Avery Orrall

Most editors at math journal resign over multiple reviews, ‘cloak-and-dagger’ removal of EIC

Nearly two dozen editors of a mathematics journal have resigned after its publisher removed the top editor and implemented a multiple review system, “running roughshod over the standard practices of the refereeing process in mathematics.”

Of the 31 members of the Communications in Algebra editorial board, 23 signed a March 10 resignation letter sent to Taylor & Francis, which publishes the journal. In the letter, the editors said the publisher “unilaterally” implemented a system in which more than one reviewer would be expected to look over a paper.

The peer review process in mathematics is more labor-intensive than for other topics, the editors said, including “not only an assessment of the impact and significance of the results but also a line-by-line painstaking check for correctness of the results. This process is often quite time-consuming and makes referees a valuable commodity.” The letter continues: “Doubling the number of expected reviews will quickly either deplete the pool of willing reviewers or vastly dilute the quality of their reviews, and both of these are unacceptable outcomes.”

Embattled journal brand mistakenly invites out-of-scope researchers to join board

Springer Nature has launched a new agriculture journal under the troubled Cureus brand. As part of its launch, the publisher invited at least one researcher with irrelevant specialities to join its editorial board, Retraction Watch has learned.

The new journal comes after Clarivate’s Web of Science delisting the original and long-embattled Cureus Journal of Medical Science in October for concerns about article quality.

The flagship Cureus was founded in 2009 by John Adler Jr., a Stanford University neurosurgeon, as an open-access journal for clinicians who didn’t have grants. Springer Nature acquired the journal in December 2022. In 2024, the publisher launched Cureus Journals — open-access journals on engineering, computer science and business — using the brand name.

Publisher demands $500 from impersonated author to retract paper

Last year, we wrote about a Walsh Medical Media journal that refused to withdraw an author’s paper unless he paid a fee — even though he didn’t write or submit the article. For one reader, some details of that story were familiar.

Laertis Ikonomou, an associate professor at the University at Buffalo in New York, discovered last September he was listed as an author on a commentary he had never seen before that had been published in the Journal of Carcinogenesis & Mutagenesis. He immediately requested the journal remove the article, and, like our previous story, the journal demanded a fee to do so. But after a few exchanges, the journal just changed the author on the paper to a different name.

The Journal of Carcinogenesis & Mutagenesis is one of 77 published by Walsh Medical Media. The publisher calls itself a “global leader” in open access publishing and, although it bills itself as a healthcare publishing company, has journals with specialties ranging from chemical engineering, coastal zone management, and intellectual property rights, as we have previously reported.

Heart researcher asked to attend remedial training after OSU misconduct finding, report reveals

In a move one research ethics expert called “odd,” a university asked one of its professors to attend a remedial integrity course — despite their “significant concerns” the training would have any impact following findings of misconduct.

In 2024, Retraction Watch covered the case of Govindasamy Ilangovan, then an associate professor of cardiovascular medicine at The Ohio State University. We reported at that time two of his papers were retracted from Heart and Circulatory Physiology at the request of the university, and that university officials had requested a third retraction. Thanks to a public records request, we now have access to the university’s 2023 final investigation report, which provides us much more information.

The released material shows a committee of the university’s research integrity officers found Ilangovan responsible for manipulating images in three papers. OSU redacted the total number of images in question, but the investigators deemed it “very concerning.”

Porn addiction recovery group sues publisher, UCLA researcher over critical paper

An online peer support group for people overcoming addiction to pornography has filed a lawsuit against the authors of a paper critical of the group, as well as the publisher Taylor & Francis, in an attempt to get the article retracted.

The 2023 study, published in Deviant Behavior, found the Reddit channel for the group NoFap had a higher rate of posts containing violent language compared with two similar subreddits.

Study coauthors Nicole Prause, a bioinformatics programmer with the University of California, Los Angeles, and clinical psychologist David Ley are named defendants in the lawsuit, filed December 30. NoFap and the group’s founder, Alexander Rhodes, are plaintiffs in the suit, which alleges the authors manipulated the data to make the subreddit seem uniquely violent.

Nature journal retracts two papers by immunology researchers for image duplication

A Nature journal has retracted a decades-old immunology paper that has been cited more than 1,000 times and, the author claims, spurred the development of new drugs.

The paper on antibody diversity appeared in Nature Immunology in 2002. The article, cited 1,016 times, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science, is the most cited work for corresponding author Andrea Cerutti, a professor at the Catalan Institution for Research and Advanced Studies in Spain.

The retraction comes on the heels of another retraction for Cerrutti, also for a paper in Nature Immunology. Both had been flagged on PubPeer for image issues. The authors maintain there was no misconduct.

Mega-journal Heliyon retracts hundreds of papers after internal audit

Heliyon has published fewer papers and ramped up its retractions since a major indexing service put the journal on hold and the publisher launched an audit of all papers published in the journal since its launch in 2016.

Clarivate put Heliyon on hold in September 2024, citing concerns about the quality of the content. The “on-hold” status indicates a journal is being re-evaluated, and new content isn’t indexed, according to documentation on the Clarivate website. A spokesperson for Clarivate told us they couldn’t comment on specific journals, but said a journal must be both taken off hold and have its missing content backfilled by August 1 in order to receive an impact factor for that year. If a journal is still on hold and content hasn’t been backfilled, the journal will not receive an impact factor, the spokesperson said.

Heliyon published over 11,000 papers in 2023 and more than 17,000 in 2024, issuing around two dozen retractions in each year. Last year, the journal published 3,168 articles and retracted 392 others.

Engineering journal plucks poultry paper for plagiarism

While plagiarism can sometimes be difficult to prove, stolen figures and identical metadata were the death knell for a recent article involving chicken mortality.

In September, the authors of a 2022 paper in the American Society of Agricultural and Biological Engineers’ journal Applied Engineering in Agriculture discovered a version of their article published by different authors in the International Journal of Engineering Research & Technology. Both papers, which had identical titles, describe the development of a robot designed to assist with detecting and removing dead chickens from farms.

Although some of the text in the 2025 IJERT paper was altered, the images are the same as those from the ASABE paper, which has been cited 13 times, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science. The IJERT paper also replaced the word “broiler,” a chicken raised for meat production, with “grill,” including paraphrasing “broiler mortality” as “grill mortality” and “U.S. broiler industry” as “American grill business.” Such tortured phrases, which occur when common phrases are transformed into nonsensical ones, can indicate plagiarism.

‘Kicking the can down the road’: Science flags insect meta-analysis based on allegedly buggy database

*An insect meta-analysis published in* Science in 2020 has been hit with an EOC. *(Photo credit: Aron Sousa)*

Science has issued a permanent expression of concern for a paper reporting a meta-analysis of a database including studies critics have said were “experimentally manipulated.”

The notice, published today, applies to a 2020 meta-analysis measuring population patterns of freshwater and terrestrial insects and predicting what might drive changes in population numbers. According to the notice, the move comes after critics raised concerns about a database, called InsectChange, on which the meta-analysis was based. The database itself was published in 2021 in Ecology, a journal of the Ecological Society of America.

The Science article has been cited 820 times, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science. The Ecology paper has been cited 23 times.

Business management journal holds researcher’s paper hostage

A “scholarly business and management publication” is holding a researcher’s paper for ransom, requesting the author pay to withdraw the article.

The researcher submitted a manuscript in August to the Academy of Strategic Management Journal in August, thinking he had sent it to the Academy of Management Journal. He asked to remain anonymous for fear of seeming careless “rather than recognizing the real predatory nature” of the journal.

The journal’s homepage notes it is indexed in Scopus, but it was delisted in 2021, nor is it indexed in Clarivate’s Web of Science. Its most recent volume contains five single-author articles from nonexistent universities. None of the articles has a DOI or provides an email for the author.

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