Jana Christopher

I tried an even harder example on Gemini Pro image generation and this is quite scary/amazing. I asked for a microscopy image of around 20 HeLa cells, GFP tagged 20% nuclear, 10% membrane, +1 nuclear staining, + overlap. Image below and prompt in the following post.

Promotional graphic for STM’s Innovation & Integrity Days Research Integrity Workshops on 9 December. The design features three workshop topics: 1) Forensic Scientometrics – Enhancing Research Integrity and Security for the Scholarly Ecosystem, 2) Communication and collaboration with Institutions, and 3) Helping your editors and reviewers understand research integrity issues. Text highlights that the workshops are new this year. Bright gradient background with STM and I&I Days branding.

Heading to Innovation & Integrity Days? Don’t miss the 9 Dec #ResearchIntegrity workshops: expert-led, interactive & focused on practical skills.

--> Forensic Scientometrics
--> Collaboration with Institutions
--> Supporting Editors & Reviewers

Join us! stm-assoc.org/events/stm-i... #STMinLondon

@hkoers.bsky.social @image-integrity.bsky.social @tonyhopedale.com @danielacuna.bsky.social

How to spot fake scientists and stop them from publishing papers Journals are considering doing identity checks to expose fake authors — but there are downsides.

"By inventing fake scientists, paper mills can create a ready supply of publications and favourable peer reviews, ensuring more of the mills’ submissions get published [and] increase[d] credibility for paying customers" www.nature.com/articles/d41...

if you see this post, your actions are:
- if you have a spare buck, give it to Wikipedia, then repost this
- if you don't have a spare buck, just repost

your action is mandatory for the world's best source of information to survive

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!)

Can we measure trust in scientific publications? - Impact of Social Sciences Jonathon Alexis Coates outlines how a constellation of static and dynamic indicators could provide a means for assessing the trustworthiness of published research

Can we measure trust in scientific publications?, via @lseimpactblog.bsky.social

blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsoci...

#AcademicPublishing #Expertise #OpenResearch

GenAI detection that actually works Clear Skies is making genAI detection with Pangram available to subscribers in Oversight.

Adam @clearskiesadam.bsky.social brought this post to my attention and he does a good job of explaining the weaknesses and strengths in the current state of GenAI detection in the text of papers.

clearskiesadam.medium.com/genai-detect...

Rethinking Peer Review Using the Swiss Cheese Model to Better Flag Problematic Manuscripts Click on the article title to read more.

A paper that combines #peerreview & cheese... what could be better? Answer: writing said paper with @abalkina.bsky.social @image-integrity.bsky.social & Marie Souliere. Read on to learn how the Swiss Cheese Model could help peer review & #researchintegrity onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...

Annual global scientific activity captured by WoS as measured by the number of actively publishing journals, the number of journals deindexed annually by WoS, the number of journals with retractions, the number of journals with PubPeer comments, and the number of journals with suspected paper mill products. It is visually apparent that deindexing now occurs at a level far below the level of occurrence of journals publishing suspected paper mill products. These patterns hold for Scopus and MEDLINE. R.A.K. Richardson, S.S. Hong, J.A. Byrne, T. Stoeger, & L.A.N. Amaral, The entities enabling scientific fraud at scale are large, resilient, and growing rapidly, Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 122 (32) e2420092122, https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2420092122 (2025).

A powerful new study, Richardson et al. @pnas.org reveals the scale of systematic research fraud: fake papers are doubling every 1.5 years - ten times faster than real science! Retractions and deindexing can't keep up: 📄 doi.org/10.1073/pnas... #ResearchFraud #Integrity #PaperMills #AcademicEthics

Reese and colleagues are doing incredibly important work to identify large scale credibility challenges for the research literature. The latest report is disquieting.

A do-or-die moment for the scientific enterprise Reflecting on our paper “The entities enabling scientific fraud at scale are large, resilient, and growing rapidly”

Today, our article "The entities enabling scientific fraud at scale are large, resilient, and growing rapidly" is finally published in PNAS. I hope that it proves to be a wake-up-call for the whole scientific community.

reeserichardson.blog/2025/08/04/a...

hot off the press: huge infestation of crooked editors involved on paper mills unmasked. www.pnas.org/doi/abs/10.1...

Happy 15th anniversary, Retraction Watch Once upon a time, a long time ago, two science journalists had an idea for a blog about retractions. And on Aug. 3, 2010, Retraction Watch launched, detailing in the first post why retractions matt…

Once upon a time, two science journalists had an idea for a blog about retractions. And on Aug. 3, 2010, Retraction Watch launched.

And now, 15 years and 6,700 posts later, that work seems more important than ever.

Happy 15th anniversary, Retraction Watch.

La haine et véhémence de mes harceleurs (qui prouvent malgré le point exact de l'article) est l'un des premiers moteurs de:
- ma motivation à ne pas flancher face à la mauvaise science
- mais aussi de la réussite de cet article (nature.com/articles/d41...) 🤣
Changez rien :)

Screenshot aus dem im Post verlinkten Artikel. Darauf zu sehen: Überschrift "Kommerzialisierung wissenschaftlichen Fehlverhaltens und die Herausforderung von Paper Mills in der Forschung", darfunter Autorinnenzeile "Von Anna Abalkina & Jana Christopher, Berlin", wiederum darunter Vorspann mit dem Text: "Paper Mills produzieren in großer Zahl gefälschte Forschungsarbeiten – oft unterstützt durch KI. Wie groß ist das Ausmaß dieser Schattenindustrie? Welche Spuren hinterlässt sie im wissenschaftlichen System? Und welche Gegenstrategien braucht es, um ihre Methoden zu erkennen und sie zu stoppen?" Angeschnitten dann die ersten Sätze des Artikeltexts. Auf der rechten Seite ein KI-generiertes Aufmacherfoto von vielen Papierlappen, die zum Trocknen in langer Reihe von der Decke hängen.

#PaperMills fälschen in großer Zahl Forschungsarbeiten. Wie sehr schadet diese Schattenindustrie dem #Wissenschaftssystem? Wie kann man ihre Methoden erkennen und sie stoppen? – Thema eines Essays von @abalkina.bsky.social‬ und @image-integrity.bsky.social‬: www.laborjournal.de/rubric/essay...

Interesting look at the enormity of the paper mill problem, via @abalkina.bsky.social @image-integrity.bsky.social www.laborjournal.de/rubric/essay...

Jana Christofer and I wrote a piece on #papermills for Laborjournal. We discuss challenges of paper mills and AI for scientific publishing. Science needs immediate solutions to correct it and prevent it from massively produced fraud.
@image-integrity.bsky.social
www.laborjournal.de/rubric/essay...

This piece nicely summarizes the situation and features thoughts from @elisabethbik.bsky.social, @mumumouse2.bsky.social, @davidsanderssci.bsky.social, @image-integrity.bsky.social and myself.

Great piece from Renee Hoch and Joanna Clarke. „It is likely not a coincidence that in the genAI era publishers are seeing an increase in large-scale publication ethics issues, including peer review integrity rings, authorship integrity issues and paper mills“

Surely no real Journal would have you submit to a gmail address ?! 🤥

Amazing talk this morning by Hub Zwart ‘Trust in science in an era of social fragmentation’ @EMBLEvents #SciSoc2025

The great Prof Csaba Szabo speaking now about the reproducibility crisis #SciSoc2025

Good morning! Looking forward to two days at EMBL, starting today: EMBL Science and Society Conference: In science we trust?
@EMBLEvents #SciSoc2025

How to spot suspicious papers: a sleuthing guide for scientists An open collection of tips and tools could help researchers and publishers to pick up on problematic research.

@cosig.net coverage in Nature news!

Collection of Open Science Integrity Guides
Anyone can do post-publication peer review.
Anyone can be a steward of the scientific literature.

www.nature.com/articles/d41...

How to spot suspicious papers: a sleuthing guide for scientists An open collection of tips and tools could help researchers and publishers to pick up on problematic research.

A group of research-integrity experts has launched a toolkit for researchers that outlines how to spot suspicious scientific papers.

https://go.nature.com/43U32fj

COSIG logo: COSIG (Collection of Open Science Integrity Guides) Now available at cosig.net!

Anyone can do post-publication peer review.
Anyone can be a steward of the scientific literature.
Anyone can do forensic metascience.
Anyone can sleuth.

That's why we are launching COSIG: the Collection of Open Science Integrity Guides, an open source resource for all of the above.

cosig.net

"A literature that's ...polluted with junk is not only no good to anyone, it's a source of real harm, and it lends itself to ... bad-faith attacks on scientific research in general... We need to speak up more about this situation and we need to start cleaning house more vigorously" #Papermills 🧪

Guest Post - Gatekeepers of Trust: Reaffirming the Publisher's Role in Service of the Reader - The Scholarly Kitchen The most vital and enduring contribution of scholarly publishers is their role as gatekeepers — not as obstacles to knowledge but as stewards of quality, integrity, and trust.

What do you think? Is/ should Gatekeeping be the core of scholarly publishing? My new article published in Scholarly Kitchen: scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2025/05/12/g... #ScientificPublishing #AcademicSky #PeerReview #AI #ScholarlyPublishing

Many aspects of editing are common sense, says Jana Christopher, an image-integrity analyst at the Federation of European Biochemical Societies, who is based in Heidelberg, Germany. For instance, it’s OK to increase the image’s contrast so that a cell or feature pops out against the background, but the background still has to be visible. Altering brightness or saturation is also acceptable as long as the modification is applied equally across the whole image. Cropping is fine if the process doesn’t remove elements that would change the interpretation of the image — after all, Christopher notes, selecting a particular field of view under the microscope is in itself a form of cropping and selective reporting. “The bottom line is that the images need to represent accurately what was observed experimentally,” she says.

The do’s and don’ts of scientific image editing.

I think this one paragraph covers about 90% of the queries we get on this kind of stuff.

www.nature.com/articles/d41...