Avery Orrall

45 editors resign from math journal, former EIC calls Elsevier publisher a ‘mini-dictator’

Forty-five of 48 members of the editorial board of the Journal of Approximation Theory resigned earlier this month for what they called Elsevier’s “concerning and potentially detrimental” decisions regarding the publication.

Paul Nevai, formerly a professor at The Ohio State University, was appointed editor-in-chief of JAT in 1990 and held the position for 35 years until December. That’s when he reached the end of his term and Elsevier informed him they’d be filling the position with someone else.

The mass resignation came after what Nevai said were several years of bad blood between the editors of the journal (including him) and the publisher, Giampiero Accardo. A representative for Elsevier told us designated publishers like Accardo are Elsevier employees who “oversee a portfolio of academic journals within a subject area, working closely with editors, authors, and research communities to support their development and long-term success.”

BMJ retracts most of a special issue for ‘compromised’ peer review and ‘improbable device use’

BMJ’s Journal of Medical Genetics has retracted the bulk of a seven-year-old special issue for an “irreparably compromised” review process and “improbable device use.”

Of the eight papers in the 2019 special issue, seven were retracted, including an editorial that “almost exclusively” referred to the other now-retracted papers, according to a statement from the journal.

According to the retraction notice published today, the journal’s investigation found the guest editor for the issue selected the peer reviewers, the majority of whom were affiliated with Nanjing University in China. The guest editor is not named in the issue. The publisher’s investigation also found evidence of compromised peer review in almost all articles, the notice states.

A journal named a sleuth in a correction. The sleuth says that was ‘ethical editorial malpractice’

As the publishing community debates the merits of naming sleuths in retraction or correction notices, one journal did so without the sleuth’s permission — by publishing an email from the authors naming her in the correction notice.

The sleuth calls it “ethical editorial malpractice.” The publisher says it was an “administrative error.” After Retraction Watch reached out for comment, the journal removed the text of the email from the correction notice.

The paper, on trends in chronic kidney disease in people with lupus, appeared in BMC Nephrology in August.

Biology journal ghosts researcher after holding paper hostage

In a story readers might find familiar, a researcher was asked to pay when he demanded a journal retract an article he had never seen but supposedly wrote — and the journal ghosted him when he refused.

In February, Evgenios Agathokleous, an environmental resources researcher at Nanjing University of Information Science & Technology in China, asked Prime Scholars’ European Journal of Experimental Biology to retract a 2023 article that listed him as the sole author. In his email to the journal, he said he had never seen the paper and asked the journal to remove it and publish a formal retraction notice.

Two days later, a Prime Scholars representative named Nina responded, telling Agathokleous “your article has already been successfully published in our journal in accordance with the company’s publication norms and policies.” Nina then asked Agathokleous to pay 519 euros, the equivalent of roughly $600, which they said “covers the costs associated with publication handling, indexing preparation, and database maintenance.”

BMJ retracts cardiac stem cell paper, removes authors months after sleuths flag data ‘mismatch’

The BMJ has retracted a paper on stem cell therapy for heart failure after sleuths flagged the work for “serious” inconsistencies in data.

Published in October, the paper reported the results of a phase III clinical trial of more than 400 patients in Shiraz, Iran, looking at whether stem cell therapy lowers the risk of heart failure after a heart attack. The journal announced the results in a press release, and news of the findings appeared in several outlets. New Scientist called the study the “strongest evidence yet that stem cells can help the heart repair itself.”

A week after the study was published, sleuths took to PubPeer to point out inconsistencies between the data reported in the article and the dataset uploaded with it. The concerns included a “curious repeating pattern” of records in the dataset and a high number of integers for the height and weight of patients.

The Lancet retracts half-century-old unsigned commentary on talc for undisclosed industry ties

The Lancet has retracted a 49-year-old unsigned commentary on the safety of cosmetic talc after two researchers discovered the author was a paid consultant to Johnson & Johnson, at the time a leading producer of talc products.

The anonymous commentary has been used for decades by corporate defense attorneys to claim scientific proof of talc products’ safety, according to critics. But one such attorney says the paper “would not be relied upon to any significant degree.”

Published in 1977, the article argued against government-mandated regulatory testing for asbestos in cosmetic talc. Around that time, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration was considering such monitoring, a task that ultimately became the responsibility of cosmetics companies.

Publisher to retract entire conference proceedings, ban editor who wrote most of them

*EPJ Web of Conferences* will retract the entire volume of conference proceedings for ICEMR 2025.

On Monday, we published a story about a physicist in India who had three papers on superheavy elements retracted after others in his field began flagging his work. Hours later, a publisher decided to retract an entire volume of conference proceedings after one of the critics pointed out the researcher, H.C. Manjunatha, was responsible for the majority of its contents.

Manjunatha is listed as coordinator of the International Conference on Emerging Frontiers in Material Science and Radiation Physics, which took place in December. Manjunatha was one of four editors for the conference’s proceedings published in EPJ Web of Conferences on March 18. Of the 55 articles in the volume, Manjunatha is an author on 32.

David Boilley, a physicist at the University of Caen Normandy and researcher at GANIL, emailed EDP Sciences, which publishes EPJ Web of Conferences, on March 22 noting Manjunatha’s position as editor and the large number of papers he authored in the volume. Boilley, whom we interviewed for our story, mentioned the forthcoming article to the journal and also included a copy of his recent preprint calling out Manjunatha’s papers.

Physicists flag over 50 papers on superheavy elements, leading to 3 retractions

A physicist in India has accumulated three retractions and 13 expressions of concern for papers on superheavy elements after three researchers in the field began to flag issues with his work.

H.C. Manjunatha, the common author on the articles, is with the physics department at the Government First Grade College in Devanahall, according to his most recent papers, including eight published this year.

The three retracted papers originally appeared in Springer Nature’s The European Physical Journal A in 2017. According to the retraction notices, a post-publication review found “serious flaws in the research methodology, numerical results, and interpretation of findings.” All pertain to the discovery and synthesis of superheavy elements, which are unstable elements with large numbers of protons.

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.

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