in scientific papers are the least controversial topic in the world.”
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About the watermarking piece: I too reviewed (for Springer, if I recall correctly) a manuscript a while back with all figures having visible watermarks by an AI company. What gives? These people are not any more even trying to hide fraud? And what kind of an editor sends this stuff for review? Tell met about the peer review crisis.
Scientists who use AI decry conference’s use of hidden prompts to snare AI peer reviews.
Regarding the item “Scientists decry conference’s use of hidden prompts to snare AI peer reviews”, it’s pretty telling that of the two people named as part of this group of “Decrying”, one is against prohibiting the use of AI, and the other is an AI researcher whose response is a non-sequitur, and whose LinkedIn post looks like the output of GenAI. The third LinkedIn user, from whom they have not provided a statement, has a post that to me looks barely coherent, and might also have been the output of GenAI – the attached image, which adds nothing to whatever “argument” was there, definitely looks like it is.
Hard not to think that these are just GenAI addicts upset that they were close to getting caught.