I’m about to head off on a family vacation, so this will be the last email you’ll receive from me for a while. I’m pressing “pause” on Substack, which means the countdown clock for paid subscriptions will temporarily stop. This allows me to take a proper rest without feeling guilty about failing to fulfil my obligations to you.

With that bit of housekeeping out of the way, here are the news headlines from the past few weeks.

Philosophers call for their journals to require conflict of interest disclosures

Philosophy has long been the punchline to jokes about unemployable majors. Now, philosophers may be getting the last laugh as frontier artificial intelligence (AI) firms increasingly are shelling out eye-watering salaries for their help in tackling some of the technology’s thorniest questions.

Many philosophers welcome the growing demand—which extends beyond AI as industry seeks philosophical guidance on issues ranging from climate change to misinformation. But some argue the discipline’s norms have failed to keep pace. Unlike most scientific disciplines, for example, philosophy journals rarely require authors to disclose potential conflicts of interest such as industry ties. That’s why an open letter released today calls on the field’s journals to begin to mandate such disclosures.

Science (Celina Zhao)

JB: This news story reminded me of one of my favourite parts of The Hitch-Hikers Guide to the Galaxy, a book (1979) and radio series that probably influenced my teenage brain, and sense of humour, more than any other.

Deep Thought — a supercomputer built to answer the Ultimate Question, of life the universe and everything — gave this advice to two philosophers from the Amalgamated Union of Philosophers, Sages, Luminaries, and other Professional Thinking Persons:

And so any philosophers who are quick off the mark, are going to clean up in the prediction business.... You just get on the pundit circuit. You all go on the chat shows and the colour supplements and violently disagree with each other about what answer I’m eventually going to produce. And if you get yourselves clever agents, you’ll be on the gravy train for life.

A good example of life imitating art, perhaps?

Universities are relying on AI-detection software to catch cheating. How well do the programs work?

A growing number of companies say that the tools they have made can identify text that has been written by another AI system. On-the-market products include Copyleaks, GPTZero and ZeroGPT, and those created by Grammarly, QuillBot and Turnitin.

Many AI detectors rely on a measure known as perplexity, which estimates how predictable each word in a sequence is likely to be. Because AI-generated text tends to follow more statistically predictable patterns than does human writing, passages with lower perplexity scores are more likely to be flagged as machine-generated, whereas less predictable phrasing is taken as a signal of human authorship.

Nature (Anna McKie)

JB: I pasted excerpts from a few recent Scholarly Kitchen posts into GPTZero, which decided they were largely written by AI. Is that a fair assessment? Only the authors will know for sure. And therein lies the problem with these tools. I can tell you that none of the text in these newsletters is written with the help of AI, but should you believe me?

British Medical Association could axe up to a third of its staff amid cash crisis

It has decided to shed up to a third of its staff in England as part of a major restructuring of its operations intended to help reduce its recurring deficit. The BMA’s finances are so precarious that it has needed a total of £86.8m in subsidies since 2008 from the British Medical Journal, which it owns, in order to stay afloat, an average of £5.1m a year.

The Guardian (Denis Campbell)

JB: Compare this with some of the largest US biomedical societies, which have deep financial reserves.

Pushback on use of hidden prompts to snare AI peer reviews

Organizers of a prominent neuroscience conference are facing pushback on social media after adding hidden prompts to their papers to catch peer reviewers who are using generative artificial intelligence (AI) to referee papers.

The 40th Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS)—which is slated to take place in Sydney, Australia, in December 2026—bans peer reviewers from uploading papers they referee to AI chatbots, as the practice breaches confidentiality. Reviewers can still use AI chatbots for background research purposes, according to the policy outlined in the conference’s handbook.

To enforce the policy and catch illicit AI use in peer review, the event’s organizers have included deliberately concealed instructions for large language models (LLMs) in papers sent out for peer review.

The Transmitter (Dalmeet Singh Chawla)

Paper mill cancer studies get double the number of citations as genuine papers

Cancer research articles with telltale signs of being produced by paper mills garner double the number of citations than do genuine papers in the field, finds an analysis of tens of thousands of articles.

In a study posted on the preprint server bioRxiv, the authors report that papers that were probably produced by paper mills frequently cite, or are cited by, other potentially fraudulent articles. Paper mills are businesses that produce and sell low-quality manuscripts — often containing fabricated data and results — designed to resemble genuine research.

...

The tool flagged 4,085 papers — 12.3% of all of the papers examined — as having characteristics associated with paper-mill articles. The researchers identified potentially fraudulent papers in 19 out of the 20 journals that they examined. Nature Cancer was the only journal in the analysis that had not published any suspicious papers.

Nature (Mohana Basu)

Read more

Hello fellow journalologists,

If you’re reading this email from the other side of the pond, I wish you a very happy semiquincentennial anniversary celebration. Getting rid of the Brits was one of the best decisions you ever made.

I’m a big fan of The Rest is History podcast. This video — hosted by the New Yorker with the podcast’s hosts, Dominic Sandbrook and Tom Holland — is more entertaining and educational than the scholarly publishing news that follows. Perhaps watch the video instead?

If you’re still with me, as a reminder, the purpose of ‘Briefly quoted’ is to pull together, in one place, the previous month’s developments that are likely to be of interest to scholarly publishing professionals. This helps us to identify the trends and saves you valuable time.

The quotes may be brief, but the email is long. Today’s newsletter covers over 70 announcements. These are broken down into subsections, to help you to quickly find the topics that interest you the most.

Until next time,

James

Publishing integrity

Leaders in libraries and publishing launch the TrustMarc Initiative

A coalition of leaders from across the world’s libraries, publishers, and research-information community today launched the TrustMarc Initiative, an open, standards-driven framework that makes the trust behind digital content visible, verifiable, and portable — so anyone evaluating content — whether people or AI systems — can see who stands behind it, and why.

As AI accelerates the spread of content of uncertain origin, the signals people have long relied on — peer review, editorial standards, curation, institutional reputation — are scattered, hard to see, and increasingly easy to fake. TrustMarc brings those existing signals together into a single, shared, machine-readable framework.

JB: This is distinct from NISO trust markers, from FASEB’s Trust Seal, and from VeriXiv’s trust marker badges (see issue 150 for more information about those).

Nature published a series of articles this week about trust in science, including an editorial (The complex truth about trust in science) and a news feature (Have people stopped trusting science? The data tell a surprising story).

Digital Science launches Dimensions Citation Check API for self-citation risk screening

Digital Science, a leading technology company serving stakeholders across the research ecosystem, today announced Dimensions Citation Check – offering journal editors a practical, scalable tool to help safeguard research integrity.

Citation Check is an API-based editorial tool that automatically detects self-citation in manuscript submissions, evaluates each instance in context, and returns a clear risk rating to support editors’ decision-making before papers reach peer review.

River Valley Technologies enhances RVRi research integrity platform

The latest updates include checks for hidden text and LLM prompt-injection attempts, broken reference links, incorrect DOIs, publication year mismatches and citation mill indicators.

The update also includes improved retraction detection logic and enhanced reporting, including a summary dashboard and graphical representation of self-citation patterns, designed to help editors review findings more quickly and make more informed decisions.

AIP Publishing Partners with Hum to Strengthen Quality Control for AIP Conference Proceedings

Publishers face a critical challenge: delivering conference proceedings efficiently while upholding rigorous quality standards. AIP Conference Proceedings publishes at significant scale, with more than 100,000 published articles across more than 1,700 volumes. As these proceedings programs grow, publishers face a common challenge: applying consistent quality and integrity checks across submissions that originate from many conferences, organizers, editors, and review processes.

To address these challenges, AIP Publishing is partnering with Hum to bring Alchemist Review to AIP Conference Proceedings. This will add an AI-assisted quality-control layer that helps identify papers with critical scientific, integrity, and publication-readiness issues before they enter the published record.

MDPI rolls out AI-powered ethics checks across all submissions

MDPI, the open access publisher, has today announced the full deployment of its in-house AI-powered research integrity system, Ethicality. The tool is now being used to automatically screen all manuscripts submitted to the publisher.

Its roll-out marks a significant step forward in MDPI’s commitment to safeguarding the scientific record, improving efficiency, and supporting editorial decision making from initial submission through to the publication decision. Ethicality now screens in the region of 2,000 submissions from authors worldwide per day.

JB: MDPI, like other large publishers, has developed its own integrity checking tool rather than buying an off-the-shelf solution.

Integra and Silverchair Partner to Bring AI-Powered Manuscript Screening to ScholarOne

The partnership is designed to help scholarly publishers address growing editorial pressures caused by increasing submission volumes, evolving research integrity challenges, and the operational burden of manual manuscript screening. Through the integration, EditorialPilot will work seamlessly within the ScholarOne workflow, enabling editorial teams to perform automated technical, language, and integrity checks at the point of manuscript submission.

Using ScholarOne’s Relay API integration framework, EditorialPilot will provide editors with actionable screening insights directly within their existing workflow—helping journals identify potential concerns early, improve operational efficiency, and support informed editorial decision-making without disrupting established processes.

Enago Reports screens 10,000 manuscripts in just two months for the Royal Society of Chemistry’s journals

More than 10,000 manuscripts submitted to Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC) journals have now been screened by Enago Reports, marking a significant milestone in the partnership focused on improving the manuscript submission experience for authors. Designed to streamline the submission process, Enago Reports automatically checks manuscripts for compliance with journal requirements, including structure, references, figures and tables, anonymisation, and other technical criteria. Authors can then correct any identified issues and re-upload their files before submission and editorial assessment.

ACS Refreshes its Guidelines to the Ethical Publication of Chemical Research

To reflect the evolving research and publishing landscape, ACS Publications has undertaken a comprehensive overhaul of the ACS Ethical Guidelines to Publication of Chemical Research. The revised guidelines clearly outline expectations for ethical conduct, covering key areas such as data integrity, image and figure preparation, authorship criteria, peer review responsibilities, citation practices, and the disclosure and use of AI and other advanced tools. Together, these updates promote consistency, clarity, and accountability throughout the publication process.

JB: I covered this in issue 150 of the Journalology newsletter.

Nature expands Registered Reports across all disciplines

Nature is expanding its Registered Reports format across all the disciplines covered by the journal, including natural, social and clinical sciences, engineering and public health. Previously, the format was limited to cognitive neuroscience and the behavioural and social sciences, and largely to confirmatory research.

Read more

Hello fellow journalologists,

This issue, the 150^th, is a milestone of sorts. 239 people received issue #1; issue #150 is being sent to just shy of 9000 email addresses. If you are one of the originals and are still reading, please hit [reply] and say hello.

Today’s newsletter covers a variety of topics: China and India are on the menu, not for the first time and certainly not for the last; the distinction between preprints and the version of record are starting to blur; impact factors are out and Heliyon is back in; Scientific American has a new home.

Springer Nature to divest its consumer media businesses

Springer Nature today announced that it is divesting its consumer media businesses – Scientific American in the United States and Spektrum der Wissenschaft in Germany. The strategic transaction will see Springer Nature focus on its core global publishing business in research, health and education while supporting the long-term development of these brands.

Scientific American and Spektrum der Wissenschaft have long-standing roles in communicating science to broad audiences and hold established positions in their respective markets. The publications are being sold to new owners with strong expertise in consumer media who are well positioned to support their future development.

JB: This news broke yesterday. I can’t say I’m entirely surprised. Scientific American was not mentioned in the Springer Nature annual report, which sent my antennae twitching at the time.

Consumer media is a tough business to be in. Margins are low and there were few economies of scale to be had with Springer Nature’s core journals business.

Scientific American’s new owner is LabX Media Group, which acquired The Scientist in 2011 and also owns Discover. Within hours of the corporate press release the Writers Guild of America East announced that 15 members of Scientific American staff had been laid off.

Furthermore, the Guild claimed:

But there’s worse: we also have reason to believe that the sale was motivated by fear within Springer Nature that our attempts to doggedly report on the crisis facing science in America today would lead to repercussions from the Trump administration. On multiple occasions the company has sought to quash or tone down political or sensitive stories that were journalistically sound.

I worked at Springer Nature for 14 years and reining in journalists is not a modus operandi that I recognise. However, I wasn’t there during the second Trump administration, which has brought its own unique pressures for media outlets.

You may remember this story from 2024 (Scientific American editor steps down after calling Trump supporters ‘fascists’ and ‘bigoted’) and this one from last year (Trump cuts subscriptions to Springer Nature journals), which likely would have put the management team on guard.

wrote about yesterday’s announcement on Substack here.

I suspect the decision to sell was primarily a commercial one. This statement from the press release sums up the financial backstory:

Scientific American and Spektrum der Wissenschaft together contributed approximately €25m to Springer Nature group revenues in 2025. The transactions will not impact Springer Nature’s guidance for 2026 and will be slightly accretive to adjusted operating profit in 2027.

In other words, Scientific American was not contributing positively to the bottom line, which is not an attractive quality for a business unit within a private-equity backed company.

I subscribe to Scientific American. The recent special issue on The Young American Scientists was exceptional. We need more journalism like this, but the books need to balance.

Read more

A few days ago I emailed you an analysis of the Emerald acquisition by Wiley. If you missed it, you can read it here:

The next issue of Journalology, the core newsletter that delves deep into recent publishing developments, will be with you next week.

The purpose of today’s edition of The Jist is to summarise how journalists have been covering scholarly communication. For once, research integrity takes a back seat. The theme running through today’s anthology is academic freedom and the politicisation of science.

There’s a lot to get through, so let’s crack on.

White House proposes vast overhaul of US science funding: what you need to know

According to the proposal, federal grants would no longer be able to be used to cover publication costs, including article-processing charges (APCs), fees that many journals charge authors to make articles freely available. The exception is for specific cases that are approved in advance by the federal agency issuing the grant.

This is at odds with an existing policy that requires all federally funded research to be made free to read as soon as it is published. “These rules would undermine the financial infrastructure to support that open-access publishing,” says Hilary Craiglow, who leads library consulting at Attain Partners, a higher-education consultancy firm in MacLean, Virginia. She notes that the federal administration has been signalling that it might roll back the open-access mandate. “But for now it is still in place, so that’s confusing.”

Nature (Dan Garisto & Mariana Lenharo)

JB: This story broke just as I was finalising the last issue of The Jist. It’s one of the most important stories of the year, not just for academic publishing but for science more broadly.

This newsletter is about journal publishing, so Trump’s ban on paying open access fees ‘won’t cut costs’, published in Times Higher Education, is worth covering here.

Rick Anderson, librarian at Brigham Young University-Provo, said the guidance failed to recognise the high-cost nature of publishing in certain disciplines, with open access fee caps likely to lead to price increases in other areas of publishing.

“Open access has always been difficult, for the simple reason that making expensive things available for free on an unlimited basis is always difficult, and the work that goes into turning research results into usable scholarly products is expensive,” said Anderson.

The latest proposals were, he continued, “another manifestation of the ongoing conflict between the desire to make high-quality content available to the public at no charge, and the fact that turning research results into high-quality content is an expensive proposition – for some disciplines, a very​ expensive proposition”.

Unsurprisingly, the STM statement on proposed revisions to U.S. federal funding regulations affecting publication and dissemination of federally funded research is not supportive of the proposals:

The proposal’s restrictions on publication and dissemination risk limiting the reach and impact of federally funded research and inserts political decision-making into what should be an independent system. Research is not complete at the point of discovery – it achieves value only when findings are validated, communicated, and made accessible. This is how clinicians access evidence to inform care, innovators identify new technologies, policymakers make informed decisions, and the public benefits from the research it funds. Funding for publication and subscriptions is essential to ensure research delivers public value and researchers can build on the latest discoveries and knowledge.

I can’t include all the coverage about this story, but I have to mention a recent New England Journal of Medicine editorial: The OMB and the Politicization of Science.

NEJM, which many clinical researchers would consider to be the world’s leading medical journal, publishes punchy editorials infrequently. It’s main competitor, The Lancet, a UK journal with a long history of activism is normally the journal that shouts loudly. Strong words, like these, appear rarely in NEJM:

A nonscientific, political process for determining what is scientifically sound has not worked in the past and will not work now. Lysenkoism demonstrated that allowing politics to control the scientific process can halt or even reverse a nation’s progress. Erratic funding would fundamentally undermine innovation and dramatically impair America’s ability to address today’s health challenges. The OMB proposal is currently open for public comment, and we urge our readers to express their concerns. When science becomes politicized, everyone loses.

RFK Jr under fire for ‘bullying’ letter to scientific journal

Robert F Kennedy Jr, the US health secretary, is demanding answers from a medical journal that recently removed a paper suggesting a link between vaccines and infant death, saying their decision was “of great interest to me”.

Public health advocates immediately criticized the move, and said Kennedy appeared to be trying to intimidate and influence the journal’s editorial process. The journal Toxicology Reports had removed the paper this spring after editors determined it was so seriously flawed it could harm patients and pose a risk to public health.

The letter, which Kennedy on Monday posted on X, asked the journal editor to answer several questions about how it arrived at its decision about the paper, which suggested a link between vaccines and sudden infant death syndrome, or Sids, by 25 June. Among his questions, Kennedy asked the journal to identify the experts who conducted the investigation into the paper.

The Guardian (Michelle R Smith)

JB: This political intervention is inappropriate, but let’s park that for now and focus on an editorial technicality instead. The article in question has a removal notice (rather than a retraction notice); the full text has been removed entirely from the scholarly record. Elsevier’s policy on article removal notes:

In an extremely limited number of cases, it may be necessary to remove an article or Article-in-Press from the online archive of the journal where it was published. Given the importance of maintaining the scholarly record as a permanent and – as far as possible – unaltered record of the transactions of scholarship, removal of an article is rare and will only occur where it is determined that:

• The article or Article-in-Press is defamatory, or infringes others’ legal rights, and retraction is not a sufficient remedy.

• The article or Article-in-Press is, or Elsevier has good reason to expect it will be, the subject of a court order.

• The article or Article-in-Press, if acted upon, might pose a serious health risk.

I wanted to better understand what “extremely limited number of cases” means in practice, so I searched ScienceDirect for “Removal notice” and identified over 240 articles. The frequency appears to be increasing over time (we’re only half way through 2026, remember):

This represents a tiny percentage of the total corpus of content on ScienceDirect, of course.

I couldn’t find any mention of “removals” in the ICMJE guidance although the COPE retraction guidelines contain similar wording to Elsevier’s policy.

My understanding is that of the three reasons listed above, the two legal rationales are the ones that are invoked the most. The third, “The article or Article-in-Press, if acted upon, might pose a serious health risk” sounds sensible, but the practicalities are challenging.

On the one hand, we don’t want to give the anti-vaxxers ammunition to spread misinformation. On the other hand, it’s important for readers to be able to see the full history of a paper, not least so we can collectively learn from past mistakes.

Who decides whether a paper is a risk to public health? What are the criteria for those decisions? What’s the editorial bar for removal and who should set those standards? The Wakefield MMR paper was retracted, but not removed. It was certainly damaging to public health. Should it have been erased from history?

In an age of preprints, author-accepted manuscripts, and content ingestion by large language models, does removing a paper serve any useful purpose other than to make the editor feel better by allowing them to reverse a bad decision?

Trump: Diabetes doctors ejected from conference for handing out paper criticising US administration

Police in New Orleans forcibly removed five diabetes experts from the American Diabetes Association (ADA) annual conference for distributing an editorial published in the association’s journal. The paper criticised US President Donald Trump for dismantling and destroying biomedical research in the country.

Louisiana State Police confiscated the doctors’ conference identification and forbid them from returning to the meeting. They escorted the protesters from the event peacefully. No one was arrested.

…

Among those ejected was Steven Kahn, editor in chief of the ADA journal Diabetes Care and lead author of the editorial.

BMJ (Janice Hopkins Tanne)

JB: Why were they evicted you ask? This may have had something to do with it:

Jay Bhattacharya, director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), was scheduled to give a keynote address at the meeting but was replaced on short notice by Richard Woychik, former director of the US National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences and now a senior adviser to Bhattacharya.

A few days later, Diabetes society apologizes after removal of Trump protesters from conference sparks outrage.

In a statement emailed to its members on Saturday, ADA said the researchers were removed from the conference because they hadn’t received prior approval to distribute materials, “not because of the viewpoints expressed in those materials.” In response, Kelly tells Science that “none of us were made aware of this policy. I doubt that any ADA member is aware of this policy.”

See how academic freedom is changing around the world

The ability to research and teach without interference from politics, wealthy donors or religious institutions produces more and better science and innovation, studies have found. Yet academic freedom around the world has been declining. According to the Academic Freedom Index, 50 of 179 countries or territories experienced a significant drop between 2015 and 2025. Only nine improved.

Scientific American (Jen Christiansen)

JB: Jen “is a senior graphics editor at Scientific American, where she art directs and produces illustrated explanatory diagrams and data visualizations.”

At the heart of the story is a graphic she produced to visualise the data from the Academic Freedom Index, which was published a few months ago.

Related to this, you may remember that back in February John P. A. Ioannidis & Jeroen Baas published a research paper entitled: Most science is published from countries lacking in democracy and freedom of press.

The current analysis shows that more than three quarters of scientific publications in 2024 came from countries without full democracy. This is a complete reversal compared with the late twentieth century. It is also a fundamental change even when compared with 2006 (the first year that Economist Democracy Index ratings started to be issued), when two thirds of publications were published from countries with full democracy.

‘Student Geng’ ignites research-integrity scandal in China after calling out senior academics

This is probably the first time in China that someone with a “grass-roots” background outside the formal academic system has gained support from state-run media after making allegations around research integrity, says Shaoxiong Brian Xu, an applied linguist at Huanggang Normal University in China who researches retractions of academic papers globally.

The fact that his accusations focused on high-profile researchers working at high-profile universities and published in high-profile journals probably helped to draw attention, Xu says. “Besides, his accusations point to data fabrication,” Xu adds. This is “one of the most serious forms of breaches of research integrity”.

Nature (Xiaoying You)

JB: The other angle worth considering here is that Nature published a news story about potentially problematic papers that it (and other Nature journals) published. This rather masochistic approach has been in place for many years: the editors of the news pages (‘front half’ of the journal) sometimes cover stories that could be embarrassing to colleagues who handle scientific manuscripts (‘back half’ of the journal). Editors working on the ‘middle half’ of the journal (the opinion section) get to sit, with popcorn, and watch.

Read more

Earlier this month Wiley announced that it had acquired Emerald Publishing from Cambridge Information Group (CIG) “in an all-cash transaction valued at £337 million, or USD 452 million.”

In this newsletter I’ll talk you through why this acquisition is important and what it means for the wider publishing industry.

Other publishers will likely have been invited to bid for Emerald. Are they feeling green with envy at Wiley’s acquisition, as some were when Wiley acquired Hindawi 5 years ago? Or will Wiley end up feeling green around the gills as it did a few short years after the Hindawi acquisition?

Let’s delve into the numbers and try to read the (green) tea leaves.

Emerald: the backstory

Emerald is a UK-based publisher founded in 1967 by academics from the University of Bradford School of Management; its main editorial focus continues to be on topics related to business, finance and management.

One of the founders, Keith Howard, took full control of Emerald in 2003 and in June 2022 Emerald announced that it had been acquired by Cambridge Information Group (CIG) for an undisclosed sum. The 2022 press release noted:

Cambridge Information Group is a family-owned, mission-led investment firm with a history of long-term investments in education, information, and software companies. During CIG’s multi-decade ownership of ProQuest, the business grew rapidly through investments in new products and multiple strategic acquisitions. CIG’s acquisition of Emerald builds on their deep experience in the higher education industry, with real ambition for long-term growth of the business.

The bold highlights are mine: the recent news that Wiley has acquired Emerald just 4 years after CIG bought it is perhaps surprising, although market consolidation is a theme that we return to repeatedly in this newsletter.

Emerald’s journal portfolio

Last year, according to Dimensions, Emerald published ~22,600 research and review articles1 in nearly 500 journals along with “8,000 book titles, and an extensive archive of case studies and backfile content”. The focus of this analysis is firmly on the journals portfolio.

Emerald was the 19^th largest publisher by article output last year, similar in size to Cambridge University Press, PLOS, or the American Physical Society. Wiley, by contrast, published over 10 times as many articles as Emerald last year.

The other recent significant acquisition was OUP’s purchase of Karger at the end of 2025: Karger published 4600 articles in 2025 in 95 journals, so Emerald is around five times the size of Karger and represents a more significant acquisition and consolidation than Karger’s sale did.

You can read my analysis of the Karger acquisition here, if you missed it:

Business models

Emerald primarily generates revenues from its journals via institutional library sales. As you can see in the table below, only 7% of its articles were published in fully open access journals (“Gold”) last year, with another 6% published open access in hybrid journals.

That mix is rather unusual for a publisher these days; the high proportion of subscription content is important to bear in mind when we consider why Wiley — which, remember, acquired the fully open access publisher Hindawi for $298 million five years ago — decided to buy Emerald, a subscription business, for $452 million.

Not so long ago publishers were going all-in on open access; now the subscription model seems to be making a resurgence, with research funders looking to reduce open access costs and with AI companies paying to license subscription content.

Read more

Hello fellow journalologists,

This is the second time I’ve sent you a ‘Briefly quoted’ newsletter (you can read the April issue here).

As a reminder, the purpose of ‘Briefly quoted’ is to pull together, in one place, the previous month’s announcements and developments that are likely to be of interest to scholarly publishing professionals. Monitoring the news wires can be like drinking from a fire hose; there’s value, I believe, in being able to see a month’s worth of developments in one place as it’s easier to spot the trends, and to monitor opportunities and threats.

The core Journalology newsletter, by contrast, picks out the most important stories and analyses them in depth (archive here). The Jist summarises how news outlets have been covering scholarly communication (archive here).

Today’s newsletter covers over 60 announcements broken down into 14 subsections, so you can quickly find the topics that interest you the most.

Until next time,

James

Peer review and editorial process

The Numbers Behind the Noise: What Our 2026 Peer Review Report Shows

That question is where the 2026 Future of Peer Review Report begins. Before accepting a crisis narrative that benefits publishers, vendors, and funders in different and often contradictory ways, the report asks for evidence. What the report finds is more complicated, and (hopefully) more useful, than a simple alarm.

JB: I covered this report in issue 149:

New IOP Publishing tool detects duplicate peer reviews in push against reviewer fraud

Duplicate peer reviews (where the same reviewer report is sent for multiple submissions) are problematic because they fail to provide a unique and critical assessment of a manuscript, making the peer review unreliable. The most egregious examples of this are “review mills”, organisations churning out fake reviews, often to inflate citations for a paying customer. Until now, such patterns in reviewer reports have been difficult to identify, limiting publishers’ ability to take timely action. The Duplicate Review Checker (DRC) changes this by automatically flagging duplicate review activity immediately and directly to editorial teams, enabling early interventions to safeguard the integrity of peer review.

Nature is expanding Registered Reports to all the fields in which we publish

Until now, submissions for Registered Reports were considered only for confirmatory research — essentially types of study that test hypotheses — and only in cognitive neuroscience and the behavioural and social sciences. From now on, we will welcome Registered Reports across the fields in which we publish, extending beyond hypotheses-testing studies to include those that, for example, gather large amounts of data or compare scientific methods.

QED for Grants

I’m excited to announce that as of today we are officially releasing “QED for Grants” for everyone. What started off as an extension of our existing paper review platform, grew in the last few months to an entirely new design. We’ve been working like crazy on this, and although we have more things we want to add in the (very near) future, we decided to release our AI for grants NOW, earlier than planned. It’s not perfect, no AI is, but for the first time, when I run my own grants through q.e.d Science, I feel it gets the research, finds real problems, and gives me very useful feedback that I can implement before submission.

Read more

The purpose of The Jist is to summarise how news outlets have been covering scholarly communication.

The main Journalology newsletter covers reports and announcements that scholarly publishing professionals need to know about. You can read the most recent issue here, if you missed it:

It seems likely that issue 150 will include an assessment of yesterday’s announcement that Wiley has acquired Emerald. But that’s for another day.

Subscribe now

Another red alert for American science

The sweeping new regulations proposed by OMB [White House Office of Management and Budget] would subject every federal research funding decision to political review. Peer review has never been formally binding, but this proposal would dramatically expand the power of political appointees to override expert assessments of scientific merit. Agencies could end multiyear grants with no due process. They also could use the vague criteria of Trump’s “gold standard science” to identify institutions for preferential treatment. International collaboration with countries identified solely by the administration would be prohibited under the new rules, but more notably, all research that involves the expenditure of funds outside the US would require case-by-case approval. This bureaucratic hurdle would effectively prevent most if not all partnerships from moving forward.

Science (Holden Thorp)

JB: This opinion piece by the Editor-in-Chief of Science is a good example of how journal editors can act as standard bearers for their communities. The bottom line of the editorial is strong and unequivocal:

The time to act is now. The scientific community needs to flood OMB with responses during the public comment period, open until 13 July. Universities and associations must speak out as a united front to mobilize Congress and be ready to file lawsuits once the regulations are finalized. I was sympathetic to members of the scientific establishment who played it carefully during last year’s budget negotiations. Getting the budget deal done was crucial. But that was then. The red light is now flashing. All hands, report to stations.

The ramifications of these new regulations, if enacted, will be far reaching for scholarly communication. It seems possible, perhaps even likely, that academic research (and therefore publishing) will become increasingly balkanised in the months and years to come.

Lawmakers propose banning all U.S.-Chinese research collaborations

The measure, called the Securing Innovation and Research from Adversaries (SIRA) Act, would prohibit U.S. scientists from using federal funding “to enter into, support, or carry out any research collaboration” with any Chinese scientist “associated with” Chinese entities on one of several U.S. government blacklists. The bill’s sweeping definition of collaboration includes co-authorship, sharing data, material transfers, and any joint supervision of students.

The blacklists are equally broad. They include any university, laboratory, or hospital considered part of the country’s “military-civilian fusion strategy” to boost the country’s standing as a science and technology superpower.

Science (Jeffrey Mervis)

JB: The above story was published on May 27. A week earlier Science ran a similar story U.S. researchers face new restrictions on publishing with foreign collaborators.

Grants managers at two of the U.S. government’s largest funders of scientific research have recently placed unprecedented limitations on the ability of U.S. scientists to publish with co-authors from other countries, researchers say. Units of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) are privately directing grantees to request permission in advance for any co-authorship with a scholar affiliated with a foreign institution, even if all the work was done in the United States. NASA, meanwhile, is reportedly telling some grantees that papers co-authored with researchers in China may have violated its rules.

Will AI ruin the social sciences — or revolutionize them?

Political scientist and journal editor Kevin Munger at the European University Institute in Florence, Italy, has predicted 50% increases in submissions to leading political-science journals this year. And the preprint server for psychology research, PsyArXiv, got such a flood of papers that it had to include checks by humans earlier in its screening processes, says Jamie Cummins, a meta-scientist at the University of Bern, who works as a moderator for the site. Social science is not alone in struggling with this issue. But Tucker and Lazer worry that, because much of the field relies on survey analysis, it is unusually susceptible to the rapid AI-based production of fragile research.

Nature (David Adam)

Mathematicians issue warning as AI rapidly gains ground

Today, 16 math specialists have turned that unease into a public cry for help—and call to action. Part warning, part manifesto, the 11-page Leiden Declaration on Artificial Intelligence and Mathematics cautions that unchecked automation threatens not only how math is practiced, but what the discipline stands for. It also lays out principles for using AI in ways that support, rather than erode, the field.

...

AI-generated papers could overwhelm peer-review systems with low-quality work, make it difficult to assign proper credit for discoveries, and disadvantage researchers who choose not to rely on AI tools. The authors also raise ethical concerns about mathematicians’ work being used to train AI systems for military and surveillance purposes.

Science (Celina Zhao)

NSF watchdog unit is no longer investigating research misconduct

But OIG’s [NSF’s Office of Inspector General] watchdog role over research misconduct has ended, Science has learned. Shortly after President Donald Trump took office in January 2025, it was stripped of its ability to track down scientific miscreants. The change was part of a drastic downsizing of OIG, including the team of Ph.D. scientists responsible for doing those investigations, as Retraction Watch first reported. NSF’s 220-page budget request for 2027, which Trump sent to Congress in April, describes the elimination of 22 OIG positions since Trump took office, a 24% decline.

Science (Jeffrey Mervis)

JB: Independent assessment of potential research misconduct is vitally important. Universities and other research institutions may be tempted to brush uncomfortable truths under the carpet to protect reputations and maintain research funding.

First and last authors more likely to be men in leading science journals

However, an analysis of first and last authorship in journals tracked by Nature Index reveals a persistent gender imbalance in these markers of scientific contribution and authority, indicating that recognition in top-tier academic publishing has not kept pace with women’s growing presence in research. Among the natural-sciences journals tracked by the index, women represented 29% of first-author positions and 17% of last-author positions in 2025. These figures have improved only slightly over the past decade, up from 28% of first-author positions and 15% of last-author positions in 2015, and are nowhere near gender parity — having women make up 40–60% of these authorships.

Nature Index (Rachel Nuwer & Vera Nienaber)

JB: This is unsurprising; the lack of progress is unforgivable.

AI Cranks Out 380 Academic Finance Papers in 12 Hours That Could Fool Peer Review Checks

Two finance professors at leading American universities set out to show just how easy it had become to industrialize one of academia’s most persistent bad habits: building a theory to explain data you’ve already seen, then pretending you came up with the theory first. In academic circles, this practice has a name, “HARKing,” which stands for Hypothesizing After Results are Known. What the researchers found was that AI doesn’t just enable HARKing on a new scale. It automates it entirely, at a speed that could overwhelm the academic publishing system before anyone figures out what to do about it.

Study Finds (anonymous)

Science sleuths uncover more than 100 suspicious images in Thermo Fisher antibody catalogue

Catalogue entries for more than 100 antibodies sold by the research services and supply company Thermo Fisher Scientific contain images that have apparently been manipulated, according to a pair of researchers who specialize in scientific integrity issues.

On 28 May, the researchers documented their findings online in a database that includes 127 “problematic images” associated with the company’s antibodies. Issues with the images — which are included in the catalogue to demonstrate antibodies’ quality and performance — range from minor alterations that make the images look nicer to extensive changes that raise questions of data soundness. The effort was led by Reese Richardson, a metascientist at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois.

Nature (Dan Garisto)

JB: Editorial independence in action; Nature’s news team covered a story that’s embarrassing for a commercial partner. However, I doubt the internal fallout reached the levels seen in 2003 when The Lancet published this editorial: The statin wars: why AstraZeneca must retreat.

Retractions for honest mistakes ‘should be celebrated’

However, [Caroline] Sutton said there is a need to ensure “we’re not excluding folks” with those checks. “How do you build a system that can both be reliable and check these things but yet still be inclusive and not just based on tools and infrastructure that we might have in the global north?”

She added that being able to verify authors and reviewers is “so important if we’re going to uphold and protect…a permanent scholarly record that everybody is going to be able to rely on”.

“At the end of the day, there is this collective responsibility for ensuring that we have a body of knowledge that is validated and that we can trust.”

Research Professional (Fiona McIntyre)

JB: This is an extract from an interview with Caroline Sutton, chief executive of the International Association of Scientific, Technical and Medical Publishers (STM). Please bear the key message in mind when considering the next story in this roundup.

Vietnam researchers face bans and funding cuts for violating integrity rules

Researchers in Vietnam who fabricate data or plagiarize papers may be permanently barred from future scientific work, according to new guidance from the country’s Ministry of Science and Technology.

The new framework, announced May 25, requires science and technology organizations to implement rules against research misconduct, and it outlines a process for investigating and sanctioning violations. The recommended penalties include written warnings, correction or retraction requests, public apologies, role suspensions, returning research funding, and bans from scientific projects. Violations of scientific integrity must also be recorded in the National Digital Platform for Science, Technology, and Innovation Management, according to the framework.

Researchers who use artificial intelligence inappropriately may also be subject to stiff sanctions. The framework warns researchers should not use AI to create fake data, images, or references nor unverified AI-generated material used as a reference.

Retraction Watch (Alicia Gallegos)

JB: Earlier in the month, the Retraction Watch team also published: New rule in Peru restricts authors with retractions from getting special bonuses.

In an ongoing effort to combat scientific misconduct, Peru has passed new rules that bar research faculty at public universities there from receiving special bonuses if they’ve had one or more retractions in the last three years.

A researcher’s unusually high h-index gives a window into an expansive citation network

Much of Gadekallu’s work consists of lengthy descriptive “surveys,” which typically summarize and define various fields of study. Some of these papers feature “tortured phrases” — often a hallmark of questionable research papers — while others contain irrelevant citations and seemingly impossible data, according to commenters on PubPeer.

“There is no secret to this growth other than working rigorously at the forefront of evolving fields, which naturally increases the likelihood of contributing meaningful results,” Gadekallu told us.

Retraction Watch (Brendan Borrell)

JB: The comments section is fascinating — the researchers attempt to justify their behaviour.

A Way to Challenge the Groupthink of Scholarly Journals

As an editor-in-chief and a member of the editorial advisory board of Theory and Society, an interdisciplinary journal published by Springer Nature, we are proud to announce a first-of-its-kind article type called “Peer Review.” The purpose is to avoid procedural traps that can prevent legitimate criticism from being published and to recover what peer review was supposed to be: serious, good-faith analysis by experts seeking clarity and truth. As in postpublication peer review, a Peer Review article may address a paper from any scholarly journal so long as it raises concerns about methods, evidence, logic, definitions or theory. The focus must be on claims, arguments and scholarly standards, not the author’s character or motives.

Wall Street Journal (Kevin McCaffree and Colin Wright)

JB: This WSJ opinion article was written by two of the journal’s editors. It seems rather odd that the WSJ would run a piece about a journal’s new article category.

Patchy funding records ‘holding back research’

Gaps in the data on research funding make it hard to see how work is supported and what it delivers, a cross-sector research group has warned. The Barcelona Declaration Working Group on Funding Metadata brings together funders, publishers and infrastructure organisations to improve how funding information is captured and shared. On 25 May, it launched a call to action urging the research community to improve the quality of open funding metadata—information on grants that identifies who funded research and what type of support was provided.

Research Professional News (Isaac Barbosa)

JB: You can read the Call to Action here. The proposals are sensible, but would add yet more complexity to the publishing process.

To make it easier for publishers to translate acknowledgment text into funding metadata, it recommends that funders assign unique identifiers to grants, known as Grant DOIs. They should also consider making standardised funding acknowledgment a formal grant condition. Publishers could reinforce this by making Grant DOIs mandatory at submission, it says, alongside working to prevent funding metadata loss across their editorial and production pipelines. Institutions and libraries could impose similar funding metadata requirements in publishing negotiations, it suggests.

Mandatory fields in submission systems are rarely popular.

Why lawyers keep citing fake cases invented by AI

A database maintained by Damien Charlotin, a senior research fellow at the Paris School of Advanced Business Studies (HEC Paris), lists more than 1,400 cases where courts have addressed AI errors in the past three years, including filings by attorneys and self-represented litigants. As recently as last fall, Charlotin says, the list appeared to be growing exponentially. It’s since leveled off to a steady flow of exasperated judicial rulings. “For the past two or three months, we have reached a plateau of around 350, 400 decisions a quarter,” says Charlotin, who has also created an AI-powered reference checker called Pelaikan.

Scientific American (Steven Melendez)

arXiv’s ban for authors submitting AI content ‘welcome but unenforceable’

In a landmark move, the popular preprint platform arXiv has said it will impose an immediate one-year ban if it finds “incontrovertible evidence” that submissions contain “inappropriate language, plagiarized content, biased content, errors, mistakes, incorrect references, or misleading content” written by large language models (LLMs).

“If a submission contains incontrovertible evidence that the authors did not check the results of LLM generation, this means we can’t trust anything in the paper,” explained Thomas Dietterich, who chairs arXiv’s computing section, as he announced the policy on social media platform X.

Times Higher Education (Jack Grove)

JB: Preprint servers may struggle to cover the costs of implementing these checks and then policing them effectively. The comments in the X thread are worth reading — academics are understandably worried that they could be banned from using arXiv if one of their collaborators uses AI inappropriately.

U.S. agencies aren’t ready for the rising cost of making research papers free, report warns

A U.S. federal mandate to make scholarly papers free to read could triple the government’s bill for publishing fees to $937 million by 2030—an increase most research agencies aren’t prepared for, says a report released yesterday by Congress’s spending-watchdog agency. But some question the report’s worrying forecast and say it should have focused more attention on exploring creative solutions to the challenge of paying for rising publishing costs amid increasingly stretched research budgets.

Science (Jeffrey Brainard)

JB: I covered this story in the last issue of Journalology.

University of Nottingham drops five publishing deals

Asked by Research Professional News about claims circulating on social media that the university had dropped agreements with publishers, a spokesperson said: “We regularly review all our journal subscriptions and have chosen not to renew five contracts for 2026.” Nottingham confirmed these contracts were with Cambridge University Press, Oxford University Press, Ovid/Wolters Kluwer, Taylor & Francis and Wiley.

Research Professional News (Frances Jones)

JB: Neither Springer Nature nor Elsevier are named, but two university presses are. Nottingham University is in significant financial trouble, unfortunately.

Tough peer-review process? Your paper might end up being more highly cited

The study, posted to the arXiv preprint server last month, evaluated the peer-review correspondence associated with a selection of papers published in Nature Communications. In 2016, the journal started making these files public for some of the papers that the journal had accepted and, since 2022, it does so for all accepted articles. It does this for transparency and to inform discussion of published papers in the research community, the journal says.

Preprint co-author An Zeng, who is a specialist in complexity science at Beijing Normal University in China, says that he and his colleagues “thought these files could tell us a lot about the ‘negotiation’ between reviewers and authors” to get papers published.

Nature (Mariana Lenharo)

What China’s rise in chemistry means for the rest of the world

China’s success in chemistry fuels its overall lead in the Nature Index: the subject accounts for more than 50% of China’s overall output. For the United States — whose chemistry Share has hardly changed in 10 years and now sits at under 5,400 — that figure is less than one-third. We see this trend play out more broadly between East and West: among the top 15 countries for chemistry, all five nations from Asia had the subject contributing more than 40% of their total output (China 51%, Japan 44%, India 58%, South Korea 42%, Singapore 49%) in the latest data, whereas top Western countries range from 22% (Italy) to 36% (Germany).

Nature Index (Bec Crew)

And finally…

In these troubling times the best response may well be to laugh: NoTrue, Silence and Rubbish Communications: satirical journals give Chinese academics a pressure valve.

Rubbish is a concept familiar to postgraduate students and junior researchers in China. It refers to an imaginary journal that publishes research deemed to be a failure or useless by mainstream academic criteria.

“I thought, why don’t I start a Rubbish journal in real life,” says Li,. Hours after seeing the post, he set up Rubbish on RedNote.

The satirical journal would “welcome a wide range of submissions, which can be about unexplainable experiment results, anecdotes that happened during your research or gossip within your research group”, read Rubbish’s inaugural post on 12 February.

If you follow me on LinkedIn you may remember that I announced the launch of The Journal of the Holy Grail on April 1, 2024 and a Lanius series of journals on April 1, 2023. None of them have been accepted for indexing, unfortunately. Sales of LinkedIn for Lurkers, announced on April 1, 2026, have also been poor. I’ll have to keep writing this newsletter instead, I guess.

Until next time,

James

P.S. Please hit the ‘like’ button (shaped like a heart) at the bottom of this email if you enjoyed The Jist. The Substack promotion algorithm responds to these signals, you see. Thank you for your support.

Hello fellow journalologists,

Today’s issue contains five stories that I think you should know about. We’ll cover:

• The US Government Accountability Office’s (GAO) assessment on the future cost of open access

• A report on the state of peer review based on a large ScholarOne dataset

• A thoughtful essay on the Matthew effect and AI

• A report by Elsevier on Europe’s research performance

• Significant anniversaries for MDPI and PLOS One

Federal Research: Agencies Should Better Manage Anticipated Publishing Cost Increases Amid Shift to Public Access

Amid the federal shift to public access, publishers are changing their business models to remain viable without subscription revenue and will require authors to pay to have their publications made open access. Agencies allow grant funds to cover these charges. Assuming historical patterns continue, the new policies and publishers’ responses may result in significant agency cost growth. This would mean less money for research (see figure). However, only the National Institutes of Health has planned to manage these potential costs. Additional analysis could help other agencies better manage costs, which may triple annually.

JB: The news agenda in 2022 was dominated by the US Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) “Nelson memo”. One of the main criticisms of that document was that it paid little attention to what the cost of the new policy might be.

On Thursday the US Government Accountability Office (GAO) published a more detailed assessment of the potential costs for US research agencies. In their words:

In 2024, OSTP published an economic analysis on expanding public access, but it did not fully reflect all five of GAO’s key elements of an economic analysis. Notably, the scope did not address the goal of estimating the potential costs and other effects. Ensuring that future analyses are consistent with the key elements can help agencies better understand the cost implications of their new policies.

The headline figure is that publishing charges for US federal research agencies will increase from $295 million in 2024 to “as much as $ 1 billion annually”. However, I’m not convinced it will be as simple as that.

We’re still waiting to hear whether the NIH will introduce price caps to help reduce the potential increase in cost. I often find myself agreeing with David Crotty and his recent prediction seems likely to me:

Should the NIH eventually announce their APC caps, I would expect to see a rush of TAs signed in the US, similar to the rapid uptake in the EU following the implementation of Plan S. The rich (researchers/institutions/publishers) will get richer, again — an unintended, but entirely predictable consequence.

In this scenario, at least some of the open access publishing costs will be shouldered by academic institutions, not by the federal research funders.

Science ran a news story about the GAO report on Friday, which included this assessment from Christopher Steven Marcum:

Still, some observers fault GAO for assuming the author-pays publishing model would predominate over others that might not cost agencies so much, such as encouraging authors to deposit articles in public repositories or supporting journals that make articles free to read without charging fees or subscriptions. “It is not the federal government’s responsibility to prop up a particular business model,” says Christopher Steven Marcum, a consultant who as a White House official during the Biden administration helped write the Nelson Memo. (That memo did not endorse a particular business model.) “The report seems to say, publishers control all the power, so federal agencies just have to cough up more money for them. I’m a little bit mystified by that.”

Read more

Hello fellow journalologists,

The purpose of The Jist is to summarise how news outlets have been covering scholarly communication.

The stories in this issue of The Jist are presented in reverse chronological order; more recent stories are at the top and older stories are at the bottom.

Before we get to the news, here are links to the newsletters I’ve sent in the past week, in case you missed them:

Hallucinated citations highest in social sciences preprints site

The analysis found that the rates of hallucinated citations varied between different repositories. SSRN ranked first with 1.91% of citations in studies posted there by August 2025 deemed to be hallucinations. ArXiv, a physical sciences repository, ranked second, with 0.39% of its citations incorrect or referring to non-existent papers or researchers. The PubMed Central biomedical-science database had a rate of 0.27% hallucinated citations in peer-reviewed publications. BioRxiv, a preprint server specializing in biological sciences, had a rate of 0.21%.

JB: To my non-expert eye, this preprint looks to be more compelling than the Lancet article that received significant press coverage recently. Here’s a quote from the Retraction Watch story about the Lancet paper (One in 277 PubMed-indexed papers in 2026 shows fabricated references, says analysis):

Fabricated citations in the biomedical literature have increased 12-fold in two years, according to an audit of nearly 2.5 million papers published as a letter to The Lancet today. The analysis of articles indexed in PubMed found that about one in 277 papers published in the first seven weeks of 2026 referenced a paper that didn’t exist. That was a jump from 2025’s rate of one in 458 and 2023’s one in 2,828.

See last issue of Journalology for more analysis.

As scientific fraud proliferates, so do businesses that aim to stop it

The last few years have seen a surge in activity from paper mills, which are shady entities looking to make a quick buck from publishing and spreading fraudulent science. Paper mills sell authorship slots on papers already slated for publication at scholarly journals or offer additional citations in exchange for a fee.

During the same period, multiple efforts have also been launched to identify, flag, and weed out these deceptive practices. Such projects—run by scholarly services firms, academic publishers, and the research community—look for a number of telltale signs that may indicate fraud. Because the area is a hot one, start-ups using technology to address the threats are gaining traction and attracting investment.

C&EN (Dalmeet Singh Chawla)

JB: The number of startups presenting at the STM research integrity conference in London last December was impressive. I’m not convinced that the demand is there for more than a handful of them, though. The large commercial publishers are building their own solutions. Small publishers will struggle to afford multiple research integrity tools. That leaves medium-sized publishers, which is a relatively small market.

Assessing research integrity tools takes time and most of the small or medium-sized publishers simply don’t have the bandwidth to judge which ones best suit their needs.

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

By his calculation, Elsevier’s retraction rate was 3.97 articles per 10,000 published. This compared to 5.46 for SAGE, 6.21 for Wiley, 6.50 for Taylor & Francis, 9.06 for Springer Nature, 17.70 for IEEE, 26.82 for PLOS and 283.77 for IOS Press. Readers of Retraction Watch won’t be surprised the highest retraction rate showed up at Hindawi, at 320.02 per 10,000. Wiley acquired the publisher in 2023 and the high number of retractions – including over 11,000 from late 2022 to early 2024 – is “consistent with the mass retractions following Wiley’s acquisition,” Oppenlaender wrote.

Retraction Watch (unsigned)

JB: The preprint was published in February, and so won’t have picked up on the big increase in retractions from Elsevier recently. The image below is taken from this page, which searches for “Retraction notice” on Science Direct.

The preprint’s author, Jonas Oppenlaender, did not include some of the largest publishers, such as Frontiers and MDPI, because these publishers retract fewer papers, on average, and so didn’t make it onto the top 10 list.

A high retraction rate reflects a willingness to correct the scholarly record, which should be applauded (while acknowledging that prior quality control processes missed problematic papers).

Elsevier vs Meta: first science publisher sues over scraped research papers

Elsevier — which publishes thousands of journals, including Cell and The Lancet — was part of a class-action lawsuit filed on 5 May against technology company Meta and its chief executive Mark Zuckerberg in the Southern District of New York. Also named as plaintiffs on the lawsuit are book-publishing giants Hachette and Macmillan, and the US fiction author and lawyer Scott Turow. The publishers allege that Meta obtained and reproduced copyrighted works in developing its large language model (LLM) Llama.

Nature (Elizabeth Gibney)

JB: C&EN also covered this story and approached other academic publishers for comment (As Elsevier sues Meta over AI, other scholarly publishers are keeping a watchful eye).

Meanwhile, Times Higher Education ran: ‘Open season’ on scholars’ rights if Elsevier loses Meta fight.

Academics may find themselves in the unexpected position of cheering on Elsevier in its legal battle with Meta because victory for the Facebook owner would signal “open season” on scholars’ rights to control how their work is represented, legal and publishing experts have said.

As researchers aim for universal AI disclosure guidelines, the devil is in the details

Seghers and Weaver hope to produce guidelines for AI disclosure specific enough to provide practical guidance, but also broad enough to cover future eventualities, including end-to-end hypothesis generation, research, and reporting by AI systems. “Some say it’s naïve,” Seghers acknowledges, “but mapping the problem is something already.”

Science (Nicola Jones)

JB: This news story covers some of the main themes from the World Conference on Research Integrity (WCRI), which was held in Vancouver last week.

Nicola also published Gotcha! Odd language mistakes may help identify fake papers in Science.

Tamarinde Haven, a social scientist studying research integrity at Tilburg University, notes the approach is probably catching mistakes originally made by humans rather than by a generative artificial intelligence programs, which are less prone to spelling errors. That means it is likely picking up “old-fashioned” fakes, which are presumably becoming less common. So, the technique will likely become less effective over time, she says. [James] Heathers agrees. “Every detection model goes out of fashion.” But if a strategy works, he argues, it should be used until it stops working: “You find the bug, you kill the bug.”

And also: AI agents may be skilled researchers—but not always honest ones.

But in a presentation at the World Conferences on Research Integrity here today, Shah reported that both systems engaged in acts that aren’t acceptable in research, including making up data and “p-hacking”: running an experiment multiple times but only reporting the best outcome. (The team’s results were previously posted as a preprint on arXiv.) The misbehaviors weren’t obvious and required a lot of sleuthing to track down, suggesting AI-assisted studies might fall victim to such problems without their authors’ knowledge.

Rising Retraction Rates: A Symptom of a Strained System

Although he respects the work of people rooting out examples of scientific fraud, Hanson said that focusing on retractions is a losing game. “Hunting down all the bad actors and retracting all the individual articles doesn't help because it's like trying to play whack-a-mole except the molehill is the size of Mount Everest,” he said. “Addressing the fact that there's an entire subterranean culture underneath that hill is going to be more challenging, but also more permanent as a solution.”

The Scientist (Shelby Bradford)

Early-career researchers do more ‘disruptive’ science than veterans

Experienced researchers are less likely to produce ‘disruptive’ science than are those just starting their careers, finds an analysis of the scientific papers published by 12.5 million researchers over 60 years. The authors discovered that older researchers are better at connecting existing ideas to produce new knowledge than are younger researchers. But those with more experience are worse at achieving massive breakthroughs that overhaul, or disrupt, entire fields of research — as happened with innovations such as the discovery of the structure of DNA.

Nature (Mariana Lenharo)

CDC leader calls for new journal to ‘elevate scientific rigor’

In a 30 April op-ed in The Washington Post, Bhattacharya changed tack. “Recognizing that MMWR does not subject its articles to formal external peer review and that it serves as a bulletin representing the voice of the CDC, I issued one of my first directives as acting director, calling for the development of a peer-reviewed journal, in addition [sic] MMWR, to complement it and elevate scientific rigor across all CDC publications,” he wrote. Epidemiologist Charlotte Kent, who was editor-in-chief of MMWR when she retired in January 2025, notes that CDC already publishes two journals that use external peer reviewers, Emerging Infectious Diseases and Preventing Chronic Disease. Those journals could handle content that now goes into MMWR, Kent says. “I don’t see what would be the benefit of starting a new journal.”

Science (Jon Cohen)

JB: There must be something about having the initials JB that makes us want to launch new journals. You can read the other JB’s opinion piece in The Washington Post here: Jay Bhattacharya: The CDC is committed to upholding scientific rigor.

‘The era of norms is dead,’ so should peer reviewers be paid?

Johan Rooryck, a former executive director of the Coalition S open access group, told RPN that paying reviewers is “a very bad idea”. He argued that paying peer reviewers “further monetises…the publishing system into distinct, payable, commoditised units”, whereas peer review should be “a collaborative moment, not a transactional one”. Rooryck also warned that payment “practically invites abusive practices in the form of ‘reviewing farms’ that will use thinly disguised artificial intelligence-generated reviews for money”, with particular risks for researchers in low- and middle-income countries.

Research Professional News (Fiona McIntyre)

JB: This week Inside Higher Ed also covered the same topic (Will Paying Reviewers Ease the Peer Review Crisis?) and, like RPN, led with quotes from Jonas Kunst, who founded Advances.in. You may remember from a couple of Jists ago that Times Higher Education ran Can journals that pay peer reviewers succeed?, which also focused on Advances.in. In that issue of The Jist I wrote:

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.

I can’t help but wonder if Jonas Kunst is trying to turn things around by pitching multiple news outlets for coverage of his work. Three very similar news stories in as many weeks seems rather odd to me.

F.D.A. Blocked Publication of Research Finding Covid and Shingles Vaccines Were Safe

Officials at the Food and Drug Administration have blocked publication of several studies supporting the safety of widely used vaccines against Covid-19 and shingles in recent months, a spokesman for the Department of Health and Human Services confirmed. The studies, which cost millions of dollars in public funds, were conducted by scientists at the agency, who worked with data firms to analyze millions of patient records. They found serious side effects to be very rare.

The New York Times (Christina Jewett)

First AI tool to detect suspicious peer reviews rolled out by academic publisher

In an analysis of around half a million peer-review reports for manuscripts submitted to the IOPP between 2020 and 2025, the AI tool identified nearly 2,500 reports that had at least 60% overlap with former reviewer reports, of which 785 reports had at least 80% overlap. Of the flagged cases, 89 were exact duplicates. The IOPP is rolling out the tool across all its journals, the publisher announced on 5 May.

Nature (Miryam Naddaf)

AI Slop Is Flooding Academic Journals. A Top Journal Measured It

The good news is that the editorial process at Organization Science is still filtering effectively. Only 3.2% of manuscripts scored at 70% or higher usage of AI receive a revise and resubmit, compared with 11.9% for low AI papers. Published articles remain overwhelmingly human generated. The editors are catching the bad work. There is a significant human cost, however. The journal doubled its deputy editors from six to eleven and nearly doubled its senior editors from roughly 30 to 60. All of this is volunteer labor, unpaid academics donating time to maintain scientific quality. When those academics are weeding out AI slop they are not using their time to teach classes, conduct research, or serve their professions.

Forbes (John Drake)

JB: The Nature news team also covered this study, plus some other recent ones, in How much of the scientific literature is generated by AI?

Why preprint servers are increasing moderation — and what that means for researchers

Preprint servers are not dumping grounds for manuscripts, says Chtena, who adds that the impression she got from her interviews with repository managers and moderators is that they “try to set the bar as low as possible” when it comes to moderation, but have had to become more discerning as the information ecosystem has become more polluted. There is no perfect amount of moderation, nor one rule book that Chtena, Fleerackers or others point to as representing best practice. Ultimately, each platform and moderator is serving their community as best they can under the circumstances, says Chtena. “I saw a tremendous amount of care put into moderation and how it is set up.”

Nature (Jackson Ryan)

And finally…

News stories about research integrity challenges, often caused by AI, dominate this newsletter. So you may be grateful to meet the academics refusing to use generative AI.

When Possingham pledged to not use AI unless otherwise advised, he said that many of his peers were supportive. However, there were some vocal critics. “People were more or less saying in their own way, you’re a Luddite and the world’s moving on,” he recalls. And being a researcher who abstains from genAI can feel a bit similar to being a black sheep.

No AI was used in the creation of this newsletter. Why? Because the journey is more important than the destination. That’s how we learn and get better at our craft.

Until next time,

James

P.S. Please hit the ‘like’ button (shaped like a heart) at the bottom of this email if you enjoyed The Jist. The Substack promotion algorithm responds to these signals, you see. Thank you for your support.

Hello fellow journalologists,

On Wednesday I sent you newsletter that assessed the recent performance of MDPI and Frontiers. If you missed it, you can read it here:

One of the take-home messages was that acceptance rates have fallen for both MDPI and Frontiers in recent years.

Yesterday, I crunched the numbers in more detail, which I want to quickly share …

Read more

This is the third in a series of essays covering the annual reports of the large academic publishers. In case you missed them, here are links to the two previous articles, which covered Elsevier and Springer Nature:

Today’s analysis includes two publishers that have a lot in common. Both MDPI and Frontiers were founded by former academics who saw an opportunity to make research freely available via open access (and generate life-changing wealth, too). These two companies have disrupted the academic publishing industry over the past 5+ years; it’s worth examining their recent performance and likely future direction of travel.

Both companies are privately held and do not publish their financials. So today’s analysis will primarily focus on non-financial indicators. However, since both publishers generate most of their income from publishing journal articles, their article output is likely to have a strong correlation with their revenues.

Setting the scene

MDPI is the more successful of the two, if article growth and volume is your definition of success. The graph below shows the number of research articles published each year (excluding preprints) up until 2024, according to Dimensions (Digital Science). The output of both publishers increased rapidly until a peak in 2022 and then fell in 2023 and 2024.

MDPI published 50,000 fewer research articles in 2024 compared with 2022; Frontiers output fell by slightly less. We don’t know what the average revenue per article would have been for those lost articles; a lot depends on how generous their waiver policies were and whether the ‘lost’ papers would previously have been given APC waivers. (Back in 2022, the average “waived share of total APC” was 36% for MDPI).

If the average revenue per article was $1500, perhaps revenues were $75 million less in 2024 than 2022 for each publisher. That’s a guesstimate, though. Whatever the true number is, it likely had a material effect on their financial bottom line.

This is presumably one reason why the Frontiers management team felt that they had little choice but to make 600 colleagues redundant in January 2024, reducing the size of the team from 2000 people to 1400.

Author pays business models allow revenues to scale quickly, unlike institutional subscription deals, which are often locked in for a number of years. That’s beneficial when times are good, but incredibly problematic when article output drops suddenly.

MDPI, in particular, is well known for publishing papers quickly. If submissions dry up, or if the publisher needs to hit the brakes because of research integrity issues, revenues can drop fast. This makes the business model far less resilient than a traditional annual subscription business, and is presumably why both companies have been signing institutional open access publishing deals.

In short, after two years of decreased output, 2025 was an important year for both MDPI and Frontiers. Would they follow the same trajectory as PLOS and decline slowly over time? Or would they manage to turn the tide and recover some of the ground that had been lost?

Read more

Hello fellow journalologists,

Earlier this week I sent paid subscribers a detailed breakdown of all the announcements from April. If you missed that overview, you can read it here.

Today’s newsletter is in the classic Journalology format. I’ve selected seven stories from the past two weeks that I think you should know about:

• 5% of articles have at least one fabricated reference

• The merger of two not-for-profits

• The revised FT50 journal rankings in economics and business

• Wiley’s new leader of the Research group

• A Forensic Scientometrics report

• Elsevier’s lawsuit against Meta

• Five years of Cell Press Multi-Journal Submission

Fabricated citations: an audit across 2·5 million biomedical papers

Among 97·1 million verified references, we identified 4046 fabricated references across 2810 papers. In 2023, approximately one in 2828 papers contained at least one fabricated reference. By 2025, this had risen to one in 458 and in the first 7 weeks of 2026, one in 277 papers had at least one fabricated reference. The fabrication rate increased more than 12 times, from approximately four per 10 000 papers in 2023, to 51·3 per 10 000 papers in the fourth quarter of 2025, reaching 56·9 per 10 000 papers in early 2026.

JB: This research article (which was published as a Correspondence letter in The Lancet; more on that later) provides further evidence that LLMs are introducing errors into the academic literature. Around 5% of articles have at least one fabricated reference, the authors found. The analysis was based on PubMedCentral data, so the results may not be generalisable outside of the biomedical sciences.

The authors propose that publishers should integrate automated reference verification into editorial workflows and indeed some do just that. This is just one integrity check, among many, that publishers now need to perform, which adds to the cost and complexity of academic publishing at a time when some funders are implementing APC price caps.

It’s possible to buy off-the-shelf solutions — or to get access to some of the tools via the STM Integrity Hub — but we shouldn’t underestimate the size of the research integrity challenge. It seems unlikely that volunteer-run Diamond OA journals, which some believe are the solution to the crisis in communication, will be able to keep up.

The large commercial publishers have invested heavily in new editorial technology in recent years. For example, as I outlined in a recent annual report deep dive, Springer Nature spent €188 million on technology between 2021 and 2025, and now has around 60 AI ‘assists’ supporting editorial workflows (N.B. not all of the €188 million investment will be into journals workflows). This week, IOP Publishing, the largest physics society publisher, announced that it has developed a tool to detect duplicate peer review reports.

Smaller publishers will struggle to implement these multiple research integrity checks. This could mean that fabricated content will be increasingly published by lower volume publishers, which don’t have the bandwidth to detect fabricated references, manipulated images, paper mills, reviewer mills etc. etc.

We should also consider the implications for preprint servers. Are we OK with a ‘rough and ready’ low cost approach for preprints? Should they be expected to invest in research integrity solutions too?

The Lancet authors recommend four actions:

First, publishers should integrate automated reference verification into submission workflows before peer review begins; verification tools exist, and the barrier to adoption is institutional rather than technological.

Second, indexing services should add integrity metadata to article records so that downstream users can assess the reliability of references.

Third, publishers should retroactively screen existing publications and issue corrections or retractions when fabricated references compromise a paper’s conclusions.

Fourth, fabricated references do not currently exist as a discrete category in major research integrity databases; establishing this category would enable systematic tracking and accountability.

The underlying assumption here is that publishers and indexers have sole responsibility for sorting out this mess.

A fifth recommendation should be added. Academic institutions bear some responsibility if their faculty produces AI slop. Angela Cochran, who leads the publishing team at ASCO, wrote an essay in 2024 that made exactly this point. Unfortunately, the institutions that most need to implement these technologies are the ones least likely to do so.

Let’s be clear what the root cause of the problem is here: a publish or perish academic culture where researchers feel they need to use AI tools, which can introduce errors, in order to be competitive. Researchers are under huge pressure from the institutions that employ them to be productive; they cut corners because there’s little comeback for doing so.

Finally, it’s worth considering why this piece of research was published as a letter to the editor, with a 9 page PDF appendix (!), rather than as a full research article. Presumably The Lancet’s editors didn’t want it to be a citable item in the impact factor calculations. However, as Ella Flemyng, the head of editorial policy and research integrity at Cochrane, notes in Retraction Watch’s story about this paper:

Though the approach [using AI] was validated on 500 records and the main limitations are discussed, we are lacking considerable details about the methods.

The impact of AI on scholarly communication is wide ranging. We need a coordinated approach. If your organisation hasn’t done so already, you can submit feedback on the STM Association’s consultation document Toward Responsible Use of Research Content in Generative Al until the middle of June.

Read more

Hello fellow journalologists,

The stories in this issue of The Jist are presented in reverse chronological order; more recent stories are at the top and older stories are at the bottom.

The purpose of The Jist is to summarise how news outlets have been covering scholarly communication. There’s been a lot of activity in recent weeks.

After pulling vaccine study, Bhattacharya criticizes long-running CDC publication

A controversial decision by the Trump administration to pull a vaccine study from a weekly report put out by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) could portend an overhaul of the venerable publication. Jayanta “Jay” Bhattacharya, temporary head of CDC at the time, has questioned whether the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report (MMWR)—for 65 years a mainstay for conveying urgent public health data—is properly peer reviewed.

The skirmish goes back to a 9 April story in The Washington Post revealing that Bhattacharya had delayed publication in MMWR of a study of the COVID-19 vaccine’s effectiveness. Bhattacharya, who also is director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), had concerns about the study’s design for assessing how well the vaccine works at preventing hospitalization and death. On 22 April, the Post reported that MMWR had outright rejected the paper.

Science (Jon Cohen)

JB: Yesterday, the vaccine paper that Bhattacharya blocked was leaked to a journalist.

But Jay Bhattacharya believes that the public should not see this work—or at least that the CDC should not publish solid science carried out, in part, by its own experts.

That’s why we have to read it now. The blocked document (scrubbed of metadata) was obtained by Inside Medicine from a source who wished to be described as “someone close to the study.”

As an aside, I enjoyed Dorothy Bishop’s assessment of That fireside chat with Jay Bhattacharya: a view from across the pond. You may remember that Bhattacharya co-founded the Journal of the Academy of Public Health just over a year ago, which I covered back in issue 107.

Dorothy notes that “The JAPH has not been a success”, which is an excellent example of British understatement.

Abrupt change to European funder’s rules leaves researchers shut out

But on 16 April, ERC [European Research Council] announced new rules designed to stem a flood of grant applications it says has overwhelmed review panels. In an open letter, ERC head Maria Leptin described the “difficult decisions,” which include adding a year to the period unsuccessful applicants must wait before applying again. “This decision was taken after much discussion and only when it was clear that no other, less painful, measures were available,” Leptin wrote.

Science (Holly Else)

JB: Publishers are not the only ones inundated with submissions. Funders are too. The ERC has taken drastic measures and has received push back from the community. Yesterday, Times Higher Education ran: More than 1,000 scientists urge ERC to reverse resubmission rule.

THE also published a story about a Comment article in Nature, written by Geraint Rees and James Wilsdon: Could agentic AI topple grant-funding systems?

In our roles as leaders of research and innovation institutions, we’ve both heard anecdotally from the dozens of funders that we work with that the volume of grant applications they receive has risen sharply. Meanwhile, the quality of proposals seems to have improved, making it harder to discriminate between them. We suspect that one reason for this change is the increasing use of AI models and agents by researchers to aid them in writing applications.

The Times Higher Education story notes:

Drawing on information from 12 research funders across the world, the Research on Research Institute (RoRI) found that the volume of applications in 2025 had risen by an average of 57 per cent compared with 2022, the year in which ChatGPT was launched. For some prestigious funding programmes, the increase since 2022 is much higher, with applications to the European Union’s Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions fellowships for early career researchers shooting up by 142 per cent over the three years to 2025.

Rise in publications sparks fear of ‘perfect storm’ for research integrity

Figures published by three of the ‘big five’ publishers—Elsevier, Springer Nature and Wiley—show submissions and publications rising in 2025. Annual reports for Elsevier and Springer Nature show publications were up 10 per cent and 11 per cent, respectively, with submissions up 20 per cent and 34 per cent. Figures published in March by Wiley show that across three-quarters of the last financial year, publications were up by 11 per cent and submissions by 26 per cent.

Research Professional (Sophie Hogan)

JB: A news story about annual reports. What a good idea! Clarke and Esposito covered what might be causing the divergence in share price recovery for the big commercial publishers in this month’s The Brief.

Informal research ties ‘more important’ than co-authorship

Being thanked in a paper’s acknowledgments is a better predictor of publication success than prolific co-authorship, according to a study that highlights the importance of participating in the “invisible college” that determines academic fortunes. Although scientometric studies have long confirmed the importance of having broad and preferably international co-authorship, US scholars have suggested that the “thank you” section at the end of a journal paper could be a more reliable guide to who is truly significant in a discipline.

Times Higher Education (Jack Grove)

Black marks on published papers don’t change citation rates, new study finds

Neither retractions, expressions of concern, nor other editorial notices seem to keep authors from continuing to cite problematic papers, according to a look at what happened to more than 170 articles by one author.

Retraction Watch (Avery Orrall)

Growing use of guest editors has turned some journals into a ‘playground of bad science’

The incentives for journals and researchers are often at odds with the incentives for publishing good science, which has been particularly true of special issues. The filter of peer review, meant to weed out subpar science, tends to be more porous with special issues. The process of peer review is often shrouded in secrecy to allow colleagues to criticize one another without professional repercussions, but one paper found that special issues tend to have faster turnaround times for articles, as well as lower rejection rates.

STAT (Anil Oza)

How much for a fake authorship? Ad database reveals secrets of scientific fraud

Researchers have amassed a data set of thousands of advertisements selling research-paper authorships online, shedding light on the global marketplace for academic fraud. The collection — the largest of its kind — contains more than 18,700 adverts that were posted between March 2020 and early April 2026 by seven paper mills — businesses that produce fake or low-quality research and sell authorships. Together, the companies cater to academics in the Middle East, Central Asia, Eastern Europe and India.

Nature (Miryam Naddaf)

JB: This was a popular story with Science, Retraction Watch, C&EN and Times Higher Education all covering it:

• Buying a first author slot can cost you anywhere from $56 to $5,600

• Around $1,000 can buy you first authorship on a dodgy scientific paper

• Price of a scientific article? $800, according to paper mills

• Thousands of shady ads sell paper authorship for cash, large-scale investigation finds

What 6,000 researchers think about the future of science

The more experience researchers had, the more likely they were to prioritize journal prestige and methodological rigour. Among those who had authored more than 100 papers since 2020, almost half selected publishing in a high-impact journal — something usually determined using an ‘impact factor’ or average citation rate for the journal — as a top-three factor, compared with just under one-third of respondents who had authored one to five papers. Similarly, three-quarters of those with the highest publishing rate highlighted methodological rigour, compared with two-thirds of the group with the least experience.

Nature Index (Anna McKie and Vera Nienaber)

Journal goes dark after impersonating Eric Topol and others

Within hours of researchers from prestigious institutions discovering they were listed as authors on a fabricated paper, the website for the journal and publisher has been taken down. Cardiologist Eric Topol, the executive vice president of Scripps Research, posted on X yesterday that his name appeared on a “fraudulent” paper published in the so-called Journal of Digital Health Implementation. He suspected the article, dated March 29 and titled “Implementation Science for AI Integration in Digital Health Systems,” was AI-generated.

Retraction Watch (Avery Orrall)

JB: This is one of the more bizarre stories I’ve read in recent weeks. What were they trying to achieve?

‘Loss of faith’ in gold open access as funders withdraw support

Earlier this month Cancer Research UK (CRUK) became the latest high-profile research funder to withdraw support for open-access publishing, stating it would no longer fund the article processing charges (APCs) for its researchers. That move will save £5.2 million over three years, explained the charity’s director of research operations, Dan Burkwood, who criticised the “unsustainable costs and structure of the current publishing model”. Noting how “some of the big publishing houses have profit margins approaching 40 per cent”, Burkwood argued that the charity’s funds were used to pay researchers’ APCs yet their universities also paid a second time via institutional transformative agreements. “The publishers are – so to speak – having their cake whilst also eating it,” he concluded.

Times Higher Education (Jack Grove)

JB: To which publishers, embracing their inner Boris Johnson, may reply: “We’re pro having it and pro eating it, but never double dip”.

(For non-UK readers, this T&F article from 2022 will help explain why the cake proverb has been forever ruined for me: The origins of ‘cakeism’: the British think tank debate over repatriating sovereignty and its impact on the UK’s Brexit strategy.)

Sci Hub has created a new AI chatbot. Is it any good?

Sci-Hub, a pirate website that illegally hosts tens of millions of scientific papers, has launched an artificial intelligence–based chatbot that mines the database and answers questions based on what it retrieves... The answers from the AI chatbot, dubbed Sci-Bot, include references to papers in the Sci-Hub database, which are free to access. The alpha version of the tool answers only one question and can’t have subsequent conversations with the user.

C&EN (Dalmeet Singh Chawla)

JB: Nick Morley, one of the founders of Grounded AI, ran some tests on Sci-Bot and wrote this on LinkedIn:

It appears that while sci-bot may be good at generating evidence-based answers, like other RAG-enabled chat bots it cannot be relied upon and is not fit for bibliography generation. It carries a high risk of propagating misinformation, particularly with regards to author attribution, contributing to a growing source of annoyance to researchers worldwide

No humans allowed: scientific AI agents get their own social network

Agent4Science isn’t the only AI-exclusive social platform to emerge this year. In January, another Reddit-style site for AI agents, called Moltbook, launched. Within days, the site had amassed more than one million users, which use the platform to discuss everything from consciousness to inventing religions. How Agent4Science differs is in its scientific focus, says Emilio Ferrara, a computer scientist at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. “Narrowing in on creating new knowledge and debating existing knowledge is a really cool safeguard they put in place,” he says. “Ideally, agents can’t deviate too much from these subjects,” and therefore “produce more positive interactions”.

Nature (Jenna Ahart)

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

Forty-five of 48 members of the editorial board of the Journal of Approximation Theory resigned earlier this month for what they called Elsevier’s “concerning and potentially detrimental” decisions regarding the publication. Paul Nevai, formerly a professor at The Ohio State University, was appointed editor-in-chief of JAT in 1990 and held the position for 35 years until December. That’s when he reached the end of his term and Elsevier informed him they’d be filling the position with someone else.

Retraction Watch (Avery Orrall)

JB: An alternative headline could be “45 editors resign from math journal after Elsevier seeks to diversify editorial board”.

US lawmakers intensify scrutiny of scientific-publishing practices

California representative Zoe Lofgren, the leading Democrat on the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology, said that high publishing fees, especially those at for-profit publishers, exploit scientists and taxpayers, who often fund the research. But representative Emilia Sykes, a Democrat from Ohio, said that the restrictions on paying such fees as set out in the 2027 budget proposed by the administration of US President Donald Trump would leave some journals unable to perform their quality-control reviews. “This is an issue in need of a scalpel, and [the budget provision] is a sledgehammer,” said Sykes, who is the ranking member on the Investigations and Oversight Subcommittee.

Nature (Max Kozlov)

JB: See also: Retraction Watch testifies in Congressional hearing on scientific publishing.

Six 'Superretractors' Responsible for Large Number of Retracted Clinical Trials

A small number of “superretractors” was responsible for a significant proportion of retracted clinical trials, a retrospective cohort study showed.

Just six superretractors accounted for about a fifth of all retracted randomized controlled trials (RCTs), according to Ioana Alina Cristea, PhD, of the University of Padova in Italy, and colleagues.

Eighteen highly cited scientists who had more than 10 retractions during their career accounted for a quarter of all retracted trials; five of these authors were also superretractors, they reported in JAMA Network Open.

MedPage Today (Kristina Fiore)

English dominance in scholarly publishing declines, new languages gain ground

According to a new study from the Université de Montréal, the English language’s share of academic output in scholarly publishing fell from 94 per cent to 85 per cent between 1990 and 2023. Researchers analysed 88 million articles and 1.48 billion cited references using the OpenAlex and Dimensions databases.

The findings, published in the Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology, reveal that Indonesian, Portuguese, and Spanish are the only languages expanding faster than English. This growth stems from successful national policies and robust regional publishing infrastructures.

Research Information (anonymous)

And finally…

Helen Pearson, who works as a journalist at Nature, has just published a book: Beyond Belief: How Evidence Shows What Really Works. Helen wrote an opinion piece in The Guardian yesterday that outlines the key themes:

But there’s a bigger picture – and a more hopeful counter-narrative: the quiet, decades-long movement by which evidence from research is becoming integrated into our lives. I’ve spent the past five years speaking with more than 200 experts in evidence from around the world while researching my book, Beyond Belief. The experience showed me a fresh way to make decisions – and five ways to fight back against the forces of unreason.

I distinctly remember the meeting, 5 years ago, when Helen told me she had started working on the book. My copy arrived yesterday and I know I’ll enjoy reading it; Helen is a talented story teller.

Until next time,

James

P.S. Please hit the ‘like’ button (shaped like a heart) at the bottom of this email if you enjoyed The Jist. The Substack promotion algorithm responds to these signals, you see. Thank you for your support.

Hello fellow journalologists,

In recent weeks I’ve had my head down writing the the corporate annual reports assessments. Elsevier and Springer Nature are published. The next essay to arrive in your inbox will cover MDPI and Frontiers.

The essays, plus the Easter holidays, have slowed down production of the core Journalology newsletter. Normal service resumes as of today, but with a twist.

Journalology needs to cater to different audiences: some readers value Journalology for its comprehensiveness; others would prefer to receive just the headlines alongside my interpretation of what the implications may be.

The core Journalology newsletter has become unwieldy in recent months. In large part that’s because I want to create a valuable resource for paid subscribers. Moving from amateur to professional has created (self-imposed) pressure to provide more value than I did last year.

However, sometimes less is more; editorial filters are in themselves beneficial. Therefore, I’ve decided to change tactics slightly.

This issue of Journalology contains five stories that are likely to have broad appeal and that I consider to be important (plus a bonus in the ‘And finally…’ section).

I’ve also been working, in parallel, on a living document on Substack, that contains the wider news for April. Paid subscribers can read the work-in-progress document here:

I’ll update this ‘Briefly quoted’ document regularly over the next few weeks and will email paid subscribers the final version early in May (and a new document each month thereafter). In the meantime you can access it right now to see what’s been announced recently.

In this way, I hope to make the core Journalology email shorter and more impactful, while also providing news junkies with an at a glance summary of all the announcements in a given month.

The Jist will continue to focus on news stories, written by journalists, and will be free to read by everyone.

Right, to business. Here’s a summary of what I consider to be the five (or six) most important and interesting stories of the past few weeks.

Realigning incentives for biomedical researchers and journals through researcher-shared outputs

By anchoring researcher evaluation in researcher-shared outputs and journal business models in service execution instead of exclusivity, this framework fosters more inclusive, transparent, and efficient assessment of scientific work, while ensuring that journals are appropriately compensated for the value that they add.

Zenodo preprint (Bodo Stern and Erin O’Shea)

JB: The authors hold senior positions at HHMI (Howard Hughes Medical Institute), one of the most prestigious funders in the biomedical sciences. Their 2019 PLOS Biology paper, A proposal for the future of scientific publishing in the life sciences, laid out the Publish, Review, Curate editorial model that eLife subsequently adopted.

(HHMI is one of the funders (and founders) of eLife and both Randy Schekman and Michael Eisen, who previously edited the journal, are HHMI investigators. The current editor-in-chief, Timothy Behrens, is funded by the Wellcome Trust, another eLife funder.)

In many ways the recent preprint is an update to their 2019 paper. The fact that it was published as a preprint, and not published in a journal like PLOS Biology, tells its own story. Many of the publishing industry’s problems could be solved, the authors argue, by decoupling author-facing appraisal from reader-facing curation; preprints are the solution.

The essay is well written and argued, and is much more balanced than I was expecting. I enjoyed reading it. That doesn’t mean that I agree with their conclusions, but it would be worth your time to engage with it.

I fundamentally disagree with their core premise that authors should be able to publish whatever they want, whenever they want. They see the gatekeeper role of editors as being deeply problematic. I spent most of my career working on highly selective journals and so I have a different view.

It’s important to remember that HHMI is an elite funder; it only awards grants to high quality researchers. Journal gatekeeping just slows their researchers down, the HHMI authors argue. OK, I could buy that to some degree. But let’s not forget that sound science publishers like MDPI and Frontiers only accepted 40% of submissions last year, according to their annual reports (more on those soon…). There’s a huge amount of bad research being submitted to journals. Do we want to create a system that allows nonsense papers to be published at scale whenever researchers fancy pressing the publish button?

This relates to my major criticism of their paper: there’s little discussion about the potential unintended consequences of their model. We must learn from the mistakes of author-pays open access. It was obvious to many of us that if you create a system where publishers can earn more cash by publishing more papers, then that’s exactly what they’ll do.

Decision makers need to engage in second-order thinking and to consider, in great detail, what the deleterious downstream effects could be, before mandating this kind of approach.

Read more

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’).

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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).

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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