NanoBubbles

Prize and lies

Three years ago, I asked in a blog post here What do scientific prizes celebrates? It was a reaction to false claims in press releases by the King Faisal Price and Northwestern University announcing the award of the 2023 King Faisal Prize in Medicine and Science to Chad Mirkin. One…

How big is the medical writing industry? Why it matters Abstract. Medical writing is a key element in pharmaceutical companies’ efforts to shape the relevant medical science literature. As part of what is called

Bernisson and Sismondo: How big is the medical writing industry? Why it matters
> 1000 medical education and communication companies (MECCS) provide medical writing services, mostly sponsored by pharmaceutical, medical device, and biotechnology companies
academic.oup.com/heapro/artic...

Track organizers: Bart Penders, Willem Halffman, Serge Horbach, Yagmur Ozturk, YJ Erden

@penders.bsky.social @willemhalffman.bsky.social @yjerden.bsky.social

STS NL CONFERENCE 2026 banner with the track proposal titled 'Making Science Better?'

📣 Submit to our track 'Making Science Better?' at the STS NL Conference which will take place in Twente from April 15 to 17, 2026! More details in the link below.

🔗 www.utwente.nl/en/bms/sts-n...

The Library and the Database: Contrasting Expectations in Two Imaginaries for the Research Literature - Minerva Two competing imaginaries inform the current wave of innovations in research publishing: one that perceives ‘the literature’ as a library of research accounts, and one that sees it as a gigantic datab...

One imaginary sees the scientific literature as a gigantic library, with texts to be read. Another sees it as a database, with facts to be mined. Our analysis clarifies contrasting expectations informing current publishing innovations, and their epistemic and political risks.
doi.org/10.1007/s110...

PCI Webinar series #13 - Simine Vazire - Recognizing and responding to a replication crisis

In case you have missed Simine Vazire's excellent webinar yesterday, here is the link to watch it online: youtu.be/_vb1CNwC3CM Thanks again @simine.com for staying up so late and thanks to the audience for the great questions!

Money, Time, Trust, Control – How commercial publishers drain science - Impact of Social Sciences Have the interests of commercial publishers now become antithetical to the pursuit of knowledge?

👀ICYMI: "if the drain has a particular history and geography, it means that it is not inevitable. It can be resisted."

#AcademicSky #HigherEd #ScholComm

Riding the Autism Bicycle to Retraction Town Does anyone *really* know their Factor Fexcectorn?

On the Factor Fexcectorn and autism bicycle AI slop study: I got an answer from Springer Nature this morning that this scientific paper will be retracted! 🧪

Full story: nobreakthroughs.substack.com/p/riding-the...

📽️ Paper Mills: Parallels with a Virus / with Dorothy Bishop @deevybee.bsky.social

www.helsinki.fi/fi/unitube/v...

The event was organised by ReproducibiliTea UniHelsinki

OpenAlex intégré au Web of Science, ou la capture du travail des “commoners” C’est une annonce qui est passée relativement inaperçue, mais qui mérite que l’on s’y arrête un instant. Clarivate a récemment annoncé l’intégration d’OpenAlex comme une nouvelle base de données au se...

OpenAlex intégré au Web of Science, ou la capture du travail des “commoners” | carnetist.hypotheses.org/2572

This paper provides guidance and tools for conducting open and reproducible systematic reviews in psychology. It emphasizes the importance of systematic reviews for evidence-based decision-making and the growing adoption of open science practices. Open science enhances transparency, reproducibility, and minimizes bias in systematic reviews by sharing data, materials, and code. It also fosters collaborations and enables involvement of non-academic stakeholders. The paper is designed for beginners, offering accessible guidance to navigate the many standards and resources that may not obviously align with specific areas of psychology. It covers systematic review conduct standards, pre-registration, registered reports, reporting standards, and open data, materials and code. The paper is concluded with a glimpse of recent innovations like Community Augmented Meta-Analysis and independent reproducibility checks.

There is no reason why systematic reviews can't be open. The data used for synthesis is *already* open and there are many excellent open source tools that can facilitate the easy sharing of analysis scripts.

Here's a nice guide for performing open systematic reviews doi.org/10.1525/coll...

New guide: Extracting tabular data from an article cosig.net

Scientific articles often report data in tables. COSIG's latest guide covers methods to export these tables into a spreadsheet editor like Microsoft Excel!

COSIG (32 guides and growing!) is available at cosig.net.

My paper about the ScienceGuardians on @themeta.news today!

@elisabethbik.bsky.social @lonnibesancon.bsky.social @thatsregrettab1.bsky.social

Do acts to correct the scientific record need to move out of the shadows? - Impact of Social Sciences Scientists prefer to correct errors in the scientific record informally, but is this a sustainable mechanism in expanding world of global research?

💥New: Do acts to correct the scientific record need to move out of the shadows?

✍️ @freddie2310.bsky.social

#AcademicSky #Corrections #AcWri

A paper critiquing post-publication peer review has numerous made-up references, including a @nature.com article falsely attributed to our Ivan Oransky.
link.springer.com/article/10.1...

How the Avalanche of Academic Papers Threatens Scientific Research This is the third part of a series on academic publishing. Read part one here and part two here. For many years, the prestigious journal Philosophy & Public Affairs published about

How the Avalanche of Academic Papers Threatens Scientific Research, by Vince Bielski
'Editor-in-Chief Anna Stilz at @ucberkeleyofficial.bsky.social led a revolt that culminated in the mass resignation of the journal’s entire editorial staff and board.'
www.realclearinvestigations.com/articles/202...

A mottled gray Chinese giant salamander wearing a deerstalker peers into a magnifying glass. He holds a copy of COSIG in his right hand (foot? limb? idk).

COSIG has a new mascot but he doesn't yet have a name! Any suggestions?

Research integrity conference hit with AI-generated abstracts The first of three themes for next year’s World Conference on Research Integrity will be the risks and benefits of artificial intelligence for research integrity. In an ironic and possibly predicta…

In an ironic and possibly predictable turn of events, the conference has received “an unusually large proportion” of off-topic abstracts that show signs of being written by generative AI.

A table showing profit margins of major publishers. A snippet of text related to this table is below. 1. The four-fold drain 1.1 Money Currently, academic publishing is dominated by profit-oriented, multinational companies for whom scientific knowledge is a commodity to be sold back to the academic community who created it. The dominant four are Elsevier, Springer Nature, Wiley and Taylor & Francis, which collectively generated over US$7.1 billion in revenue from journal publishing in 2024 alone, and over US$12 billion in profits between 2019 and 2024 (Table 1A). Their profit margins have always been over 30% in the last five years, and for the largest publisher (Elsevier) always over 37%. Against many comparators, across many sectors, scientific publishing is one of the most consistently profitable industries (Table S1). These financial arrangements make a substantial difference to science budgets. In 2024, 46% of Elsevier revenues and 53% of Taylor & Francis revenues were generated in North America, meaning that North American researchers were charged over US$2.27 billion by just two for-profit publishers. The Canadian research councils and the US National Science Foundation were allocated US$9.3 billion in that year.

A figure detailing the drain on researcher time. 1. The four-fold drain 1.2 Time The number of papers published each year is growing faster than the scientific workforce, with the number of papers per researcher almost doubling between 1996 and 2022 (Figure 1A). This reflects the fact that publishers’ commercial desire to publish (sell) more material has aligned well with the competitive prestige culture in which publications help secure jobs, grants, promotions, and awards. To the extent that this growth is driven by a pressure for profit, rather than scholarly imperatives, it distorts the way researchers spend their time. The publishing system depends on unpaid reviewer labour, estimated to be over 130 million unpaid hours annually in 2020 alone (9). Researchers have complained about the demands of peer-review for decades, but the scale of the problem is now worse, with editors reporting widespread difficulties recruiting reviewers. The growth in publications involves not only the authors’ time, but that of academic editors and reviewers who are dealing with so many review demands. Even more seriously, the imperative to produce ever more articles reshapes the nature of scientific inquiry. Evidence across multiple fields shows that more papers result in ‘ossification’, not new ideas (10). It may seem paradoxical that more papers can slow progress until one considers how it affects researchers’ time. While rewards remain tied to volume, prestige, and impact of publications, researchers will be nudged away from riskier, local, interdisciplinary, and long-term work. The result is a treadmill of constant activity with limited progress whereas core scholarly practices – such as reading, reflecting and engaging with others’ contributions – is de-prioritized. What looks like productivity often masks intellectual exhaustion built on a demoralizing, narrowing scientific vision.

A table of profit margins across industries. The section of text related to this table is below: 1. The four-fold drain 1.1 Money Currently, academic publishing is dominated by profit-oriented, multinational companies for whom scientific knowledge is a commodity to be sold back to the academic community who created it. The dominant four are Elsevier, Springer Nature, Wiley and Taylor & Francis, which collectively generated over US$7.1 billion in revenue from journal publishing in 2024 alone, and over US$12 billion in profits between 2019 and 2024 (Table 1A). Their profit margins have always been over 30% in the last five years, and for the largest publisher (Elsevier) always over 37%. Against many comparators, across many sectors, scientific publishing is one of the most consistently profitable industries (Table S1). These financial arrangements make a substantial difference to science budgets. In 2024, 46% of Elsevier revenues and 53% of Taylor & Francis revenues were generated in North America, meaning that North American researchers were charged over US$2.27 billion by just two for-profit publishers. The Canadian research councils and the US National Science Foundation were allocated US$9.3 billion in that year.

The costs of inaction are plain: wasted public funds, lost researcher time, compromised scientific integrity and eroded public trust. Today, the system rewards commercial publishers first, and science second. Without bold action from the funders we risk continuing to pour resources into a system that prioritizes profit over the advancement of scientific knowledge.

We wrote the Strain on scientific publishing to highlight the problems of time & trust. With a fantastic group of co-authors, we present The Drain of Scientific Publishing:

a 🧵 1/n

Drain: arxiv.org/abs/2511.04820
Strain: direct.mit.edu/qss/article/...
Oligopoly: direct.mit.edu/qss/article/...

Title slide

The speaker at the lectern

Live posting day 2 of the International Research Integrity Conference in Sydney.
researchintegrityconf.com/internationa...
We start with session 4: What might work?
Cyril Labbe with "Detection of Research Rubbish and More"
#IRICSydney

COSIG: The Collection of Open Science Integrity Guides Newest version available at cosig.net!

The FDA Adverse Events Reporting System (FAERS) is useful for identifying potential adverse events associated with drugs. However, its data is often exploited to produce articles reporting spurious drug risks.

COSIG's entry on formulaic research now covers low-quality pharmacovigilance studies!

REACH October-December 2025 | Science Integrity Alliance REACH is a modern, interactive, and comprehensive digital magazine designed to meet the shared needs of all stakeholders in the research community.

Check out the latest issue of REACH magazine from @sci-integrity.com, which features COSIG on page 42!

www.sci-integrity.com/reach-octobe...

✨The new issue of REACH is live!
If you’re looking for inspiring weekend reading, I hope you’ll enjoy exploring this new issue.📗

🗣️ Share it with your colleagues or anyone who might find it useful.
🔗 www.sci-integrity.com/reach-octobe...

#openscience #researchintegrity #REACHmagazine #SIA

The new landing page for COSIG, available at cosig.net. It reads: Anyone can do post-publication peer review. Anyone can be a steward of the scientific literature. Anyone can do forensic metascience. Anyone can sleuth. However, investigating the integrity of the published scientific literature often requires domain-specific knowledge that not everyone will have. This open source project is a collection of guides written and maintained by publication integrity experts to distribute this domain-specific knowledge so that others can participate in post-publication peer review. COSIG currently hosts 31 guides and was last updated on 25 September 2025. Guides can be downloaded as individual PDFs. A combined PDF with all guides included can be downloaded here.

COSIG has a new landing page! Check it out at cosig.net.

(Files for COSIG are still hosted on OSF!)

📣 This Tuesday, October 28, from 11:00 to 12:30, we are hosting a seminar by Willem Halffman at LISIS titled
“The library and the database: two imaginaries for the research literature”

Join us (there will be a buffet!)

@umr-lisis.bsky.social @willemhalffman.bsky.social @isis-radboud.bsky.social

On and off-the-record correction practices: A survey-based study of how chemistry researchers react to errors This survey-based study (982 participants) explores chemistry researchers’ practices and motivations in correcting errors in scientific publications.While respondents believe errors should be corre...

📝 Latest Publication Alert! 📝

"On and off-the-record correction practices: A survey-based study of how chemistry researchers react to errors"

freddie2310.bsky.social

→ doi.org/10.1080/0898...

#ResearchOnResearch
#ResearchIntegrity
#Science
#ScienceErrors
#Researchers

Announcing Colloquium: Problematic Science. With presentations by @elisabethbik.bsky.social and @stanvanpelt.bsky.social. RU, 14 oct.

On and off-the-record correction practices: A survey-based study of how chemistry researchers react to errors This survey-based study (982 participants) explores chemistry researchers’ practices and motivations in correcting errors in scientific publications.While respondents believe errors should be corre...

✨My new survey-based study on how chemistry researchers react to errors is now published in Accountability in Research @accountabilityair.bsky.social! A big thanks to the participants & @nanobubbles.bsky.social members for feedback 🫧. #ScienceCorrection #ResearchOnResearch doi.org/10.1080/0898...

COSIG: The Collection of Open Science Integrity Guides Newest version available at cosig.net!

What is a "calculation chain" file? How can I easily identify duplicated values in a table?

COSIG's 31st guide is all about data forensics using Microsoft Excel!

osf.io/bz725

As always, all guides are available at cosig.net.

Photo d'Irène Frachon, credit @Maxppp - Olivier Arandel

!!! 6 octobre 2025 - Amphi Weiss - 45 rue des Saint Pères - Paris !!!
15h Conférence d'Irène Frachon, lanceuse d'alerte du #Mediator

suivie à 16h d'une table ronde sur la manipulation de l'information scientifique et la protection des lanceurs d'alerte (détails ci-dessous).