Avery Orrall

Sage retracts eight papers by former Radboud ‘rising star’ for compromised peer-review process

The publisher Sage has retracted eight papers by a former “rising star” from a Dutch university for a “compromised” peer-review process at a journal he edited.

Last week, Retraction Watch obtained an email from an editor at Sage to the editorial board of Group & Organization Management, stating that, following a “thorough investigation,” the publisher would retract “a subset of articles” by the journal’s former editor-in-chief Yannick Griep. The retraction applies to eight of the 25 papers Griep coauthored in the journal, according to the July 14 retraction notice. The papers were retracted for a “compromised” peer-review process, the notice states.

“As the peer-review process was administered by the former Editor in Chief, who is also the co-author of the articles, the objectivity of the peer-review process has been compromised,” reads a publisher’s note published alongside the retractions. The move “relates to the underlying review process and no determination has been made regarding the scientific content of the articles.”

‘Disappointed’: Cochrane journal asked researchers to publish article, then retracted it for conflicts

A developer of an AI tool for conducting literature reviews said he and his team were “excited and honored” when a Cochrane journal had extended a “specific and individual invitation” in January 2025 to submit an article describing their system.

Kevin Kallmes, the chief executive officer at and founder of Nested Knowledge, and five of his colleagues wrote the manuscript and submitted their paper describing the procedure for using AutoLit. They included their affiliations and a note they held equity in the company. Cochrane Evidence Synthesis and Methods published the paper in October.

A few months later, the journal retracted it.

‘The exploitation still remains’: Stats journal associate editors resign over $3,000 publishing charge

Eighteen associate editors of the journal Statistics and Computing have announced they will resign after Springer Nature announced the journal would require a fee to publish.

In a July 8 statement to editor-in-chief Ajay Jasra, the resigning editors cite the publisher’s decision to become fully open access starting in 2027, a move they call “irreconcilable with our vision of science.” According to the journal’s homepage, all submissions from July 1 that end up in the journal will be subject to a $2,990 article processing charge (APC).

The journal formerly operated as a hybrid model, with optional open access. While the fee to publish OA will remain the same, authors will not have the option to publish for free with their research behind a paywall, unless they qualify for a waiver. Springer Nature offers APC waivers to papers with corresponding authors in low-income areas, according to their website.

Ethics journal retracts paper by high school student for AI, peer review manipulation

The Journal of Medical Ethics has retracted a paper on the use of AI in the pharmaceutical industry for containing references that don’t exist. The article’s sole author: a high school student.

The paper, which argues biased algorithms can exacerbate inequities in health care, was published in September. The author, Irfan Biswas, listed his affiliation as Shrewsbury Public Schools in Massachusetts.

According to the May 28 retraction notice, an investigation by the journal found Biswas used generative AI to “identify and understand referenced sources” and did not verify the references prior to submission.

Editors of Courant math journal to leave Wiley, establish new roots with independent publisher

Editors of a journal run by a prestigious math institute will close up shop and form a new journal with an independent publisher, with one editor citing Wiley’s increased oversight as the reason behind the move.

Communications on Pure and Applied Mathematics is the journal for the Courant Institute of Mathematics at New York University. The journal has been published in partnership with Wiley for over 75 years, and all the editors of the journal are affiliated with Courant.

In emails Retraction Watch has seen, the editorial board notified Wiley in January that the institute would not be renewing its contract with the publisher once it expired at the end of 2026.

Increasing workload may have contributed to recent retraction at nursing journal, editor says

Roger Watson was seeking answers. Last September, a paper in his journal had attracted criticism he thought he and his fellow editors at Nurse Education in Practice should have caught.

The February 2025 paper described the role of moulage, or simulated, realistic-looking wounds, in training nurses to perform endotracheal suction, a way of clearing out the lungs. One group used dummies with simulated bodily fluids, and the other group used regular dummies. An expert flagged the paper seven months after it was published: Tubes used in groups with or without moulage dummies had “significant size difference, which may have influenced the level of difficulty for participants to complete the suctioning task,” the expert wrote in an email Retraction Watch has seen.

The authors responded to the concerns at first, but then the conversation reached an impasse, the authors stopped responding, and the only choice, Watson said, was to retract the paper.

Science flags paper that found AI chatbots help debunk conspiracy theories

Science has issued an expression of concern for a highly publicized study looking into whether conversations with AI chatbots could convince conspiracy theorists to abandon their beliefs. The move came after the authors of the paper found inconsistencies in their dataset, but a reanalysis shows the findings still stand, they say.

The September 2024 article found conversing with an AI chatbot called DebunkBot reduced people’s belief in a particular conspiracy theory by an average of 20%. The research was featured in news stories in The New York Times, Washington Post and The Atlantic.

This February, the authors — Thomas Costello of Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, psychologist Gordon Pennycook of Cornell University in New York and cognitive scientist David Rand at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology — won the Newcomb Cleveland Prize from the American Association for the Advancement of Science, which publishes Science, for the work. It has been cited 192 times, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science.

Editors of semantics journal resign, launch new journal after publisher ‘ultimatum’

The new journal, *Semantics of Natural Languages*, launched in May.

The editors of a semantics journal owned by Springer Nature have resigned to launch a new one, citing pressure from the company to increase their annual publication volume by 25%.

The editor-in-chief and the two associate editors Natural Language Semantics resigned from the journal in early April, editor-in-chief Amy Rose Deal, a linguistics professor at the University of California, Berkeley, told Retraction Watch. They resigned in consultation with the 25-member editorial board, which gave “a very high level of support for the move,” Deal said.

In a May 19 open letter, the three resigning editors and the founding co-editors of Natural Language Semantics announced the launch of their new journal, Semantics of Natural Languages. The new journal is published by the Open Library of Humanities, an open-access publisher whose goal “is to liberate university research from commercial control,” according to its website.

Journal retracts study linking hepatitis vaccine to autism that was included in CDC review

A toxicology journal has retracted a 16-year-old study linking hepatitis B vaccines to autism in children following an independent statistical review that found a half-dozen concerns with the study’s methodology.

Using data from the National Health Interview Survey, the authors claimed boys vaccinated in their first month of life had “threefold greater odds for autism diagnosis” than those vaccinated later or not at all.

The study was included in a rapid systematic review of hep B vaccine studies presented by John Su, director of the Immunization Safety Office for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, at the Sept. 18 meeting of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices. It resurfaced in a presentation at the Dec. 4 ACIP meeting, just before the committee’s decision to no longer recommend that infants receive the hep B vaccine at birth if the mother tests negative for the virus.

In what EIC calls an ‘honest mistake,’ journal approves paper without peer reviewing it

For most researchers, having an article accepted comes with constructive feedback from editors and reviewers. But when a sociology researcher learned his article was accepted at a Taylor & Francis journal, he was surprised to find the journal had skipped the peer review process altogether.

Martino C. submitted his article on the effects of economic instability on political ideology in Slovakia to the journal Democracy and Security on October 15. (We’ve withheld the author’s last name at his request for digital privacy reasons.) He told Retraction Watch he was hoping peer reviews would help him improve his argument.

But on January 13, the paper was marked “Accepted” in the journal’s submission portal without feedback.

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