The Jist: May 17 to June 2
Get the gist of recent news stories, written by journalists, that cover topics related to scholarly communication.
Hello fellow journalologists,
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.
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
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