springer nature – Retraction Watch

Federal lawsuit accuses four major publishers of extorting article processing charges

A lawsuit filed under the U.S. False Claims Act accuses four major publishers of perpetrating a decade-long scheme to defraud the government by charging exorbitant article processing charges.

The case, which became unsealed July 30, claims Elsevier, Springer Nature, Wiley and Informa forced U.S. research institutions to submit false claims to the government for reimbursement through article fees up to 10 times the cost of processing the articles.

Juan Pablo Alperin, a professor at Simon Fraser University and codirector of the Scholarly Communications Lab based in Vancouver, is represented by two attorneys who have had blockbuster success in FCA cases over the past decade. He and his attorneys originally filed the case under seal in March 2024. The government declined to intervene in the case on July 23 of this year, and a judge ordered the complaint unsealed, which now allows Alperin to pursue the case independently.

Retraction Watch story exposing research factory fuels investigations, preprint withdrawals, termination

Raghabendra Kumar Mahato

A preprint server has withdrawn three papers by an author at the center of a Retraction Watch story revealing a prolific research factory operated through the WhatsApp messaging system.

Last week, we reported on Raghabendra Kumar Mahato, a second-year medical student in Nepal, who runs an international research network that churns out conference abstracts and journal papers at a rapid-fire pace. Mahato’s network includes nearly 1,000 members connected through WhatsApp and produces suspected fast-churn science, while recruiting authorship for the works. Papers by the network have been accepted by major journals and presented at conferences by leading medical societies.

On July 24, Research Square, a preprint server owned by Springer Nature, withdrew three manuscripts by Mahato due to concerns “regarding integrity arising from the submitting author’s involvement in a paper mill network,” according to notices placed on the work. The notices include a link to Retraction Watch’s investigation.

Journal, university investigations launched into gene-editing death following Science-Retraction Watch reporting

Nature is investigating concerns surrounding a paper at the heart of a news story published last week on the death of a 6-year-old girl following a gene therapy treatment in China.

The paper, published in February by a team led by neuroscientist Zilong Qiu of Shanghai Jiao Tong University School of Medicine in China, described preclinical work for a gene-editing treatment for Snijders Blok-Campeau syndrome, a neurodevelopmental disorder.

As we reported in collaboration with Science, the work was funded in part by the family of a 6-year-old girl with the condition. The family had approached Qiu based on work he had done with gene therapy for Rett syndrome, a disorder that also causes developmental delay. The parents ended up paying $860,000 to fund preclinical work for a gene-editing treatment for their daughter, who died of a severe immune reaction to the therapy seven days after receiving it.

Kaggle removes problematic stroke dataset for copyright infringement

Images from the now-deleted dataset on Kaggle purportedly showed people who had a stroke, but the folder included stock images and photos of politicians and celebrities, as seen in this screenshot.

The online data repository Kaggle has removed a problematic dataset for violating intellectual property rights months after it was flagged by sleuths for containing celebrity photos and lacking information on data provenance or confirmed medical diagnoses.

Researchers had used the images to train machine learning algorithms to detect stroke, but the dataset instead contained images of people with Bell’s palsy — as well as pictures of celebrities from movies and on the red carpet, as we reported in May. Adrian Barnett, a medical statistician at Queensland University of Technology in Australia, flagged the dataset after discovering two others he and his colleagues investigated in a February preprint that showed signs of being fabricated.

Using a reverse image search, Barnett matched four of the photos in the dataset, called “Facial droop and facial paralysis image,” to a paper published years earlier in the Journal of the Canadian Dental Association (JCDA). Only after prompting the journal to complain to Kaggle did the company take down the dataset.

‘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.

Sex pay ban paper earns a retraction after a long and winding road for an unhappy author

In March 2024, Riccardo Ciacci, an economist at the Universidad Pontificia Comillas in Spain, published a paper claiming Sweden’s ban on buying sex had increased reported rapes by as much as 62%. The finding gained attention on social media, and quickly drew criticism from others in the field.

In particular, a group of three economists took their concerns to social media and to the journal editors, and eventually published a critique of Ciacci’s work. They claimed his analysis reports a statistical relationship not relevant to the finding described in the paper. They concluded there was no large or statistically significant finding.

What followed was a year-long effort to fix the paper, and then ultimately, a decision to retract it. Ciacci, who was not accused of misconduct, said the retraction, which he disagrees with, has cost him a promotion and funding for future research. He also alleges he experienced an onslaught of harassment on social media. In the end, Ciacci maintains the retraction was unjustified, and critics say it came far too late.

Springer Nature to start issuing expressions of concern for books

Springer Nature will start issuing expressions of concern notices for books after investigating hundreds of its books for integrity-related problems in recent years.

The publishing giant has seen an uptick in the number of investigations for books. In 2022, Springer Nature carried out 124 such investigations. In 2023, that number grew to 207 in 2023 and 217 in 2024, Svetlana Kleiner, a research integrity adviser with the publisher, told attendees of the World Conference on Research Integrity in Vancouver, Canada, last month.

Springer Nature carried out 210 book-related probes last year, she added, and 81 in 2026 as of mid-April.

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.

Critics of birdsong study fight to be named in Nature’s retraction

A zebra finch in New South Wales, Australia. *Source: JJ Harrison/Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)*

Researchers who flagged methodological issues in a paper on birdsong a year and a half before Nature retracted it say they should be credited in the editorial notice. But the editors have refused, with one telling the critics the paper was retracted for unrelated reasons.

The March 2024 study at the center of the dispute looked at how sexual selection may drive song patterns in male zebra finches. Nature retracted the paper last month because two of the synthetic song pairs used in the study were found to be unreliable, according to the notice. All three authors agreed to the retraction.

Todd Roberts, the paper’s corresponding author, told Retraction Watch the critics now asking for credit “prompted us to check the synthetic song pairs used in our paper.” He said his team did not do the reliability analysis of the pairs until after publication.

Elsevier retracts the least and reinstates the most, new analysis finds

*Frequencies of reasons 10 publishers have given for retracting articles (source).*

While Elsevier outcompetes other publishers in terms of sheer volume, it also has the lowest retraction rate and highest rate of reinstating articles among nine top publishers of scholarly articles, a recent study has found. The study also found a tenth publisher to be an outlier in terms of reasons for retraction.

“Every publisher has their own retraction profile and retraction rates vary by two orders of magnitude,” Jonas Oppenlaender, author of the February preprint and a researcher at the University of Oulu in Finland, told Retraction Watch. “This reflects different editorial cultures and detection strategies, not just different levels of misconduct.”

Oppenlaender examined data from the Retraction Watch Database spanning 1997 to early 2026 to identify the top nine publishers with the most retractions. He also included the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), “because it is a major professional-society publisher that has not previously been examined in cross-publisher retraction studies,” he wrote in the preprint.

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