The Jist: 15 April to 28 April 2026
Get the gist of recent news stories, written by journalists, that cover topics related to scholarly communication.
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
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