Hello fellow journalologists,

A few weeks ago I dissected the RELX / Elsevier annual report, the first in a series of articles looking at the large commercial publishing companies’ performance in 2025. If you missed it, you can read it here:

The introduction to the annual reports series contains a high level view of the growth of the largest publishers in recent years:

The focus of today’s newsletter is Springer Nature, which is a much smaller business than RELX (£1.7 billion revenue compared with £9.6 billion) primarily because it’s much less diversified: unlike RELX, most of Springer Nature’s revenues and profits come from academic publishing.

The purpose of these deep dives is to help publishing professionals, and other interested readers, to better understand the corporate behemoths that have such an influential role in academic publishing. I’m writing these articles with my younger self in mind; I’m attempting to create a resource that I would have found educational when I was at the start of my career. Hopefully, experienced readers will learn something useful from this analysis, too.

Springer Nature: the story so far

Before we dive into the annual report, I’d like to briefly remind you of Springer Nature’s corporate backstory as it will help us to put the 2025 annual report into context.

As a recap, Springer Nature was formed in 2015 from the merger of two companies: ‘Springer Science + Business Media’ and ‘Macmillan Science and Education’. The two shareholders for the new company were Holtzbrinck Publishing Group (53% holding; a German family-owned business) and BC Partners (47% holding; a private equity firm). The new company, Springer Nature, was thought to be worth “more than €5 billion”, according to a Financial Times report from 2015. BC Partners had paid €3.3 billion for Springer Science a few years before, in 2013.

Private equity firms, like BC Partners, invest in businesses with the goal of selling them at a higher valuation further down the line. The primary objective for the newly formed Springer Nature was to initiate an IPO (Initial Public Offering), the process by which a privately held company is listed for public sale on a stock market. That way, BC Partners could sell its shares and exit the business.

After multiple failed attempts, which I won’t recount here, the IPO eventually went through on 4 October, 2024.

By the end of November 2025, 14 months after the IPO, Holtzbrinck owned 50.6% of the company and BC Partners’ private equity holding dropped from 47% to to 34.8% (source); the remaining shares are now held by other investors.

BC Partners will need to sell all of its shares in the fullness of time, as it will be obliged to return the capital to the equity fund’s investors. However, to date BC Partners has only sold around a third of its initial holding, 19 months after the IPO.

It’s not difficult to see why BC Partners has not rushed to an early exit. The share price at the point of the IPO in October 2024 was €24; reached a highpoint of €27 at the end of 2024; and it fell to a low of €15 about a month ago. The price rebounded a little after the publication of the annual report in March.

It’s worth remembering that the stock prices of all publishing companies have taken a battering recently because of the perceived threat of AI. For example, the total value of the RELX shareholders’ investments dropped by £13 billion between January 1 and Dec 31, 2025, or £27 billion if you extend the period through to the end of February 2026. It’s recovered a little since then.

The academic community is obsessed with publishing companies’ profitability. However, it’s worth noting that the owners of Springer Nature saw the value of their investment almost halve between December 2024 and March 2026 (i.e. from roughly €4 billion to €2 billion). Yes, the shareholders will receive a dividend payment of €165 million off the back of profits generated in 2025, but the value of their investment dropped by £2 billion in just over a year.

Viewed another way, BC Partners paid €3.3 billion for Springer in 2013 and at the end of 2024, at the high point of the share price, their shareholding in Springer Nature was probably worth around €1.9 billion.

I’m not trying to defend the high profit margins of corporate publishers; the market’s dynamics make it possible for commercial publishing companies to be far too profitable and the likes of RELX have seen strong share price growth over decades; the recent strong downturn is highly unusual.

However, I do want to make the point that people who complain about high profit margins often forget that:

(1) Profit is generated from (significant) financial investment

(2) The value of that investment can go down (a lot) as well as up

(3) New and improved products and services are only possible because of access to large amounts of capital

In other words, financial risk sits alongside reward; the latter is only possible because of investment of capital.

These simple facts are often forgotten by academics who want to ‘take back control’ of publishing. That’s a noble desire (when I was young and naive I left Elsevier in 2004 to join PLOS for exactly this reason) but would need huge financial investment to make happen or a massive disruption by a new technology, for example AI.

Springer Nature Group financial performance

I want to focus most of this newsletter on the Research division of Springer Nature, and in particular on the journals group. But first let’s take a quick look at Springer Nature as a whole.

One important part of Springer Nature’s recent history is that it’s been highly leveraged: the ratio of its debt to earning power was high. This was one of the main reasons why the IPO struggled to get over the line initially; the high levels of debt made the company less attractive to potential investors.

Why was the debt so high? Buying a business is a bit like buying a house: purchasers put down a deposit and take out a bank loan (like a mortgage) to cover the rest.

Springer was owned by a series of private equity houses before being acquired by BC Partners in 2013, which collectively chose to keep the debt levels high. This made an IPO more challenging and so in recent years Springer Nature has been using some of its profits to pay off bank loans.

For example, last year Springer Nature paid off €400m from its loans and now owes €1.2 billion, reducing its leverage to a 1.7 multiple (in 2021 Springer Nature had €2.3 billion of debt and the ratio of debt to profit was a 3.6 multiple). So the company has cut its debt in half over the past 5 years by paying off loans.

This is important because it means it will be able to negotiate better financial terms (lower interest rates) for its remaining loans, as it will be considered a less risky proposition by lenders. This frees up cash for dividend payments, share buybacks, or for investments.

It also means that more cash will be available in the coming years for mergers and acquisitions (M&A), as less money is needed for interest payments or for debt repayments. One of the financial analysts on the investors’ call asked what Springer Nature plans to do with the extra cash that it will have access to this year. Alexandra Dambeck, the CFO, said:

… the best use for our cash flow is really to fund our organic growth and that would always come at the first place… We continuously look at M&A: on the one hand side that can be accretive to our growth but also has leverage through technology. But it has to be the right M&A that fits to our portfolio.

Market consolidation in academic publishing seems likely because of economies of scale. It wouldn’t surprise me if we see Springer Nature acquire other publishers (and/or technology companies) in the years to come now that it has got its financial house in order.

As an aside, shortly after the annual report was published Springer Nature announced that Alexandra Dambeck, the CFO, will be leaving the business towards the end of this year. She joined the company in January 2024. There may be an interesting backstory there that I’m not privy to.

Research segment

Let’s now turn our attention to the part of the Springer Nature that’s likely to be of most interest to readers of this newsletter: the journals, books and services segment (‘Research’).

Read more

Hello fellow journalologists,

I’ve been playing catch up after taking some time off over Easter; this email provides a summary of how news outlets have been covering scholarly communication over the past few weeks.

I’m in the process of writing the next annual report summary, which will be sent very soon (in the meantime, you can read the Elsevier analysis if you missed it).

Massive budget cuts for US science proposed again by Trump administration

The proposal would also prohibit the spending of “Federal funds for expensive subscriptions to academic journals and prohibitively high publishing costs unless required by Federal statute or approved in advance by a Federal agency”. The proposal does not define ‘expensive’ or ‘prohibitively high’ or specify which journals would be affected. Many journals “charge the Government to both publish and to access the same research study”, the proposal says, adding that there are many “low-cost outlets” for publishing federally funded research.

JB: This is just a budget proposal, but could have significant ramifications for publishers and author choice. We’re still waiting to hear about the NIH’s new public access policy, which was expected to have been published by now.

‘Fight AI-driven resmearch with points for peer review’

David Comerford, professor of economics at the University of Stirling, told Research Professional News that incentivising rigorous peer review would be a first line of defence against the rising tide of “resmearch”, where special interest groups or firms use AI to trawl large, public datasets and produce findings that seem to support their product or stance, even if there are other findings that contradict them.

JB: “Resmearch” is a neologism that was new to me.

Scientists invented a fake disease. AI told people it was real

The condition doesn’t appear in the standard medical literature — because it doesn’t exist. It’s the invention of a team led by Almira Osmanovic Thunström, a medical researcher at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden, who dreamt up the skin condition and then uploaded two fake studies about it to a preprint server in early 2024… The problem was that the experiment worked too well. Within weeks of her uploading information about the condition, attributed to a fictional author, major artificial-intelligence systems began repeating the invented condition as if it were real.

JB: Is this a neomorbus?

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 as 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.

Dutch universities set out vision for ‘new publication culture’

Academia needs a “new publication culture” to protect research integrity, the association of Dutch universities (UNL) has concluded, outlining its vision of the right way forward. In a position paper published this month, UNL says research integrity is “under increasing pressure from metric-driven ‘publish or perish’ incentives, predatory journals, paper mills, artificial intelligence-generated or fabricated content and other questionable research practices”.

Canadian panel seeks to add more teeth to research oversight

A Canadian panel is proposing several changes to its guidelines for responsible conduct of research, including a provision that effectively removes any statute of limitations on investigations into potential misconduct. The proposed revisions, from the Canadian Panel on Responsible Conduct of Research (PRCR), are up for public comment until April 17 and have not been made official.

Should academic misconduct be catalogued? Proposed US database sparks debate

For decades, academic institutions have struggled with how to prevent researchers who have committed misconduct from securing jobs at new universities while hiding the bad behaviour. A proposal published today in the journal Science offers a solution, at least in the United States: creating a national database of people found guilty of data fabrication, workplace harassment and more, that would be accessed by research institutions before making new hires. But scientists who spoke to Nature are divided over whether this centralized, confidential list would solve the problem or generate new ones.

JB: You can read the proposal in Science here: More transparency needed on misconduct.

Hallucinated citations are polluting the scientific literature. What can be done?

As a rough estimate, if the rate of 65 publications with at least one invalid reference out of some 4,000 publications analysed holds across the academic literature, it would suggest that more than 110,000 of the 7 million or so scholarly publications from 2025 contain invalid references. Nick Morley, Grounded AI’s co-founder and chief product officer, says that the types of citation problem seen in 2025 are different from those found by his team before the proliferation of LLMs. This fact, he says, points to the use of AI as a leading culprit.

Judge tosses lawsuit over controversial Paxil ‘Study 329’

In a March 24 decision, Judge Robert Okun granted Elsevier’s motion to dismiss for lack of standing. Murgatroyd can’t move forward with the suit because he failed to establish “or even plausibly” allege the journal article is a consumer good or service under the CPPA, according to Okun’s ruling. The CPPA defines a consumer good or service as anything someone would purchase or receive and normally use for personal, household or family purposes.

AIs can ‘memorize’ data they shouldn’t. Can they be forced to forget?

Sometimes, LLMs spit out word-for-word copies of what they ingested, potentially violating copyright or exposing sensitive information such as credit card numbers and addresses… Later this month, however, researchers will present a potentially valuable new tool for studying memorization at a major AI conference in Brazil. Named Hubble—because its creators hope that, like the Hubble Space Telescope, it can help clarify the unknown—it is the first open-source tool designed specifically to study the problem.

Internet Archive ‘collateral damage’ in AI news battle

To prevent what many publishers see as theft of their copyrighted material by potential competitors, some of them have blocked AI developers from crawling their websites and copying stories from them. But many such publishers have grown concerned in recent months that AI developers are using the [Internet] archive as a kind of back door to the publishers’ content, and so they’ve also started to block its access to their material or curtailed its ability to distribute that material.

JB: You may also be interested in: 100+ journalists applaud the Internet Archive’s role In preserving the public record.

Human scientists trounce the best AI agents on complex tasks

The proportion of publications in any given natural-sciences field that mention AI ranges from 6% to 9%, according to the Artificial Intelligence Index Report 2026, released today by the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered AI at Stanford University in California. “Scientists have really embraced this AI era,” says computer scientist Yolanda Gil at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, who led this year’s index report.

JB: You can read the report here: The 2026 AI Index Report.

Have you published a disruptive paper? New machine-learning tool helps you check

Scientists in the US have unveiled a new machine-learning tool that, they claim, can identify disruptive scientific breakthroughs. They say their method, which assesses how much a paper reshapes its field, is better than other techniques at spotting such disruptions even if they are simultaneously discovered by independent research groups.

Can journals that pay peer reviewers succeed?

The model is straightforward – the journal charges authors an Article Processing Charge (APC) of £1,950, paid after acceptance, typically covered by funders, institutions or grant money. That revenue funds compensation for both editors and peer reviewers, who receive $100 (£75) per review. The journal has a rejection rate of roughly 60 per cent. Since its launch, the platform has published 50 papers and attracted more than 500 registered reviewers, without paid advertising. Kunst says although the reaction in the academic community has mostly been positive, establishing the journal has been an “uphill battle”.

JB: I covered the launch of Advances.in back in issue 14 of this newsletter. Their tagline is “reinventing academic publishing”. 50 papers published over a 4-year period suggests that the process is going rather slowly.

We shouldn’t assume that the journal’s low output is due to the paid peer review model. Correlation does not equal causation. Launching a new journal independently was always going to be difficult, regardless of whether peer reviewers were paid or not.

I’m looking forward to reading the update on Biology Open’s (Company of Biologists) Fast & Fair paid peer review pilot. The graphs on this page suggest that paying a select group of peer reviewers can help to publish papers quickly.

Offering scientists cash to spot errors in published papers doesn’t work

A project that offers researchers a cash bounty for finding mistakes in published scientific papers has run into trouble: It can’t find enough reviewers to do the work. Now, organizers of the Estimating the Reliability and Robustness of Research (ERROR) project are planning to throw in an additional incentive, by publishing the reviews in a new peer-reviewed journal… The project planned to carry out 100 in-depth critiques in 4 years, but only nine have been completed so far, with eight more in the works. Candidate reviewers identified by ERROR often decline requests immediately, agree to do the work but don’t follow up, or ghost the project organizers after a few emails, Elson says.

China dominates the discovery of new chemicals and reactions

China now discovers more than 40% of new chemicals and reactions reported in scientific literature, with the country’s contributions growing exponentially in recent decades, according to a new report. The researchers behind the work attribute this to China’s investment in its chemical sector, which has enabled the country to overtake the US as the dominant leader in chemical discovery. The report also challenges the idea that China’s progress in the chemical sciences is due to its collaborations with US scientists.

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.

JB: There are two lessons here. First, journalists often mistake the name of the flagship journal (BMJ) with the publisher (i.e. BMJ Group). The BMJ did not retract this paper; another journal in the BMJ Group did. Second, publishers should make clear who guest edited a special issue. The guest editors should take public responsibility for what they publish. As I’ve said before, I don’t have a problem with special issues per se. I do have concerns about the guest editor model.

What Julia Angwin’s Case Reveals About AI, Reputation, and the Right of Publicity

In the complaint, Angwin takes aim at “Grammarly’s misappropriation of the names and identities of hundreds of journalists, authors, writers, and editors.” In a nutshell, Grammarly offered a service that provided writing advice, identifying and associating that advice with the names of high profile writers, including Angwin, Stephen King, Neil deGrasse Tyson, Casey Newton, and many others, despite no relationship between these writers and Grammarly. Most, if not all of the writers were initially completely unaware of the existence of the feature.

JB: This is fascinating. Imagine an AI tool that could edit in the style of Annette Flanagin or write like a Nobel prize winner of your choice.

And finally…

I’ve been asking myself whether editorial and publishing leaders will follow Mark Zuckerberg’s lead:

If you are one of Meta’s almost 79,000 employees and cannot get hold of the boss, do not worry. The owner of Facebook and Instagram is reportedly working on an AI version of Mark Zuckerberg who can answer all your queries. The AI clone of Zuckerberg, Meta’s founder and chief executive, is being trained on his mannerisms and tone as well as his public statements and thoughts on company strategy. The rationale behind the project, according to the Financial Times, is that employees could feel more connected to one of the most powerful people in Silicon Valley.

The possibilities are endless. For example, authors could ask a virtual Editor-in-Chief why their paper was rejected. This is a solution that scales and negates the need for a time consuming appeals process. What could go wrong? AI is all about improving efficiency, right?

Until next time,

James

P.S. Please hit the share button if you think your colleagues would enjoy reading The Jist.

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Hello fellow journalologists,

Earlier this week I wrote an essay that dissected the RELX (Elsevier) annual report. Such documents are somewhat dull affairs, but they contain nuggets of information that can’t be found elsewhere.

The essay was the first in a series of posts analysing the largest publishers’ performance in 2025. The goal is to help scholarly communication professionals and researchers better understand the academic publishing landscape.

If you haven’t seen that essay yet, you can read it here:

Next up is Springer Nature, which released its annual report a few days ago. I haven’t finished writing that analysis yet, so I thought I would send you the latest instalment of The Jist before the Easter break instead. It should help you to see how news outlets have covered scholarly communication over the past few weeks.

News headlines

Across the social sciences, half of research doesn’t replicate

A sweeping project involving hundreds of researchers in several dozen countries showed that across the social sciences, the findings of roughly half of all papers cannot be replicated independently, and there’s no reliable way to tell in advance which ones will falter. Called Systematizing Confidence in Open Research and Evidence (SCORE), the effort investigated more than 100 papers published in dozens of leading journals in business, economics, education, political science, psychology, and sociology. The replication success rate—49% for the 164 papers evaluated, reported today in Nature—is consistent with findings from previous studies in individual fields such as psychology, suggesting the problem is pervasive in the social sciences.

JB: You can read the accompanying News & Views article here, a Comment with one of the lead authors here, an Editorial here, and the three research papers here, here and here. The N&V article concludes:

Journal editors, presidents of professional associations, department chairs and other social-science leaders should read these results as showing that every social science faces replication problems. Those who study scientific paradigm shifts might warn that the gatekeepers of the current system often have the most to lose from changing it. But I am more optimistic. Tighter standards are not merely restrictions; they also create fresh opportunities for innovation, including big-team science, ‘adversarial’ collaborations and healthier norms of independent verification. If social-science institutions help to improve standards for empirical evidence, they can ensure that scholars’ professional incentives align with their scientific values.

In the Comment article Brian Nosek says:

A core lesson from SCORE is that there is no single measure of trustworthiness, and there never will be. ‘Published or not’, for example, is a crude way to assess the quality of science. We take peer review as sacrosanct when everyone knows it’s not. Peer review is highly tentative, occurs at a single point in time, is ad hoc, permanent — and, in most cases, opaque.

Amen to that.

Chinese institutions account for over half of research paper retractions

According to the study, there were 29,867 Chinese affiliations listed on these retractions – more than 91% of which don’t list international collaborators. Researchers in China produced 16.5% of all research output during that time period [1997 to 2026], the study found, despite the country’s institutions being listed on more than 52% of retracted papers in the sample. Following China, institutions based in India, the US and Saudi Arabia feature on 7.25%, 5.72% and 2.83% of retractions, respectively.

Researchers from China dominate IOPP outstanding reviewer awards

This year’s recipients were selected from about 35,000 reviewers who submitted peer-review reports to IOP Publishing journals in 2025. Journal editors evaluated nominees based on the volume, timeliness and quality of their reviews. A total of 1621 individuals have been honoured with a 2025 award. China makes up 30% of awardees followed by 16% from the US and just over 6% from India. Some 10% of this year’s award winners are also based in lower middle-income countries or territories.

Over 90 Percent of Scientists Admit to Questionable Research Behaviors

Recently, Entradas and her colleagues surveyed more than 1,500 researchers in Portuguese universities to gauge their perception and participation in such dubious practices. The findings, published in PLoS One, revealed that 91 percent of the researchers have participated in at least one practice that lies in the grey zone of scientific integrity, indicating that widespread QRPs [questionable research practices] may pose a threat to ethical research.

Women Face Longer Peer Review Delays

A recent large‑scale study published in PLOS Biology confirms gender bias in academia by showing that scientific papers led by women as first or corresponding authors experience longer delays in the peer‑review process than those led by their male colleagues. Researchers in the Biology Department, University of Nevada, Reno, Nevada, analyzed more than 36 million academic articles in over 36,000 biomedical and life science journals. Using articles indexed in PubMed, the analysis found that average review time is between 7.4% and 14.6% longer for papers authored by women than for those submitted by men. This gender gap is widespread and affects most disciplines, regardless of female representation in each field.

Hallucinated citations are polluting the scientific literature. What can be done?

As a rough estimate, if the rate of 65 publications with at least one invalid reference out of some 4,000 publications analysed holds across the academic literature, it would suggest that more than 110,000 of the 7 million or so scholarly publications from 2025 contain invalid references… The true number of hallucinated references is almost certainly higher, says Weber-Boer, because the analysis focused on big publishers, which have more resources for checking citations systematically than do smaller publishers.

Karger publishing house lays off 76 of 114 employees

76 employees of the long-established publishing house Karger are losing their jobs – just three months after its takeover by Oxford University Press. Those affected are criticizing the cold manner of the dismissals. The feared mass layoff at the renowned scientific publisher Karger has been decided: 76 employees, two thirds of the workforce, lose their jobs in Basel. This is clear from the letter on the consultation process of S. Karger AG to the Office for Economic Affairs and Labour (AWA), which is available to this editorial staff. The terminations were issued at the end of March, with individual notice periods ranging from one to six months.

Commission’s EU-wide open access idea prompts concerns

The European Commission’s announcement that it might move to impose mandatory open access to the results of publicly funded research across the EU has received a mixed reception from research and publishing leaders. Ekaterina Zaharieva, the EU research commissioner, told the European Parliament this month that the Commission was “looking into making publicly funded research open access by default” under the planned European Research Area Act. Expected this year, the act will attempt to force the EU member states to take steps to improve their research systems.

Cern confirms it will run expanded fee-free publishing platform

In its own announcement, the [European] Commission said ORE will have a budget of €17 million for 2026-31, with the EU providing €10m. Since it launched five years ago, ORE has published more than 1,200 articles. Cern said the platform is “expected to support a growing number of research outputs each year”. Last month, experts told RPN they thought uptake of the increased eligibility will depend on how the newly participating national organisations engage with their communities.

‘Coordination needed’ for innovation in scholarly publishing

Bringing about innovation in scholarly publishing requires coordination between stakeholders, assessment reform and public investment, according to a report from Knowledge Exchange, a group of European research organisations. The report, published on 18 March, considers six such innovations: preregistration of research protocols to ensure robust methodology; publication of successive versions of papers with gradual improvements; publication of preprints; open peer review; post-publication curation to speed up dissemination; and modular publication of not only papers but also components such as methods and data.

Wikipedia bans AI-generated content in its online encyclopedia

Wikipedia has banned the use of artificial intelligence in the generation or rewriting of content for its voluminous online encyclopedia. In a recent policy change, Wikipedia said that the use of large language models (or LLMs) “often violates” its core principles and will not be allowed. The English language version of Wikipedia has more than 7.1m articles. The use of AI has been a contentious issue among Wikipedia’s community of volunteer editors but a vote among the site’s editors supported the ban, according to 404 Media. There are two exceptions to the new ban: AI can still be used for translations, and to make minor copy edits.

Fresh AI data mining plan ‘could hand research to big tech’

Researchers and publishers have expressed scepticism about a proposed exception to UK copyright law that would permit data mining by artificial intelligence developers purely for science and research. Earlier this month, the [UK] government released a report on AI and copyright following a consultation on proposed changes to UK law. Proposals to carve out a broad copyright exception for data mining had sparked a backlash, particularly from the creative sector, and the government has dropped its preferred option for an exception to go ahead with rights holders able to opt out.

ERC sets out firm line on use of AI in peer review

The European Research Council has published new guidelines on how its expert reviewers of research proposals can use artificial intelligence, setting out stricter rules than some other sectoral organisations. Reviewers must not delegate their evaluation to AI and must respect the confidentiality of the proposal, according to the guidelines published by the ERC Scientific Council on 24 March.

How to build an AI scientist: first peer-reviewed paper spills the secrets

AI Scientist is a collection of ‘agents’ built on top of existing large language models (LLMs), such as GPT-4o or Claude Sonnet 4. It prompts those LLMs to search the literature on a given topic, generate hypotheses and design a set of possible research directions. Next, AI Scientist writes code, executes it and measures its efficiency. Finally, it writes a paper describing the results. The authors of the paper describing the tool also created an ‘automated reviewer’ to evaluate the quality of its output. The results “approach borderline acceptability for machine learning conference workshops”, the authors write.

Major conference catches illicit AI use — and rejects hundreds of papers

A major artificial-intelligence conference has rejected 497 papers — roughly 2% of submissions — whose authors violated AI-use policies in their peer reviews of other articles submitted to the meeting. The International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML), to be held in Seoul in July, has a reciprocal review policy, meaning that, bar certain exceptions, every paper must have an author who reviews other conference papers. Authors whose reviews violated the conference’s large language model (LLM)-use policy had their papers rejected.

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

In their reply, the journal editors said publishing unsigned commentaries “used to be standard practice.” A representative from The Lancet told us the journal would only consider publishing an unsigned letter now “in rare circumstances where there are concerns about author safety.” In those circumstances, the editors are still aware of author names and affiliations, the representative said.

And finally…

Well, that was quite a lot wasn’t it? Time for a nap, perhaps?

His 2025 book, The Brain At Rest, proposes that regular bouts of doing nothing can change your life. Finding time to let your mind wander and take a daily 30-minute nap can make you more creative and efficient, he argues.

Until next time,

James

P.S. The winner of the best April fool’s joke goes to De Grill, the new brand for De Gruyter Brill. The logo was cooked to perfection 🍔!

Hello fellow journalologists,

Yesterday I outlined my plan to explore the annual reports recently released by eight of the largest publishers. Today’s email focuses on Elsevier, a subsidiary of the British-Dutch company RELX.

Before we kick off, I should make a disclaimer. I’m a neuroscientist by training. I don’t have an accounting degree or an MBA. I’ve had financial responsibility for the Nature Portfolio in the past and I know my way around a balance sheet, but I am by no means a finance expert. Please bear this in mind as you read this analysis. I’ve added footnotes to help explain the financial terms that are used; some accountants may take issue with my simplification.

RELX is the largest of the companies we’ll consider in this annual reports series; it’s the 15th largest company in the FTSE 100 with a market capitalisation similar to the NatWest group, one of the largest banks in the UK.

RELX contains many different types of business units within it, of which Elsevier’s journals programme is a (relatively) small proportion. So don’t let the RELX headline figure of £9.6 billion in revenues (+7% vs 2024) and £3.3 billion of adjusted operating profit1 (+9% vs 2024) mislead you. RELX was called Reed Elsevier up until 2015, which caused no end of confusion: these top-level financials are for the parent company, not Elsevier itself.

There are four divisions within RELX; the slowest growing, in terms of both revenue and adjusted operating profit, may surprise you:

The Scientific, Technical and Medical market segment (to use RELX’s terminology; the rest of us call it ‘Elsevier’) is 28% of RELX revenues and 31% of adjusted operating profit. RELX’s high profit margins are not created entirely from the academic sector: RELX is also generating cash from lawyers, risk managers and exhibitionists (sorry, couldn’t resist).

The sheer scale of RELX is worth noting. RELX employs 37,000 people, of whom more than 12,000 are technologists ($2 billion annual technology spend). 9700 people work for Elsevier, which is 26% of the RELX workforce; it’s not clear whether that figure includes shared services like technology (I suspect it does).

The underlying growth for Elsevier’s adjusted operating profit is higher than for revenue. In other words, revenues are increasing faster than costs, improving profitability.

Nick Luff, the RELX Chief Financial Officer, told investors:

Here you can see the 9% underlying growth in group adjusted operating profit. As Erik [CEO] mentioned, we continue to manage cost growth to be below revenue growth in each business area. As a result, Risk, STM and Legal each delivered underlying profit growth two or three percentage points ahead of underlying revenue growth, while Exhibitions was one point ahead, reflecting event cycling in the year.

You may not approve of the high profit margins of commercial publishers, but everyone should understand that they’re only possible because of significant financial investment into a niche industry.

RELX has a market capitalisation of £43 billion. This means that its owners, which include pension funds and other corporate investors, have £43 billion invested in the company. Since Elsevier contributed 28% of RELX’s revenue, you could say, perhaps, that around £12 billion is invested in Elsevier.

Elsevier incurred costs of around £1.7 billion last year, which included investment to develop new technology and for improving services.

Compare that figure with the recent announcement about Open Research Europe (ORE), the diamond open access journal (database?), which was launched with much fanfare last week:

Backed by a nearly €17 million budget for the period 2026-2031 and co-funded by the European Commission by up to €10 million, the new phase of ORE is set to begin operations as a collectively supported publishing service in the autumn of 2026, with CERN operating the platform.

€17 million over 5 years is like bringing a knife to a gunfight.

Anyway, I digress.

STM segment

OK, so let’s turn our attention to the Scientific, Technical & Medical market segment, also known as Elsevier (coverage starts on page 18 in the annual report, if you want to follow along). Revenues were £2.714 billion (+5% vs 2024) and adjusted operating profit was £1.035 billion (+7% vs 2024).

Read more

Hello fellow journalologists,

Around this time of year the largest commercial publishers release their annual reports. These, often lengthy, documents contain lots of useful and important information for people working across the academic publishing sector.

Furthermore, the CEOs and CFOs are often quizzed by investors on their business strategy and future expectations, which can provide useful insights.

Over the past few weeks I’ve spent many hours delving into the annual reports and investor information; I’ve extracted nuggets that are likely to be of interest to Journalology readers. Rather than write one very long newsletter, I’ve decided to split the coverage over the course of a few weeks to make it easier for readers to digest.

Today’s email sets the scene. In the coming days I’ll publish newsletters that cover one or more companies.

My primary goal is to help publishing professionals, of all levels of seniority, to better understand the marketplace that they’re working in. If you aspire to rise to a leadership or management position you need to understand the market trends and what your competitors (and potential future employers) are up to.

I’ll do my best to explain some of the financial terminology that’s used in the reports and help you to understand each company’s current strategy (N.B. This is definitely NOT investment advice!).

Over the next few weeks paid subscribers to Journalology will receive emails analysing the following companies, based on the data released in their recent 2025 annual reports:

• Elsevier

• Springer Nature

• Wolters Kluwer

• Sage

• Taylor & Francis

• MDPI

• Frontiers

• Wiley (annual report won’t be released until June)

Collectively, these eight publishers account for around 40% of research and review journal articles published globally.

The annual reports need to be interpreted carefully — they all tell a tightly controlled corporate story — but they provide a unique insight into the companies’ priorities that often isn’t revealed elsewhere.

Article market share

The information I’ll present in future emails will largely come from the eight companies’ themselves. They each have their own way of presenting financial and non-financial data and it can be difficult to compare apples with pears (and USD with GBP and EUR).

So I thought I would set the scene by showing you how journal article output has changed over the past 10 years. The green bars depict the total number of research + review articles published in academic journals globally (i.e. all publishers, not just the eight publishers listed in yellow).

‘CAGR’ is compound annual growth rate, a way of measuring growth over time. I’ve calculated two CAGRs, one over the last 10 years and another over the last 5 years.

You can see from the bottom right of the table that the 10-year CAGR for the article market as a whole was 8.1% and the 5-year CAGR was 5.6%.

The 10-year CAGR for Frontiers and MDPI is much higher than the 5-year CAGR because their output peaked in 2022 and then dropped. The 5 and 10 year CAGRs for the established publishers is much more internally consistent.

The year-on-year article growth in 2025 vs 2024 tells an important story. The established commercial publishers grew much faster in 2025 than their historical CAGRs.

Springer Nature and Wiley both grew their article output by around 15% last year compared with 2024. Taylor & Francis and Elsevier grew by around 10%. Sage and Wolters Kluwer, which historically grew year-on-year in low single digits, managed between 5 and 7% growth. The article market as a whole grew by about 7% last year.

It can be inaccurate to do market-share calculations at this point in the year because data for many of the smaller publishers won’t be in Dimensions yet.

However, with that caveat in mind this is what the annual market share looks like — at this point in time — for the eight publishers. The 2025 numbers could change slightly in the future as more articles are added to Dimensions:

The yellow columns show the market share for each publisher in the calendar year. Elsevier and Springer Nature are getting close to recovering the ground they lost when open access kicked in around 2018, with MDPI and Frontiers growing rapidly at that point in time.

2025 was a particularly important year in the history of scholarly publishing. It will be remembered as the year AI tools were used at scale by researchers to help them to become more productive, producing financial opportunity for publishers but also considerable reputational risk because of research integrity challenges.

The publishers’ annual reports naturally tend to focus on the positives, and brush over the negatives, but are interesting to explore nonetheless. However, they are generally LONG. But don’t worry — I’ve read them in detail so you don’t need to.

First up is Elsevier, which will arrive in your inbox tomorrow.

Until next time,

James

The Jist provides readers with the gist of recent news stories related to scholarly publishing. Paid subscribers to Journalology also receive a weekly in-depth analysis of publishing industry developments.

Hello fellow journalologists,

China is both an opportunity and a threat for western academic publishers. In this issue of The Jist I’ve pulled together excerpts from recent news stories about academic publishing in China and also the wider Chinese research ecosystem. Publishing professionals, and academia more broadly, need to keep abreast of what’s happening in this important market, I’d argue.

None of the text that follows is mine; I’ve deliberately selected snippets that collectively tell a story and hopefully give readers a sense of the major trends. Most of the articles are from the past few weeks, but some are a little older.

We’ll start off with three stories that are directly relevant to publishers before moving on to news and opinion pieces that describe the current (and future) research landscape in China.

China releases global high-quality journal list for medicine, life sciences

A total of 4,027 medical journals and 3,064 life sciences journals were chosen to feature on the list. This list is intended to serve as a reference for researchers in selecting journals for submission, for academic institutions in research assessment, and for research management authorities in optimizing journal tiering systems. The list was iteratively generated based on global citation big data from 2023 to 2025, starting with a set of authoritative seed journals. The journals are categorized into four tiers, forming a pyramidal structure: Tier A represents top-tier journals, Tiers B and C constitute the academic core, while Tier D encompasses emerging and specialized fields.

What’s driving the rise of Chinese journals?

George Cooper, a lecturer in publishing practice at University College London in the UK, says another reason why China is investing in publishing is because of changes to the way it assesses research, moving away from volume-centric measures and stipulating that at least a third of all publications must be published in a domestic Chinese outlet. “You see a top-down policy shift from incentivising publishing in high-impact factor outlets, which are typically English language and overseas—which has been driving a lot of content to Western publishers, much to their benefit—to prioritising China’s own domestic research infrastructure,” he says.

Major Chinese funder to stop paying fees for 30 pricey open-access journals

In a challenge to open-access publishers, the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), the world’s largest research institution, has told its researchers it plans to stop paying to publish their papers in dozens of international free-to-read journals it regards as too expensive. High-profile, high-fee journals affected include Nature Communications, Cell Reports, and Science Advances.

How Chinese labs race for the next ‘first-in-class’ breakthrough

China’s leading scientists and research laboratories are racing to deliver the country’s next breakthroughs in chemistry and other fields, fueled by record investment in research and development as well as an aggressive push for scientific self-reliance. From battery materials to biomedicine development, China is focusing on advancements in chemistry that often lead to industrial applications and major commercial gains.

China intensifies push to become world leader in tech and AI

China is pledging to use ‘extraordinary measures’ to support the country’s bid to become a global leader in artificial intelligence, quantum technology and other cutting-edge technological fields, according to its 15th five-year plan. The plan was passed by the top legislature in Beijing on Thursday and published on Friday. It will run from 2026 to 2030 and serves as China’s overarching blueprint.

The real story behind China’s technology triumph

Many of China’s poorest provinces have better infrastructure than the United States’ wealthiest regions. China’s policies designed to stimulate manufacturing growth have led to price wars, waste and debt crises. It is true that China’s one-child policy and zero-COVID strategy caused unnecessary suffering. It is also true that US regulatory policies are hindering the provision of public services such as railways in the United States. Just for including these facts, I would call Wang’s book one of the best English-language texts on China published in the past few years.

Research security policy needs clear guidelines

The US approach to China illustrates the dangers of this accountability gap. Government security requirements are imposed upon researchers and institutions often without clear guidance on what’s allowed or disallowed. US-China scientific collaboration has declined sharply since 2017, even in fields far beyond military or space-based applications. In areas where China leads, continued cooperation could serve US interests. Yet no affirmative guidance is offered. Researchers are often left to guess, and guessing incorrectly can carry severe consequences.

Chinese university leadership changing but party ties still key

The analysis of leadership trends across China’s top universities between 2013 and 2023 found that doctoral degrees are now “nearly universal” among presidents, rising from 82.1 per cent in 2013 to 93.7 per cent in 2023, coinciding with China’s push to build world-class universities. Chinese institutions typically have two leaders; the president, who oversees academic and administrative affairs, and the party secretary, who provides political and ideological leadership. The share of party secretaries with PhDs also increased from 73.2 per cent to 88.5 per cent, the study found.

China could be the world’s biggest public funder of science within two years

China is on the cusp of becoming the world’s biggest public funder of research, according to a forecast by US academics, as stalled growth in government investment in the United States coincides with consistent rises in spending by the Chinese authorities. The analysis — produced exclusively for Nature Index — was the work of researchers from Frontiers in Science and Innovation Policy (FSIP), a programme at the University of California, San Diego, that studies the US research and development (R&D) system and examines the extent to which public and private funding boost technological development.

‘Quality has to catch up with quantity’ in China’s HE expansion

Postiglione’s book, Higher Education in China: Domestic Demands and Global Aspirations, due out next month, charts China’s rise in global higher education, which has been underpinned by heavy state investment. He said that by 2025 China had double the number of students going to college as in the US, four times as many STEM graduates and twice the number of STEM PhDs. He added that, based on research output, China now has “nine of the world’s top 10 universities” and leads globally in fields including chemistry and environmental science.

China hikes research spending as self-reliance remains priority

Filchenko said partnership remains critical to China’s research standing. “Internationally co-authored papers achieve higher citation impact than domestic-only outputs,” he said, pointing to growing partnerships with Europe, Asia-Pacific and the Middle East. Despite the increased investment, there are questions about whether China will be able to attract top international talent to boost its knowledge base. Groenewegen-Lau said China is likely to continue drawing researchers with existing ties to the country, but may struggle to attract those without such links. “The money alone…is probably not enough to really change the trend,” he said, citing challenges around language, bureaucracy and career progression.

Why China’s philanthropists are digging deep for research

Zhang believes the combination of financial incentives and the political need for Chinese companies to show their support for the government is building significant momentum overall in private-sector funding of fundamental research. “These two things will become a hotbed for nurturing China’s scientific innovation in the next ten years,” she says. Alongside the rapidly growing pot of public money, it points to an overall investment in fundamental discovery that is rapidly catching the United States, where funding for federal research agencies — such as the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health — has been under threat under President Donald Trump.

Geopolitical tensions are leading China to rethink research collaboration

In interviews I had with 12 senior academics and administrators at Chinese universities in late 2025, the participants described a shift towards a system of collaboration that still seeks global partnerships, but which is anchored by domestic concerns. The model captures a tension between political pressure to restrict knowledge and data and reputational incentives to remain engaged in international collaboration. As one dean told me, “There is a clear understanding that cutting ourselves off would damage our research capacity and talent development. So, international engagement remains a necessity, not a choice.”

The pros and cons of China’s health role in Africa

This deepened commitment to Africa coincides with a sharp decline in US support for aid programmes in low‑ and middle‑income countries, including for health and collaborative research in Africa. In March 2025, the US government announced that 83% of programmes run by the US Agency for International Development (USAID) would be cancelled. Sub‑Saharan Africa was USAID’s largest recipient region in 2024, receiving an estimated $12.3 billion of the agency’s roughly $35 billion in total allocations. China cannot replace US contributions in Africa, says Han Cheng of the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin, who studies China’s global engagement. “If you think about the scale and scope of US aid on the ground, China can’t match that.”

China is an innovation powerhouse — but it should do more fundamental research

China’s state-led research model has paid dividends, enabling the nation to funnel vast resources into key sectors, such as artificial intelligence, quantum technologies and integrated circuits. Globally, China now leads in nearly 90% of crucial technologies that markedly enhance, or pose risks to, a country’s national interests, suggests a 2025 analysis by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, a think tank based in Canberra. By contrast, between 2003 and 2007, the United States led in more than 90% of areas and China in just 5% of them.

Until next time,

James

Hello fellow journalologists,

This week’s issue of Journalology contains fewer stories than usual, which should make it easier for you to quickly parse. I want to respect your time; providing a stronger editorial filter is one way of doing that.

As an experiment, I’ve collated the news and announcements that didn’t make the cut into an ‘overmatter’ Google…

Read more

The Jist provides readers with the gist of recent news stories, written by journalists, that cover events in scholarly publishing. Paid subscribers to Journalology also receive an in-depth analysis of recent publishing industry developments, sent mid-week. You can upgrade your subscription here.

Hello fellow journalologists,

This week I delve into the third most highly cited paper of 2025, which was published in a journal that launched the previous year. The article’s corresponding author, the journal’s owner, and the journal’s Editor-in-Chief have quite a lot in common: 46 chromosomes in common, in fact. Read on to find out more.

News headlines

Controversial editorial practices boost plastic surgeon’s publishing empire

Although practices vary, the journals Agha founded aren’t alone in requiring authors to follow, and sometimes even cite, reporting guidelines. But a conflict of interest can arise when an editor demands authors reference guideline papers published in the editor’s own journals – as Agha does in his instructions to authors, reporting guidelines and editorial correspondence.

Retraction Watch (Frederik Joelving)

JB: This Retraction Watch news story primarily focuses on the journals that Riaz Agha, a plastic surgeon and entrepreneur, sold to Wolters Kluwer in 2022.

Riaz Agha went on to found Premier Science, which publishes 21 journals. I didn’t know much about the portfolio, so I decided to do some digging. This is what I found.

Each journal in the portfolio is prefixed with Premier Journal of xxxx and most have published only a handful of papers. The first journals started publishing articles in 2024.

Riaz Agha and Mahlia Agha (the co-owners of Premier Science) were authors on three highly cited papers that appeared in the flagship title, Premier Journal of Science in 2025 (source: Dimensions).

The first paper — a guidelines paper published in June 2025 — has received 2000 citations in the past 9 months. Indeed, this paper is the third most highly cited paper (published in any journal globally) of 2025. Riaz Agha is the corresponding author.

A Waybackmachine snapshot taken on August 3, 2025, lists Riaz Agha as the Editor-in-Chief of Premier Journal of Science.

In other words, it appears that the journal’s Editor-in-Chief, owner, and corresponding author of its most highly cited paper are one and the same person. The conflicts of interest statement for the TITAN Guidelines paper reads:

The authors have no financial, consultative, institutional, or other relationships that might lead to bias or a conflict of interest.

It’s not clear who the handling editor was for the paper or if Riaz Agha, the corresponding author (and Editor-in-Chief), was involved in the editorial assessment process. Peer review certainly happened fast:

The Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) has this to say about editorial independence:

The relationship of editors to publishers and journal owners is often complex but should always be based on the principle of editorial independence. Notwithstanding the economic and political realities of your journal, you should select submissions on the basis of their quality and suitability for readers rather than for immediate financial, political or personal gain.

It’s worth noting that Riaz Agha is no longer the Editor-in-Chief of any of the Premier Science journals and is listed as the Founder and Publishing Director. His biography states:

Dr Agha is also a Practising Plastic Surgeon working in London’s Harley Street having completed his training in the London Deanery in April 2020. He is also President-elect of the Section of Plastic Surgery at the Royal Society of Medicine. In 2018, he was awarded a doctorate at Balliol College, University of Oxford where he was a Clarendon Scholar (awarded to the top <1% of 20,000 applicants).

What’s driving the rise of Chinese journals?

Yet Chinese publishers still face major challenges. Cao says Chinese scientists still prefer publishing in international journals, partly because getting published in China often depends on being in the right networks. “International journals are perceived to be fair, transparent,” he says.Publishing in international journals also makes it more likely that Chinese academics’ work will be read. Even when Chinese-language journals produce abstracts in English, few academics from outside the country have the language skills to verify what the abstract says. “Not many international scientists read Chinese,” says Cao. “That affects the spreading of knowledge produced in China.”

Research Professional News (Harriet Swain)

JB: This article provides an excellent overview of some of the current market dynamics in China (N.B. paywall).

A few people have told me recently that they don’t believe that China will dominate high impact science in the future. Read these three news stories, which were published in the past week, to see if you agree:

• Top brass in China reaffirm goal to be world leaders in tech, AI

• China pledges billion-dollar spending boost for science

• How Chinese labs race for the next ‘first-in-class’ breakthrough

Hallucinated references are passing peer review at top AI conferences and a new open tool wants to fix that

To address these shortcomings, the team is releasing CiteAudit, which they say is the first comprehensive, open benchmark and detection system for hallucinated citations. The dataset includes 6,475 real and 2,967 fake citations. A generated test dataset contains fakes from models like GPT, Gemini, Claude, Qwen, and Llama. The real test dataset draws from actual hallucinations found in papers on Google Scholar, OpenReview, ArXiv, and BioRxiv. The researchers systematically categorize hallucination types, from subtle keyword swaps in titles and fabricated author lists to fake conference names and made-up DOI numbers.

The Decoder (Jonathan Kemper)

Scientific sleuths come in from the cold

Some research integrity practitioners agree that standards for their sleuthing work is needed, but others in the idiosyncratic field think the process doesn’t need defining or labeling. Instead, they argue that constructive criticism of researchers and the articles they publish should be considered an integral part of the scientific process—and the responsibility of the academic community as a whole. It’s a healthy debate in a field populated by an eclectic assortment of people, many of whom take pleasure in searching for, and publicizing, scientific fraud. They often labor in isolation on nights and weekends, alongside full-time jobs.

Chemical & Engineering News (Dalmeet Singh Chawla)

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.

Retraction Watch (Avery Orrall)

JB: Yeah, that happened to me too. On November 15, 2025, I received this email:

My PhD is in neurophysiology and I haven’t published a research paper since 1998. I know very little about agriculture or food science.

Needless to say, inviting the person who had recently published Cureus loses its impact factor, to apply to join the editorial team of a spin off Cureus journal could be considered to be a bit of an own goal.

I approached my former Springer Nature colleagues for comment shortly after receiving the email last November; I thought about writing a story about the marketing email, but decided against it. Glitches happen during IT migrations, after all.

Recruiting editors by emailing people who have signed up to eAlerts feels icky to me; some might argue that it’s not much different from posting an editorial job advert online. A Springer Nature spokesperson told me at the time:

Just to be clear – the email was a call to apply, intended for a small subset of relevant researchers, inviting them to apply. Once we receive applications for the role, we have stringent processes to vet applicants (credibility, integrity, etc.) and interview them before we appoint them. Once appointed, we constantly review the quality and integrity of editorial work.

How bioRxiv changed the way biologists share ideas – in numbers

In total, researchers have now posted more than 310,000 preprints to bioRxiv since it first launched in 2013, and the site receives about ten million views every month (see ‘The growth of bioRxiv’). The work also hints that the benefits of quick dissemination of research are winning over fears that the lack of peer review in preprints could cause a loss of rigorous quality control in scientific publishing.

Nature (Chris Simms)

JB: I covered this report in the newsletter that I sent to paid subscribers on Wednesday. Unfortunately, the Nature news editors decided to reproduce the bottom half, but not the top half, of Figure 4 in the report. Plotting cumulative submissions over time makes it look as though bioRxiv has grown much faster than it actually has.

Keep calm and be transparent: advice from scientists who retracted their papers

Research has shown that when authors self-retract because of honest mistakes, their earlier work continues to be cited. These data, along with anecdotes such as King’s story, suggest that attitudes about retractions might eventually shift. Nature reached out to scientists who have openly retracted their studies, and asked about their experiences and lessons learnt.

Nature (Sofia Caetano Avritzer)

JB: This story should help reassure academics that correcting mistakes via a retraction will likely not adversely affect their career.

And finally…

I thoroughly enjoyed this Nature podcast: Nervous networker or conference presenter? Just care less, says voice coach Susie Ashfield.

In fact, I enjoyed it so much that I went ahead and bought Susie’s book: Just F**king Say It: The Ultimate Guide to Speaking with Confidence In Any Situation.

I’ve only read a few pages so far, but this extract from the introduction made me enthusiastic to read more:

James is going to do it. He’s going to go out there and just f**king say it… He will speak, and it’ll sound as though something brilliant just popped into his head on the way to the stage.

Excellent! That’s just what I need and is certainly worth the £0.99 Kindle entry fee.

Until next time,

James

P.S. Editor friends: should it be Mother’s Day or Mothers’ Day? I attended a school play this week that had banners with Mothers Day emblazoned on them. Ugh.

Hello fellow journalologists,

There have been more announcements than usual this week, perhaps to coincide with the London Book Fair. This week I compare the revenues of some of the largest society publishers; discuss various announcements related to preprints; and, unfortunately, report on significant job losses at Karger, which was acquired by OUP last…

Read more

The Jist summarises journalist-written content for journalologists, providing readers with the gist of recent news stories in scholarly publishing. Paid subscribers to Journalology also receive an in-depth analysis of recent publishing industry developments, sent mid-week.

Hello fellow journalologists,

I started writing Journalology in August 2022. By October 2025, when I migrated the newsletter to Substack, Journalology had around 5500 subscribers. Growth had happened slowly and steadily over a period of 3 years primarily by word of mouth; most of the readers worked in academic publishing or adjacent fields.

Last week the Journalology newsletter hit the 8000 subscriber mark; 2500 new subscribers have signed up to Journalology in the past 4 months. Journalology is now ranked #10 in the Bestseller in Science list and so the newsletter gets more visibility on the Substack platform as a result.

I strongly suspect that the majority of the 2500 recent subscribers do not work for academic publishers. I want to help this broader range of people to discover stories that help them to understand the challenges that scholarly publishing currently faces.

I’m committed to providing a free version of the Journalology newsletter that complements the paid analysis that gets sent out mid week. The free newsletter is now called The Jist, an imprint that I’ve used before.

This should help to differentiate the free newsletter (The Jist) from the in-depth analysis that I provide in the mid-week, full-length Journalology newsletter, which goes to paid subscribers. The Jist will be sent on Sundays, probably biweekly, depending on how much news there is to cover.

News headlines

Career effects of preprints get mixed reviews from biomedical researchers

Nearly half of biomedical scientists worry preprints could spread shoddy research and misinformation, according to a new survey that could help explain why the life sciences have taken up the publishing practice more slowly than some other fields. The survey is one of the largest to date to examine views of life sciences researchers on the practice of placing non–peer-reviewed manuscripts on public servers. The results, posted this week on the bioRxiv preprint server, also reveal that researchers on average do not believe publishing preprints enhances their career advancement. But many acknowledge benefits, such as spreading their findings more quickly than peer-review journals do and helping them find collaborators.

Science (Jeffrey Brainard)

JB: I’ve included this graph of preprints in Europe PMC before, but here it is again because it tells an important story: monthly preprint output in the biomedical sciences is not growing, despite the publicity and promotion that preprints have received in recent years.

Richard Sever, who is Chief Science and Strategy Officer at openRxiv, perhaps unsurprisingly provides a more positive outlook on preprints, as reported in the Science story:

But concerns over quality may be based more on researchers’ impressions than evidence, Sever says, noting that bioRxiv and medRxiv reject submissions that don’t use the scientific method or that pose obvious risks to public health. Preprinting a fraudulent manuscript exposes it to more scrutiny than if it appeared only in a journal, he adds. “If you get a reputation for being the person who always puts up stuff [on preprint servers] which doesn’t have complete data and is shoddy, then you’re done in academia.” What’s more, some 80% of preprints eventually appear in peer-reviewed journals. And despite their quality checks, journals publish problematic papers, he says.

Major Chinese funder to stop paying fees for 30 pricey open-access journals

In a challenge to open-access publishers, the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), the world’s largest research institution, has told its researchers it plans to stop paying to publish their papers in dozens of international free-to-read journals it regards as too expensive. High-profile, high-fee journals affected include Nature Communications, Cell Reports, and Science Advances. CAS, which employs more than 50,000 researchers across some 100 institutes, has yet to publicly announce the new policy, expected to take effect on 1 March. Observers say it is likely aimed at controlling costs and perhaps boosting China’s own journals.

Science (Jeffrey Brainard)

JB: I wrote about this story in Thursday’s newsletter. I also covered the proposed NIH price cap (which is expected imminently) 8 months ago.

Five ways to spot when a paper is a fraud

Unfortunately, the current deluge of bad papers is unlikely to subside without massive systemic changes. And advances in AI and other technologies are only making fraudulent papers harder to catch. But that doesn’t mean that it’s a waste of time to stay on the lookout. The scientific community, Richardson says, is like a nature reserve — something to be protected and maintained, but also enjoyed. You might not walk through the reserve with the intention of keeping it clean, he says, but “it doesn’t hurt to pick up trash every now and again”.

Nature (Stephanie Melchor)

JB: This news feature provides tips from research integrity sleuths on how to sniff out dodgy papers.

AI agents are ‘aeroplanes for the mind’: five ways to ensure that scientists are responsible pilots

AI research agents will look different in each field, but they should follow the same basic rules: results should be traceable, methods verifiable and responsibilities assigned clearly. Establishing those rules will require coordination between scientific societies, funders, journals, public research infrastructures and the AI labs building today’s models. The goal is a shared public–private framework for interoperability — for instance, common standards for logging agent decisions so that an analysis run in one lab can be audited or reproduced by another.

Nature (Dashun Wang)

JB: I tried to find five news stories where Nature used “five ways” in the title, but could only find two in the past few weeks (see above).

Censorship and safety concerns cloud China’s plans to host science journalism conference

Proponents of holding the meeting in China hope it will assist science journalists there and help connect international reporters to the country’s scientists. But others worry discussion of certain topics will be suppressed, and that some journalists will not be able to safely travel to a country that regularly detains members of the press. “It’s insane that you would pick the world’s largest prison for journalists to hold a science journalism conference,” says Jackson Ryan, president of the Science Journalists Association of Australia, who presented that country’s bid.

Science (Anthony King)

A medical journal says the case reports it has published for 25 years are, in fact, fiction

A Canadian journal has issued corrections on 138 case reports it published over the last 25 years to add a disclaimer: The cases described are fictional. Paediatrics & Child Health, the journal of the Canadian Paediatric Society, has published the cases since 2000 in articles for a series for its Canadian Paediatric Surveillance Program. The articles usually start with a case description followed by “learning points” that include statistics, clinical observations and data from CPSP. The peer-reviewed articles don’t state anywhere the cases described are fictional.

Retraction Watch (Kate Travis)

JB: This journal, currently published by Oxford University Press, has been publishing fake clinical case reports for 25 years without making it clear that the cases were entirely fictitious. The journal is indexed by Web of Science and PMC:

The journal also submits the full text of its articles to PubMed Central, including the case studies. The versions on PubMed Central also do not bear any indication the case reports are fictional.

Hey ChatGPT, write me a fictional paper: these LLMs are willing to commit academic fraud

All major large language models (LLMs) can be used to either commit academic fraud or facilitate junk science, a test of 13 models has found. Still, some LLMs performed better than others in the experiment, in which the models were given prompts to simulate users asking for help with issues ranging from genuine curiosity to blatant academic fraud. The most resistant to committing fraud, when asked repeatedly, were all versions of Claude, made by Anthropic in San Francisco, California. Meanwhile, versions of Grok, from xAI in Palo Alto, California, and early versions of GPT, from San Francisco-based OpenAI, performed the worst.

Nature (Elizabeth Gibney)

JB: I tend to use Google Gemini because it’s included in my Google Workspace subscription, but I plan to experiment with Claude soon, not least because Anthropic is standing up for itself against the US government.

Chemist nears three dozen retractions for image duplication, self-citation and more

In at least eight of the retractions, named problems include citation manipulation. By the time one paper went from submission to publication in Heliyon, the authors had added 28 citations that were “not relevant to the topic of the paper and benefit authors,” including Louis, according to the retraction notice. In another Heliyon paper, between submission and publication, self-citations for Louis increased from seven to 38 and from two to nine for Benjamin. And in a third Heliyon paper, self-citations jumped from one to 14 for Louis and from two to 11 for Benjamin.

Retraction Watch (Lori Youmshajekian)

JB: Heliyon is a Cell Press journal published by Elsevier and has been issuing retraction notices at scale in recent months (there were 582 retractions when I wrote this LinkedIn post a month ago; there are now 858 retraction notices issued by Heliyon).

The table below shows the 10 journals that shrank the most in 2025 compared with 2024 (taken from this Journalology newsletter from December 2025). Heliyon tops the chart.

This AI can improve your peer review — and make it more polite

About 24% of the reviewers who received AI feedback revised their reviews, making their comments on average 80 words longer as they added more specificity. A set of human specialists who evaluated a subset of the revised reviews judged 68% of them to be better than the originals. Authors whose reviews had received AI feedback wrote longer rebuttals than did those whose hadn’t, and reviewer responses to those rebuttals were also longer. Zou interprets these lengthier responses as higher engagement in the process.

Nature (Nicola Jones)

JB: Politeness is a good thing. It’s a shame some people need a machine to help them to treat colleagues respectfully.

Will AI Help or Hinder Scientific Publishing?

Meanwhile, scientific publishing is confronting AI in another realm: peer review. As an editor, Perlis has noticed that, since the pandemic, it has gotten more difficult to recruit reviewers willing to evaluate manuscripts, as researchers became more burnt out and more began declining review requests, or simply did not respond to editors’ calls. Allowing researchers to use AI could “broaden the pool of people who can contribute to science in some way,” he said. (A 2025 survey of about 1,600 scientists by the publishing company Frontiers found about half reported using AI to help conduct peer review.)

Undark (Claudia López Lloreda)

Is authors’ treatment by publishers getting worse?

But publishers are generally wary of speaking publicly about the friction that can arise between authors, reviewers and editors. Times Higher Education approached a number of leading university presses and academic publishers, but most – Cambridge, Chicago, Oxford, MIT, Princeton and Routledge/Taylor and Francis – failed to reply or opted not to be quoted.

Times Higher Education (Matthew Reisz)

JB: Publishers are often vilified on social media and some news outlets also enjoy a pile-on. I can understand why people working at publishers are reluctant to engage; I was too when I had a salaried job. It’s important to do so, though, otherwise the narrative will continue to be negative and one-sided.

The Value Challenge in Scholarly Publishing

Yet many in academia continue to view publishers as gatekeepers who benefit disproportionately from academic labor while offering limited recognition or return. At the same time, publishers frequently underestimate how undervalued and overburdened authors and reviewers feel, as demands on their time continue to grow. The result is a reinforcing cycle of mistrust. Scholars criticize, publishers defend, and both sides retreat into increasingly entrenched positions.

The Scholarly Kitchen (Ashutosh Ghildiyal)

JB: This opinion piece explores some important issues that should be discussed more. Most of the stories included in today’s newsletter are “bad news” stories, which provide a skewed view of the publishing industry.

The thousands of people working in academic publishing make many positive contributions to the research enterprise; those ‘stories’ don’t make good copy, unfortunately.

And finally…

Pokémon turns 30 — how the fictional pocket monsters shaped science

The world of Pokémon has also been used to expose dodgy practices in academic publishing. As well as playing Pokémon Go in his spare time, entomologist Matan Shelomi at National Taiwan University in Taipei used Pokémon to raise awareness about predatory journals, which are “just a scourge on academia”, he says. In 2019, he began writing dozens of fake papers using with made-up references and fictitious co-authors including characters from Pokémon such as Professor Samuel Oak and submitted them to journals that he suspected to be predatory. “Any predatory journal that sent me spam e-mail, I would reply with one of these fake submissions,” he says.

If you know any kids who are interested in Pokémon, this story is worth reading. My 8-year-old is a taxonomist in training.

Until next time,

James

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One of the tenets of scholarly publishing is that we correct the record when we get something wrong. Last week I made a slightly snarky comment about Cabells n…

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Hello fellow journalologists,

Tomorrow I’m travelling down to London for the Researcher to Reader conference. Hopefully I’ll see some Journalology readers there.

Today’s newsletter includes snippets from news stories, written by journalists, that are likely to have broad appeal. This section is ‘free to read’ by everyone who has signed up to the Journalology newsletter.

On Tuesday, paid subscribers will receive an additional newsletter that contains a deep dive into the news that matters for publishing professionals. You can upgrade your subscription here.

News headlines

Journal giant Elsevier unveiled an AI tool that scans millions of paywalled papers. Is it worth it?

LeapSpace is offering what appears to be one of the largest corpuses of full-text, paywalled papers and books, totaling 18 million. The AI can access articles from Elsevier’s own collection and those of its four partners: Emerald, the Institute of Physics, the New England Journal of Medicine Group, and Sage Publications. (It pays its partners a royalty per use, and the tool gives their articles more exposure.) Elsevier has promised that the analytical reports will not favor citations to its own content, and that users’ queries will be kept private and not used to train the proprietary LLMs, from the OpenAI group, that support LeapSpace.

JB: This news story in Science provides a useful overview of Elsevier’s LeapSpace tool, which I’ve covered in this newsletter previously.

Elsevier publishes more Q1 impact factor journals than any other publisher and is best placed to make a subscription product like this work. Erik Engstrom, the RELX CEO, is quoted at the end of the news story:

Engstrom also said that, unlike other publishers that have licensed their content to AI developers, Elsevier plans to limit such sharing because it believes automated analysis of its content will be a core part of the company’s future. “We have a content advantage that we believe is very sustainable and very strong.”

‘Retract papers based on flawed citations’, urges integrity tsar

Academic publishers should also make greater efforts to remove papers citing multiple retracted studies, continued Cabanac. “This is something I find infuriating – publishers should be accountable for what appears in their books, journals and conference papers. They should be constantly reassessing their materials and removing them when problems arise… but I know of no publisher which has set up a task force to check the bibliographies of the work they publish and sell,” he said.

“It’s difficult to do but I have done the work for them,” he said, referring to the publicly available cache of data on his Problematic Paper Screener portal established in February 2021.

JB: Guillaume Cabanac, who uses tortured phrases to identify dubious papers, is the “integrity tsar” mentioned in the headline. “Uprightness potentate”, would be a more appropriate moniker, surely?

Guillaume also appeared in another news story: Correction to a retraction highlights tortured phrases have been around longer than LLMs.

To his knowledge, LLMs don’t produce tortured phrases, Cabanac said in a follow-up email to us. Sage issued a correction to its retraction in January, stating the original notice “incorrectly cited the origin of tortured phrases to the use of a large language model.”

Nanoscience is latest discipline to embrace large-scale replication efforts

Although replication efforts such as these have become more common over the past decade, work that highlights problems and mistakes is not yet widely viewed as a legitimately mainstream part of research, argues Malte Elson, a psychologist and metascientist at the University of Bern. “I think there’s still a great stigma in your work not being replicated or somebody finding an error,” he says. “This is a very regrettable sort of cultural phenomenon. Part of discovering truth is being able to say when something is wrong.”

Stone, parchment or laser-written glass? Scientists find new way to preserve data

Writing in the journal Nature, Black and colleagues report how the system works by turning data – in the form of bits – into groups of symbols, which are then encoded as tiny deformations, or voxels, within a piece of glass using a femtosecond laser. Several hundred layers of these voxels, Black notes, can be made within 2mm of glass. The system uses a single laser pulse to make each voxel, making it highly efficient. By splitting the laser into four independent beams writing at the same time, the team say the technology can record 65.9m bits per second. The researchers found they could store 4.84TB of data in a 12 sq cm piece of fused silica glass, 2mm deep – about the same amount of information that is held in 2m printed books, an accompanying article by researchers in China notes.

JB: You can read the research paper here and the accompanying News & Views article here, which concludes with this heady possibility:

Silica unites performance, durability and practical feasibility, transforming a laboratory concept into a viable solution for preserving the records of human civilization. If implemented at scale, it could represent a milestone in the history of knowledge storage, akin to oracle bones, medieval parchment or the modern hard drive. One day, a single piece of glass might carry the torch of human culture and knowledge across millennia.

OSTP to review potential “repeal” of Nelson Memo

Tucked into the “Joint Explanatory Statement” accompanying the Appropriations “Minibus” passed in January is a non-binding provision requesting that the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) report on the status of a “process of repealing the August 25, 2022, Memorandum to Executive Departments and Agencies entitled, ‘Ensuring Free, Immediate, and Equitable Access to Federally Funded Research,’” commonly known as the Nelson memo. STM has learned that the current Administration has expressed concerns about the Nelson memo and is reviewing potential options.

JB: The Nelson memo was the biggest story in academic publishing in 2022. US science has been turned upside down since then. A year ago David Crotty, who is now Executive Director of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press, wrote:

Been thinking a lot about the incredible amount of wasted time, effort, and money that publishers and publishing societies have spent chasing the short-lived whims of research funders. Think about how much work went into the whole “Transformative Journal” thing, only to see that eventually squashed by the very funders who proposed it. Or if you flipped your whole portfolio to fully-OA because of the Gates policy and now they tell you they will no longer pay APCs. In the US with the imminent death of the Nelson Memo, how much time and effort has been invested in strategies and products to meet the requirements of that policy which will now likely be put on hold or abandoned altogether?

Publishers of all types will be wary of changing their strategies in response to future funder mandates, I suspect.

Can we predict which chemistry research projects will pay off?

A new metrics-based approach aims to analyze paper citations, patents, news articles, and more to predict areas that are primed to provide the most benefit for the research dollar. Experts caution that the tool and its focus on metrics may not provide the level of desired insight, especially when it comes to predicting societal impact.

Microsoft has a new plan to prove what’s real and what’s AI online

It is into this mess that Microsoft has put forward a blueprint, shared with MIT Technology Review, for how to prove what’s real online. An AI safety research team at the company recently evaluated how methods for documenting digital manipulation are faring against today’s most worrying AI developments, like interactive deepfakes and widely accessible hyperrealistic models. It then recommended technical standards that can be adopted by AI companies and social media platforms.

JB: You can read the Microsoft report here: Media Integrity and Authentication: Status, Directions, and Futures.

‘Toxic culture’ caused by REF pressure to target top journals

Academics claim they are coming under growing pressure to publish in highly rated publications ahead of the Research Excellence Framework (REF), contributing to a “target-driven” culture that discriminates against other types of research outputs. In a highly critical report into working practices at the University of Liverpool Management School prepared by University and College Union (UCU) representatives, policies that require staff to publish in journals designated 3* or 4* by the Academic Journal Group and in those on the FT50 list are cited as a source of “considerable apprehension” for a majority of staff.

JB: The Academic Journal Guide and FT Research Rank (see here for an explanation) are hugely influential in economics, business and management research.

And finally…

A former colleague of mine, Helen Pearson, has written a book that will be published in April and will likely appeal to many readers of this newsletter.

Here’s an excerpt from the blurb of Beyond Belief: How Evidence Shows What Really Works:

Today, more and more people around the globe are using scientific evidence to figure out what works—in health, government and business as well as conservation, schools and parenting. This wasn’t always the case. This book tells the story of the evidence revolution—a worldwide movement that promotes evidence-based thinking—and shows how it can help us all, especially in an age of alternative facts.

Helen is the former Chief Magazine Editor of Nature and is Honorary Professor of Practice at University College London. I always enjoy reading Helen’s journalistic work and I’m sure you will too. You can preorder the book on Amazon and other retailers or directly from Princeton University Press (the reviews are impressive).

Until next time,

James

Hello fellow journalologists,

I’m writing this week’s newsletter from wet and windy Wales. You’ve received this email because you (or your organisation) is a paid subscriber to Journalology. Thank you for your support.

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Hello fellow journalologists,

I’ve decided to split this newsletter and start sending two emails a week.

The Sunday email will be ‘free to read’ by everyone and will largely focus on news stories written by journalists, which are likely to be of interest to a broad audience.

Paid subscribers will also receive a longer email midweek that contains a deep dive into more specialist publishing stories.

I’m making this change primarily to make the writing process more manageable. Thursdays and Fridays are especially popular days for announcements; I’ve been struggling to get everything together by Sunday without spending a day writing at the weekend.

I know that some Journalologists enjoy the long read on a Sunday and I’m sorry to make a change to that routine. Hopefully you will understand.

News headlines

China to punish universities that fail to sanction research misconduct

China’s science ministry will crack down on universities that fail to investigate or sanction researchers who are involved in serious research misconduct. The move is part of a renewed push to get academics and their institutions to take scientific integrity more seriously. The nation’s Ministry of Science and Technology (MOST) said in a notification on its website that institutions should focus on investigating papers that are retracted in international science journals as a result of misconduct. The results of those investigations will be publicized to enhance deterrence. Institutions will face serious penalties if they conceal or tolerate wrongdoing by their researchers, the note states, although it does not reveal what those penalties might be.

JB: Ideally, research integrity issues should be stopped at source; punishing misconduct after it occurred is the second best option. Unfortunately, many universities focus on reputational damage control, rather than putting effort into ensuring that their faculty’s output meets basic quality standards.

How AI slop is causing a crisis in computer science

Computer science is the first field to face the deluge of slop — because research happens in silico and is done by researchers with AI expertise. But with the rise of AI, similar challenges are likely to arise in other fields, including wet-lab-based disciplines, says Lee, “although they may manifest in somewhat different ways”. Speaking to reporters at the launch of Prism last month, Kevin Weil, vice-president of science at OpenAI in San Francisco, California, compared the problem of weeding out low-quality AI-made content with that of spam filtering for e-mails. Working out how to filter out low-quality AI-assisted science is “a real important problem, but we also want to make sure that we are accelerating the top end and helping great scientists do more”, he said.

JB: This article pulls together various stories related to computer science and AI-generated articles that have broken in the past month (most, if not all, I’ve covered in this newsletter).

If this is old news to you, perhaps this story from Nature will grab your interest: AI agents are hiring human ‘meatspace workers’ — including some scientists.

The idea is simple, as the website’s homepage reads: “robots need your body”. Human users can create profiles to advertise their skills for tasks that an AI tool can’t accomplish on its own — go to meetings, conduct experiments, or play instruments, for example — along with how much they expect to be paid. People — or ‘meatspace workers’ as the site calls them — can then apply to jobs posted by AI agents or wait to be contacted by one. The website shows that more than 450,000 people have offered their services on the site.

As journal’s retraction count nears 170, it enhances vetting

In response to the findings, ASTM has implemented a series of safeguards, including enhanced vetting and oversight of guest editors, tighter controls for peer reviewers, expanded use of technology-assisted screening tools to detect irregular review patterns and ongoing monitoring of editorial workflows, according to a Jan. 30 statement from the publisher.

JB: This is an update on a story that I covered in issue 138. ASTM = American Society For Testing And Materials, which self publishes a handful of journals.

The CDC hepatitis B study is unethical and must never be published

The Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE), an international organization that establishes best practices for scholarly journals, has endorsed specific ethical standards for studies that involve vulnerable groups. Among these standards is this statement in the Declaration of Helsinki: “Reports of research not in accordance with this Declaration should not be accepted for publication.” The current controversy about the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) funding for a proposed study of hepatitis B vaccines in Guinea-Bissau must serve as a reminder of this core requirement of publication ethics.

JB: I’m including an extract from this essay to raise awareness of this important issue. On Friday the World Health Organization released this statement:

WHO is aware of the proposed randomized controlled trial (RCT) on the hepatitis B birth dose vaccine in Guinea‑Bissau. Based on questions raised in publicly available information and consultation with relevant experts, WHO has significant concerns regarding the study’s scientific justification, ethical safeguards, and overall alignment with established principles for research involving human participants.

Number of UK universities opting out of Elsevier deal hits nine

While not all universities are signing up to agreements with all five publishers—with some also having opted out of deals in previous years—Elsevier appears to be seeing the greatest number of rejections, with universities criticising pricing and a perceived lack of willingness by the publisher to respond to research community asks on open access. Amid ongoing financial pressures on the UK higher education sector, there were expectations that some universities would not be able to afford to renew their deals.

JB: Last year the UK published 170,000 research articles. These nine universities appear on 15,500 (9%) of those articles (source: Dimensions).

AI help in grant proposals tied to higher funding odds at NIH

Scientists are increasingly turning to artificial-intelligence systems for help drafting the grant proposals that fund their careers, but preliminary data indicate that these tools might be pulling the focus of research towards safe, less-innovative ideas. These data provide evidence that AI-assisted proposals submitted to the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) are consistently less distinct from previous research than ones written without the use of AI — and are also slightly more likely to be funded.

JB: Would the same be true for research articles submitted to journals? Probably.

And finally…

I try to read Richard Horton’s column in The Lancet, the journal he edits, every week. The latest essay is Meditations of Melancholy.

The word that explains our current state of mind is anomie—according to Émile Durkheim, a serious disturbance of society’s collective order, a sudden rearrangement or transformation of the social body, a disruption producing a state of disorganisation that creates disappointment, exasperation, and suffering.

Richard reflects on a lecture he attended last year by Salim Abdool Karim entitled Science Under Threat.

Karim concluded his lecture with a to-do list of actions to defeat the assault on science. Recognise and understand the problem. Defend the role of the scientist in society. Fact-check everything. Rebuild trust. And remember that every act of resistance helps. A political strategist I know once said, “We will not win because we are right, we will win because we are organised.”

The academic publishing industry is failing miserably at “fact-check everything”. We need to be better organised. We need to rebuild trust.

Given the volume of research content that’s being created, we have to leverage technology to help. But that, in itself, creates problems, as Krishna Kumar Venkitachalam explored in his Scholarly Kitchen essay on AI anxiety.

Science operates in a strange space. The system is designed to be ruthless, unemotional, and evidence-based. Yet the individuals running it are warm-blooded, vulnerable, emotional, gut-feeling-based humans. So far, we’ve balanced this such that the system stays rigorous while humans stay involved enough. AI threatens to disrupt this balance by replacing human interactions that happen in the margins. From my perspective, role redundancy is less concerning than what happens when we stop interacting with each other and start interfacing primarily with systems.

Curiosity and inquiry are unique human characteristics. Science is under threat, not just from politicians but also from within. Have we truly recognised and understood the problems we’re facing? When quantity matters more than quality — when output is the primary measure of success, for both researchers and for publishers — we risk losing sight of what really matters: a trusted role for science, and academic research more broadly, in society.

Until next time,

James

Hello fellow journalologists,

I generally listen to music while I’m writing. This week I’ve had Miles Davis’ Kind of Blue on repeat. ‘So What?’, you may ask. The reasons relate to “clarity of purpose, depth of thinking, and new horizons”. More on that later in the newsletter.

I’ll be attending the Researcher to Reader conference in London the week after next (Feb 24-25). There are still tickets available, I understand. You can find out more here. I hope to see some of you there.

News headlines

The ‘News headlines’ section includes snippets from news outlets that are likely to have broad appeal. This section is ‘free to read’ by everyone who subscribes to the Journalology newsletter.

Open-source AI tool beats giant LLMs in literature reviews — and gets citations right

Researchers have published the recipe for an artificial-intelligence model that reviews the scientific literature better than some major large language models (LLMs) are able to, and gets the citations correct as often as human experts do. OpenScholar — which combines a language model with a database of 45 million open-access articles — links the information it sources directly back to the literature, to stop the system from making up or ‘hallucinating’ citations.

JB: The black-box nature of commercially available LLMs makes me deeply uneasy. OpenScholar could be the start of a solution. The big downside is that it only has access to open access articles; paywalled articles are not included in the dataset.

The researchers, who work at the University of Washington and the Allen Institute for AI, also developed a way of testing LLMs in a scholarly context:

ScholarQABench, a new large-scale benchmark, provides a standardized way to evaluate literature review automation across several scientific domains.

The authors provide data on how bad the hallucination problem is for GPT-4o:

Although GPT-4o hallucinates citations 78–90% of the time, OpenScholar achieves citation accuracy on par with human experts.

The Nature paper is an easy read and is worth spending some time with: Synthesizing scientific literature with retrieval-augmented language models.

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. If Clarivate removes the hold by August 1, the journal will receive an impact factor this year. If not, its impact factor will be listed as “forthcoming,” a spokesperson for Clarivate told us.

JB: Heliyon was not originally part of Cell Press. It was moved there in around 2019 (from memory) to help it to grow after a sluggish start. The strategy worked. Heliyon published 4000 articles in 2022, increasing to 17,000 by 2024. Last year its output dropped to 3000 articles, possibly because it was put ‘on hold’ by Web of Science (but I suspect also because Elsevier hit the brakes — the drop in output was incredibly fast; I wrote about it here).

Last year Heliyon retracted 392 articles. In the first month of 2026 it retracted a further 144 articles. That’s a small proportion of its total output since it launched in 2016, but it’s not an ideal outcome for one of Elsevier’s flagship brands. It’s unclear if further retractions are to come or whether Heliyon will keep it’s impact factor. Retraction Watch notes:

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.

I wouldn’t be surprised if Elsevier quietly closes Heliyon in the future or at the very least moves it out of Cell Press. After all, the Cell Press portfolio also includes iScience, which has an impact factor of 4.1 and could, in theory at least, compete with the likes of Scientific Reports and PLOS One.

Academic publishers defeat lawsuit over ‘peer review’ pay, other restrictions

A group of major academic publishers convinced a judge in New York to dismiss a lawsuit accusing them of thwarting competition by barring scholars from submitting papers to multiple journals simultaneously and denying pay for “peer review” services. In his ruling, opens new tab on Friday, U.S. District Judge Hector Gonzalez in the federal court in Brooklyn said the four scholars, scientists and professors who filed the lawsuit in 2024 had not shown sufficient evidence of a conspiracy involving publishers Elsevier, John Wiley & Sons, Sage Publications, Springer Nature, Taylor & Francis and Wolters Kluwer.

JB: Common sense prevails. The only winners in this class action lawsuit are the lawyers and their bank managers. You can read the ruling here.

Journal impact factors still exert ‘undue influence’, finds PLOS study

But a survey of almost 500 biology researchers who have served on either grant review committees or university hiring and promotion panels in the past two years found most respondents still used this and other “extrinsic proxies” to assess not just the strength of an applicant’s publication record but the trustworthiness of their outputs. In the study, published by the open access title PeerJ, 57 per cent of respondents say they normally use at least one of three indicators – journal reputation, lab reputation or JIF – to evaluate whether or not “research is credible”. Journal reputation was the most trusted “extrinsic proxy” when evaluating research credibility (it was used by 48 per cent of respondents) and 43 per cent used it to decide whether research was trustworthy or reliable, says the study, written by PLOS editors.

JB: This paper was published in PeerJ a few weeks ago; the authors work at PLOS. The findings are unsurprising in many ways. Humans have used brands and perceived reputation — for people and for products — as heuristics for millennia. That’s unlikely to change any time soon, as much as we might want it to.

Global aid cuts could lead to 9.4 million deaths by 2030, Lancet study says

Over the past year, sharp aid cuts have forced the closure of soup kitchens in war-riven Sudan, led to medicine shortages across sub-Saharan Africa, and resulted in reductions in food rations in places such as Somalia and Haiti. A new study published Monday in the Lancet puts a number on the potential human toll as the global humanitarian system cracks apart, projecting an extra 9.4 million deaths by 2030 if the current trends persist. The study amounts to an early picture of how funding reductions from the United States and other Western countries could undo decades of health gains, leading to upsurges in HIV/AIDS, malaria and hunger across the developing world.

JB: Impactful journals publish research that holds politicians to account for the decisions they make. This news story from The Washington Post about a recent Lancet study is a good example of that in action. The Post may not be able to cover important stories like this in the future after a third of the newsroom was let go this week.

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Hello fellow journalologists,

This week I have a poll AND a quiz for you. I’ll eat my hat if someone gets the quiz question right. Anyone can take part in the poll, though (and I hope you will).

News headlines

The ‘News headlines’ section includes snippets from newspapers and magazines that are likely to have broad appeal. This section is ‘free to read’ by everyone who subscribes to the Journalology newsletter.

Reproducibility crisis ‘a little bit exaggerated’, suggests ERC chief

The very fact that replication studies were conducted and that potentially unreliable findings were highlighted illustrates that science “autocorrects”, [Maria] Leptin emphasised. Researchers who, in the worst cases, try to cheat the system “are going to be discovered”, she said. Open science practices, in which methods and outcomes are shared for scrutiny and to facilitate replication studies, are “essential” so that further work can “find flaws”, she continued. Leptin also suggested that the “most important” way to shore up trust in science is for the public and policymakers to better understand the scientific method and its self-correcting nature.

JB: ERC = European Research Council, which will dish out €2.6 billion in funding this year as part of the Horizon Europe programme (total budget = €13 billion). Professor Maria Leptin, a well known biologist, is the head of the ERC. She poses an important, but potentially contentious, question. Let’s put it the vote:

Journal retracts nearly 150 articles for compromised peer review

The American Society For Testing And Materials (ASTM) International started an investigation into its Journal of Testing and Evaluation after an ASTM vendor noticed some “irregular patterns in the peer review” in a special issue, spokesperson Gavin O’Reilly told Retraction Watch. When the publisher confirmed those patterns, ASTM decided to investigate several related issues, he said. The investigation revealed the peer review process in the special sections or issues had been compromised, each of the retraction notices says.

JB: ASTM International publishes five journals, three of which published less than 20 research or review articles last year. The publisher’s article output increased rapidly in 2018 (to over 800 articles) and then fell precipitously in 2020 (to 400 articles). Last year ASTM International published less than 200 articles.

Retraction Watch notes that in 2024 the society generated nearly $82 million from “publications sales”. Journals are likely to be a tiny part of that total. Lets do the maths: even if they were generating $10,000 in revenue per article, that would only be $2 million of the $82 million total. ASTM likely generates most of its publishing revenues from ‘standards’.

Critical social media posts linked to retractions of scientific papers

Zheng and his colleagues examined thousands of tweets that referenced articles that went on to be retracted and articles that didn’t. Of the 604 studies that went on to be retracted, the researchers found that 8.3% had at least one critical post on X before retraction, compared with only 1.5% of articles that were not retracted. Zheng and his colleagues defined critical tweets as posts that contained sarcasm, criticism, accusations or doubt about the article. They say that nearly 1 in 12 of the retracted articles could have been flagged to publishers for greater scrutiny on the basis of the social-media posts.

JB: 1 in 12 doesn’t sound like a particularly strong signal to me.

ArXiv preprint server clamps down on AI slop

Until now, someone wanting to submit to arXiv for the first time only needed an email address affiliated with a reputable academic or research institution, such as a university. But a rule instituted on 21 January now requires first-time posters to be endorsed by an established arXiv author in their own field. People who have previously posted in the same disciplinary section of arXiv do not need an endorsement. The move is an attempt to clamp down on a rising tide of fraudulent submissions, says University of Amsterdam astronomer Ralph Wijers, chair of the arXiv editorial council. A large fraction, he says, are generated with artificial intelligence (AI). The new rule is “mostly to try and discourage very junior, unskilled people from trying to get something started by sending some rubbish to arXiv,” he says.

According to the 2024 annual report, the total budget for arXiv was around $7m. The majority of that was for personnel costs ($3.5m) and indirect costs covered by Cornell (for HR, building costs etc; $2.3m).

Publishing companies are investing millions of dollars into research integrity tools and teams to try to protect the academic record; arXiv doesn’t have the same access to those funds and so has no choice but to resort to blunt measures like this one, which makes arXiv feel a bit like an old boys’ club.

A related story ran this week: ArXiv says submissions must be in English: are AI translators up for the job?

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Hello fellow journalologists,

This is part B of issue 137 of Journalology, which covers the major news stories from last week (if you missed part A you can read it here). You’re receiving this email because you’re a paid subscriber; thank you for your support.

The Journalology newsletters are often rather long; I structure them the same way each time to h…

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Hello fellow journalologists,

Some weeks it’s hard to write this newsletter, not because of lack of material but because academic publishing seems so trivial and unimportant compared with wider global events. This was one of those weeks. For the first time I sense, as a European, a rupture between my continent and at least some of North America. And that makes me very, very sad.

The bright spot of what was a dark, difficult week was undoubtedly Mark Carney’s speech at Davos, which provided both hope and light. The Canadian prime minister (and former Governor of the Bank of England) showed that statesmanship with a backbone is possible in 2026.

This newsletter is about academic journals, not global politics, but hopefully you’ll indulge me as I reuse some of Prime Minister Carney’s words to fit the topics covered by Journalology. The quotes that follow are all from his Davos speech; the scholarly publishing community can learn lessons from his courageous words.

Carney kicked off with an anecdote from Czech dissident Václav Havel’s essay The Power of the Powerless, which explored why communism was tolerated by ordinary people. Carney told the story as follows:

Every morning, this shopkeeper places a sign in his window: ‘Workers of the world unite’. He doesn’t believe it, no-one does, but he places a sign anyway to avoid trouble, to signal compliance, to get along. And because every shopkeeper on every street does the same, the system persists – not through violence alone, but through the participation of ordinary people in rituals they privately know to be false.

In my experience, the vast majority of publishing professionals, commercial and not-for-profit alike, are deeply committed to the core principles of academic research. However, at a point in time when quantity seems to matter more than quality — both within academia and within publishing — perhaps we should look ourselves in the mirror and ask whether we’re taking part in “rituals that privately we know to be false”.

Small and medium-sized publishers are struggling to compete in an environment where scale wins; research integrity challenges, transformative agreements and AI all require significant financial investment. Medium-sized publishers talk a lot about collaboration, but actions speak louder than words. Or as Carney put it:

… the middle powers must act together, because if we’re not at the table, we’re on the menu.

The research-integrity challenges that we collectively face have the potential to bring out the best in us. The STM meeting on research integrity in London last December gave me hope; there was a real sense of collaboration and collegiality, of a willingness to tackle hard problems together. In Carney’s words:

Collective investments in resilience are cheaper than everyone building their own fortresses. Shared standards reduce fragmentations. Complementarities are positive sum.

Many publishers are in denial about the shift in the balance of scientific power, from the west to east. As a reminder, China published twice as many research papers as the USA last year, hitting the 1 million article mark for the first time (the 2025 article numbers in the below graph will get larger as more 2025 content is added to the Dimensions database over the next 6 months).

The coming decades in academic publishing will be defined by China, which is building its own publishing infrastructure, and yet at the recent APE meeting in Berlin China barely got mentioned. The future will look different from the past. We need to think like Carney:

So we’re engaging broadly, strategically, with open eyes. We actively take on the world as it is, not wait around for the world we wish to be.”

Speech writers and editorialists often finish off an argument by referring back to something mentioned at the start of their monologue. Prime Minister Carney’s bottom line at Davos circles back to Václav Havel’s anecdote about the shopkeeper in Czechoslovakia; Carney makes the point that the illusion of the rules-based order, which superpowers break whenever it suits them, has been dispelled. His speech at Davos may be remembered as one of the defining moments in 21st century geopolitics.

We are taking the sign out of the window. We know the old order is not coming back. We shouldn’t mourn it. Nostalgia is not a strategy, but we believe that from the fracture, we can build something bigger, better, stronger, more just. This is the task of the middle powers, the countries that have the most to lose from a world of fortresses and most to gain from genuine cooperation.

Scholarly publishing, for all its faults, bears only a passing resemblance to the seismic shifts occurring on the global political stage. Yes, the large commercial publishers sometimes build fortresses and accumulate power in the form of increased market share; that’s a feature of their ability to attract capital investment. But they are also often the leaders of the “rules based order”, creating, and investing in, core infrastructure like Crossref and initiatives like United2Act.

We should observe what’s happening in global politics and reject unilateralism. Small and medium-sized publishers, which serve niche audiences, have a place at the academic top table; they need to collaborate, not compete, to ensure they stay off the menu.

Research is a global enterprise, driven by human beings’ innate desire to understand the universe and our place in it. Shared standards reduce fragmentations. Complementarities are positive sum. Together, we can build something bigger, better, stronger, more just.

News headlines

The rise of China’s research: a global opportunity

The next decade will unfold in a multipolar and increasingly complex scientific landscape, where rivalry and collaboration coexist. Yet the history is clear: the best science often emerges from international collaboration, which depends on data transparency, research integrity, and reciprocity. Although scientific collaborations between the USA and China have declined since 2019, those with countries in the Asia-Pacific region, Africa, and the Middle East have expanded rapidly, while its research links with the European Union are strengthening. Although abundant opportunities for international collaboration persist, many are at risk of being missed—data security and geopolitical tensions breed mistrust as well as creating practical barriers to cooperation. China’s ascent as a global leader in research offers a vital opportunity.

JB: Some editors and publishers may be in denial about China, but The Lancet is not one of them, as this editorial illustrates. I often use The Lancet’s development in China as a case study when I give talks. The journal started proactively engaging with China in the early 2000s and in 2008 published a special issue on China and Global Health.

The Lancet’s editors played the long game, betting that China would become a global research powerhouse, perhaps one day overtaking the east coast of the USA, whose universities’ faculty preferred to publish in The New England Journal of Medicine or JAMA. When the pandemic hit, some of the most clinically important papers from China were sent to The Lancet, which built a reputation for championing global health, rather than to its US rivals.

More than half of authors of leading research say funding is declining

Funding for leading research projects around the globe is more likely to be falling than increasing, according to a survey of thousands of researchers who have published some of the most influential science in the past few years. The Research Leaders survey polled more than 6,000 authors of articles published in journals tracked by Nature Index journals since 2020. It found that 53% think funding for leading projects in their field is decreasing; by contrast, 21% say it is rising.

JB: Simon Marginson, a higher-education researcher at the University of Bristol, UK, is quoted throughout the piece, including this:

“The gravity has been shifting to Asia in terms of science funding and higher-education participation for the past 20 years,” Marginson adds, with this now being accompanied by “a strange American implosion, which has accelerated the change in narrative”.

The Impact of Shadow Scholars on Academic Integrity Today

It is estimated that tens of millions of students have benefited from essays written by ghost writers or ‘shadow scholars,’ many of whom live in Kenya as highly educated but underemployed workers. The real crime, as Kingori sees it, is not just the cheating that is going on, but that those who cheat will go on to be doctors, lawyers, or even academics themselves in the future, profiting from well-paid Global North jobs on the back of the work done by Kenyan and other Global South ghost writers. Furthermore, far from being ashamed of their work, many Kenyan writers in the documentary are proud of the work they have done on behalf of others, even though their identity as authors has not been recognized.

JB: The trailer for this documentary is shown below. The full-length film, which launched a few months ago, is available on a number of streaming services.

According to Simon Linacre:

The film is a heartbreaking watch, particularly as there is an even darker threat behind the story, namely the emergence of Generative AI, which threatens the livelihoods of so many ghostwriters almost overnight. While this may remove the injustice of using essay mill workers to further the ends of those who are willing to pay to cheat, it will not remove the cheating itself, which is simply moving to the cheaper, quicker, and more accessible Gen AI platforms.

Science is drowning in AI slop

Now, somewhat ironically, the problem is affecting AI research itself. It’s easy to see why: The job market for people who can credibly claim to have published original research in machine learning or robotics is as strong, if not stronger, than the one for cancer biologists. There’s also a fraud template for AI researchers: All they have to do is claim to have run a machine-learning algorithm on some kind of data, and say that it produced an interesting outcome. Again, so long as the outcome isn’t too interesting, few people, if any, will bother to vet it.

JB: This news feature from The Atlantic is balanced and well written. The article finishes with this paragraph:

When I called A. J. Boston, a professor at Murray State University who has written about this issue, he asked me if I’d heard of the dead-internet conspiracy theory. Its adherents believe that on social media and in other online spaces, only a few real people create posts, comments, and images. The rest are generated and amplified by competing networks of bots. Boston said that in the worst-case scenario, the scientific literature might come to look something like that. AIs would write most papers, and review most of them, too. This empty back-and-forth would be used to train newer AI models. Fraudulent images and phantom citations would embed themselves deeper and deeper in our systems of knowledge. They’d become a permanent epistemological pollution that could never be filtered out.

I’ve probably linked to this before, but my favourite Nature ‘Futures’ article of all time covers a similar topic: A brief history of death switches. If you haven’t read it before, you should. It’s a brilliant piece of writing. This is the basic premise:

With a death switch, the computer prompts you for your password once a week to make sure you are still alive. When you don’t enter your password for some period of time, the computer deduces you are dead, and your passwords are automatically e-mailed to the second-in-command. Individuals began to use death switches to reveal Swiss bank account numbers to their heirs, to get the last word in an argument, and to confess secrets that were unspeakable during a lifetime.

And finally…

The eagle-eyed editors among you will have noticed that the title of this newsletter is “Journalology #137a: Rupture”. Part B of this week’s edition of Journalology will hit paid subscribers’ inboxes around the middle of next week; it will cover all the scholarly publishing news and comment from the past 7 days, together with some analysis and interpretation from me.

I chose to write this week’s newsletter in two halves partly to keep the newsletter’s length manageable, but mostly because I’m going away this weekend and I haven’t finished writing Part B yet...

Until next time,

James

P.S. If you write editorials for your journal I highly recommend dipping into these books. The tactics that speech writers use are directly applicable to writing editorials. Simon Lancaster’s books are my personal favourites.

Everyone should read You Are Not Human: How Words Kill to fully understand the power of metaphor and why the words we choose matter. To give you a taste, watch this video which Simon posted on LinkedIn a few days ago. Powerful stuff.

Hello fellow journalologists,

I’ve had a busy week attending the Academic Publishing Europe (APE) meeting in Berlin. I’m not a big fan of conference reports, so I won’t attempt to summarise what was said in this newsletter. Videos of some of the sessions are already available to view here; they should all be publicly available within a month, I understand.

Last week I asked you to vote on whether editors should replace ‘seminal’ with an alternative word (if you missed last week’s issue, you can read the rationale here). Nearly 400 of you voted with 61% voting “yes”. Style guides will need updating.

This week’s newsletter focuses almost entirely on news stories and announcements. If I’d included snippets from opinion articles too, the newsletter would have been 2-3 times longer.

However, there’s still plenty to get your teeth into. All subscribers can read the five stories included in the “news headlines”; paid subscribers also have access to around 30 other articles that appear below the subscription fold, including a handful of deep dives from me on stories that grabbed my attention.

News headlines

New Report Documents Publisher Investment in Research Integrity Infrastructure

A new report, released today, offers the first collective look at the range of approaches scholarly publishers are deploying to tackle threats to research integrity, threats that have evolved in nature and scaled dramatically in recent years. The STM-commissioned report was researched and compiled by research firm Research Consulting, which conducted in-depth interviews with 18 research integrity and publishing experts across 13 organizations. It documents significant capacity building in recent years. Some publishers now maintain dedicated research integrity teams that number more than 100 staff members and screen millions of manuscript submissions annually. They do so using innovative and evolving detection systems that enlist technology, but keep humans at the center of the work.

JB: The STM report can be downloaded here and was announced at the APE meeting. It summarises the various ways that publishers are trying to overcome research integrity challenges, based on interviews with 18 research integrity experts from 13 organisations. The key takeaway is:

The report identifies three pillars of publisher practice: capacity (dedicated teams and screening technology), practice (standards, screening protocols, and training), and coordination (shared detection tools and infrastructure). Major collaborative initiatives documented in the report include the STM Integrity Hub, which now includes 49 organizational members, the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) with 106 publisher members representing over 14,500 journals, and United2Act, a coalition of 58 organizations coordinating responses to paper mills.

AI tools boost individual scientists but could limit research as a whole

Writing in Nature, Hao et al. report a paradox: the adoption of AI tools in the natural sciences expands scientists’ impact but narrows the set of domains that research is carried out in. The authors examined more than 41 million papers, roughly 311,000 of which had been augmented by AI in some way — through the use of machine-learning methods or generative AI, for example. They find that scientists who conduct AI-augmented research publish more papers, are cited more often and progress faster in their careers than those who do not, but that AI automates established fields rather than supporting the exploration of new ones. This raises questions and concerns regarding the potential impact of AI tools on scientists and on science as a whole.

JB: If you want an easy-to-read news story about this Nature paper, then AI has supercharged scientists—but may have shrunk science is probably the place to go.

Sage journal retracts more than 40 papers over concerns with peer review, author contributions

Sage has retracted 45 papers from one of its journals for questionable authorship and peer review. The publisher began an investigation into Clinical Hemorheology and Microcirculation last year to address citation concerns, a Sage spokesperson told Retraction Watch. The journal was one of 20 titles that lost their impact factors in Clarivate’s 2025 Journal Citation Reports for excessive self-citation and citation stacking.

JB: This journal was part of the 2023 IOS Press acquisition, Retraction Watch notes:

Sage has retracted more than 1,500 articles from another former IOS Press journal, the Journal of Intelligent & Fuzzy Systems, for problematic peer review and other issues. The publisher was one of the first to retract problematic papers in bulk.

The academic community failed Wikipedia for 25 years — now it might fail us

However, generative-artificial-intelligence systems trained heavily on Wikipedia are now threatening the future of this free, volunteer-driven resource. The stakes have changed — and academics must take note. Large language models offer instant, Wikipedia-derived answers without any attribution. When AI chatbots provide seemingly authoritative responses drawn from Wikipedia’s very pages, why would anyone navigate to the source, let alone contribute to it? This parasitic relationship endangers the last bastion of freely accessible, human-curated knowledge and undermines the premise of collaboration on which many of Wikipedia’s knowledge-sharing practices rely.

JB: The key point here is “without attribution”. This week Nature also ran a Q&A with Jimmy Wales’ about his new book The Seven Rules of Trust: Why It Is Today’s Most Essential Superpower. My copy arrived yesterday and I’m looking forward to reading it. The word “trust”, or its derivations, appears 8 times in this newsletter. It’s possibly the single most important word that we all need to consider right now.

2025 Readership Survey - The Scholarly Kitchen

TSK remains the leading source of information for its readers at 75%, in the face of growing competition from The Brief (28%) and Journalology (28%). Respondents also prioritize email notifications from outside organizations (48%) and directly visiting professional news sites (25%) as very important for discovering key developments. LinkedIn is emerging as the social media outlet of choice (64%), with a notable decline in X (Twitter), which is now of the lowest interest (15%).

JB: 714 people responded to the 2025 TSK survey compared with 2750 people to the 2021 TSK survey. There are a handful of reasons why that might be the case. Regardless, I’m delighted that Journalology is mentioned alongside those two established (and primarily US) opinion outlets.

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