If your week flew by — we know ours did — catch up here with what you might have missed.
The week at Retraction Watch featured:
- Editor-in-chief resigns amid probes of alleged citation manipulation, data errors
- Wildlife journal issues corrections for missing ethics statements
- A paper suggested a paleontologist’s fossil was a forgery. He wants it retracted
- OpenAI withdraws three preprints 1 day after releasing 722 manuscripts on unsolved math problems.
- ‘Cerebral torment’: IOP retracts nearly 100 conference papers for tortured phrases
In case you missed the news, the Hijacked Journal Checker now has more than 450 entries. The Retraction Watch Database has over 67,000 retractions. Our list of COVID-19 retractions is approaching 700, 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):
- “It’s been an open secret for many years that Informa would consider selling Taylor & Francis if the price was right.”
- “arXiv’s new preprint submission cap divides opinion.”
- India’s NIRF university rankings delayed as board considers “debarring” repeat misconduct offenders after including retraction data in their analysis.
- The Yannick Griep case “reveals why cheating in science is so persistent, and what can be done about it.”
- “Statistical Sleuthing: Can you spot a problem?”: A podcast featuring the recent Dan Ariely retraction.
- “Effect of research paper mills enough to start affecting LLM query results,” says researcher.
- Scientists don’t have a “religious calling that keeps them away from the temptations of the real world,” says Nick Brown.
- “The systemic breach of AI in academic publishing: Infrastructural failures and authorial misconduct across seven major publishers.”
- “Peer review isn’t free. So who pays?”
- Don’t mandate AI prompt disclosure, argue ethicists. A composer who drew criticism for publishing a paper on theoretical physics responds, and says “AI companies have hijacked academic norms.”
- “The editors-in-chief of Science, Nature, Cell, and NEJM AI on what journals now require when AI does the analysis, and who gets the credit.”
- “The Limited Communication of Corrections to Users of Scholarly Platforms.”
- “Publishers to share 20 million research papers with AI start-up.”
- “CDC Is Moving Forward With a Previously Shelved Controversial Hepatitis B Vaccine Study.” Arthur Caplan and Jonathan Moreno previously wrote “The CDC hepatitis B study is unethical and must never be published.”
- “Should AI Have a Role in Peer Review?” and “The Conversation We’re Not Having about AI in Peer Review.”
- “Available upon reasonable request: the authorship function that was already dead.”
- “‘Organized academic harassment’ at Hokkaido University Chemistry Department.”
- “What can chemists learn from how AI is shaking up mathematics?”
- “The fast-track to publication: bibliometric analysis of rapid service fees in scholarly publishing.”
- “Editors are facing an influx of AI-written pitches, including at science publications like mine. What now?”
- Journal editors on how they are coping with “the impacts of generative artificial intelligence on scholarly publications.”
- Researcher proposes preprint servers “integrate a mandatory data sanitization checklist into the submission pipeline” to prevent leaking sensitive information.
- Authors “reject the use of the term ‘scientist’” to refer to AI agents in scholarly publishing.
- “OpenAI Fires Researchers for Allegedly Sharing Information with AI Safety Group.” The researchers “dispute misconduct claims, warn of chilling effect” in open letter.
- “One small study in Iran swayed meta-analyses in favour of antidepressant use in children, researchers say.”
- Former university president added former school vice president to defamation lawsuit following plagiarism accusations.
- “Every outcome in the U.S. News rankings seemed to be good news this year according to a wave of press releases that touted how well colleges performed—even in cases where they slipped.”
- “AI agents are not good at interpreting science. What can be done?”
- “Ten Priorities for Scholarly Publishing through 2027.”
- “How did Rosalind Franklin miss the helix in her iconic DNA image? She didn’t.”
Upcoming Talk
- “Why Retractions Are on the Rise and Why That’s Good News”: A Population Health Sciences seminar featuring our Ivan Oransky (October 19, University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Medicine and Public Health and virtual)
Like Retraction Watch? You can make a tax-deductible contribution to support our work, follow us on X or Bluesky, like us on Facebook, follow us on LinkedIn, add us to your RSS reader, or subscribe to our daily digest. If you find a retraction that’s not in our database, you can let us know here. For comments or feedback, email us at [email protected].