Low quality papers are flooding the cancer literature — can this AI tool help to catch them? A large language model scans abstracts and titles for signs that an article was produced by a 'paper-mill' company.

Low quality papers are flooding the cancer literature — can this AI tool help to catch them? www.nature.com/articles/d41..., Revealing the Paper Mill Iceberg: AI-Based Screening of Cancer Research Publications www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Powerful piece, highly recommended!

The Proceedings of WOOC 2025 are online! 🎉
📖 Index volume: zenodo.org/records/1719...
📚 All papers: zenodo.org/communities/...

@barcelonadori.bsky.social @opencitations.bsky.social @unibo.it #WOOC2025

Fraud, AI slop and huge profits: is science publishing broken? Podcast Episode · Science Weekly · 02/10/2025 · 18m

Thanks @iansample.bsky.social at @theguardian.com podcast for chatting #ScientificPublishing.

This pod follows from The Strain on Scientific Publishing & reports of publisher profit margins rivalling Google etc...

Paper: direct.mit.edu/qss/article/...

Pod: podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/s...

There’s a striking pattern among the top journals targeted by an Indian paper mill. All have sharply increased their publication number in recent years.
Is this growth driven by publisher goals, a surge in submissions due to AI, or both?
#papermills

Excited to work with a wonderful group of international colleagues to promote openness of publication metadata in negotiations with publishers!

@cwts.nl

Rethinking the narrative on vaccine policy and public trust Kirkland and Greer’s article about Robert F Kennedy Jr and others in the antivaccine movement offers a timely and urgent critique of current US vaccine policy leadership and its global ripple effects....

Rethinking the narrative on vaccine policy and public trust doi.org/10.1136/bmj....

Open Science Workshop - detecting errors and misconduct in science
Dates: 20-22 October
Location: Radboud University, Nijmegen, The Netherlands
Registration link: tinyurl.com/3xkd8twf
ONLY PHYSICAL ATTENDENCE POSSIBLE! NO ONLINE POSSIBILITIES.

We’re now OpenAlex - OpenAlex blog For years, we’ve been working under the name OurResearch. That name sat at the top of our org chart, with three child projects under it: OpenAlex, Unpaywall, and Unsub. Starting today, things are simp...

OurResearch rebrands to OpenAlex.

blog.openalex.org/were-now-ope...

AI models are using material from retracted scientific papers Some companies are working to remedy the issue.

AI models are using material from retracted scientific papers www.technologyreview.com/2025/09/23/1...

Fake-Studien: Dubiose Firmen unterwandern die Wissenschaft Die Zahl an Fake-Studien von dubiosen Firmen steigt rasant. Wie groß ist das Problem – und kann dieser wissenschaftliche Müll Patienten schaden? Wissenschaftler warnen vor den Folgen.

This is a great article on paper mills by Lea Wolz (in German). It provides a general overview of paper mills and their impact on science. It gives examples of how fake papers penetrate Cochrane reviews and bias recommendations. Highly recommended!
www.quarks.de/gesellschaft...
#papermills

First thing after the summer break: getting ready for Bristol, where I’ll present our work on stealth journal takeovers and their telltale signs at @stienid2025.bsky.social. Already available at doi.org/10.5281/zeno...

Truly grateful by the interest our presentation on stealth journal takeovers generated at the STI in Bristol last week. Thanks to everyone who approached me to discuss it during the conference! @stienid2025.bsky.social read the whole story at zenodo.org/records/1476... and zenodo.org/records/1521...

The threat of analytic flexibility in using large language models to simulate human data: A call to attention Social scientists are now using large language models to create "silicon samples" - synthetic datasets intended to stand in for human respondents, aimed at revolutionising human subjects research. How...

Can large language models stand in for human participants?
Many social scientists seem to think so, and are already using "silicon samples" in research.

One problem: depending on the analytic decisions made, you can basically get these samples to show any effect you want.

THREAD 🧵

How to Fight Fraudulent Publishing in the Mathematical Sciences: Joint Recommendations of the IMU and the ICIAM These recommendations were formulated by the authors in close collaboration with the IMU Committee on Publishing (chaired by Ilka Agricola) and have been endorsed by the Executive Committee of the IMU...

How to Fight Fraudulent Publishing in the Mathematical Sciences: Joint Recommendations of the IMU and the ICIAM
arxiv.org/abs/2509.09877

RetractBASE (retractbase.csic.es), the largest open search engine specialized on retracted literature, makes publicly accessible their datasets here: osf.io/xtrsb/files/...

Fraud and cover-up Fraud and cover-up

Whoa! Elsevier fired @richardtol.bsky.social, longstanding Editor-in-Chief of the journal Energy Economics. Richard's side of the story should be ringing alarm bells. #EconSky

Fraud and cover-up
richardtol.substack.com/p/fraud-and-...

The rising danger of AI-generated images in nanomaterials science and what we can do about it - Nature Nanotechnology Generative AI has made it trivial to generate fake microscopy images that are indistinguishable from real images, even for experts. As researchers in nanoscience, it is time for us to face this realit...

New Comment Online:

The rising danger of AI-generated images in nanomaterials science and what we can do about it.

#MaterialsScience
#Nanoscience
#ArtificialIntelligence
#ResearchIntegrity
#AcademicChatter

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Systematic fraud uncovered in mathematics publications An international team of authors led by Ilka Agricola, professor of mathematics at the University of Marburg, Germany, has investigated fraudulent practices in the publication of research results in mathematics on behalf of the German Mathematical Society (DMV) and the International Mathematical Union (IMU), documenting systematic fraud over many years.

Systematic fraud in mathematics publishing has been documented, highlighting the impact of non-transparent metrics and commercial pressures on research quality and integrity. Recommendations for reform have been proposed. doi.org/g93rhg

Sorbonne University decides to withdraw from the Times Higher Education (THE) World University Rankings As of 2026, Sorbonne University will no longer submit data to the Times Higher Education (THE) World University Rankings. The decision comes as part of a wider approach to promote open science and ref...

"The university will stop sharing the data required to be included in the ranking as of 2026. As a result, Sorbonne University will no longer feature in future rankings produced by THE, which include the World University Rankings, the Rankings by Subject or the Impact Rankings."

Excellent!

Exclusive: Journal bans drug safety database papers as they flood the literature celafon/iStockPhoto Starting around 2023, a curious trend took hold in papers on drug safety monitoring. The number of articles published on an individual drug and its link to specific adverse even…

This is another wake-up call about what is happening with scientific literature, which is being flooded by template papers produced by paper mills. One example is the use of open-access databases like FAERS or NHANES, combined with analyses that rely on biased or incorrect methodologies.

The Scandal of Academic Publishing - Publishing Research Quarterly Much is rotten in academic publishing, but it is easier to hold noses than do anything more fundamental about the stench. The five companies dominating the industry have grown fat on the backs of free...

The Scandal of Academic Publishing link.springer.com/article/10.1...

Der Einfluss von Beall’s Liste auf die Wissenschaft und den wissenschaftlichen Diskurs / The Influence of Beall’s List on Science and the Scientific Discourse refubium.fu-berlin.de/handle/fub18...

📢 New RoRI paper out in Science & Technology Studies

The study explores how 8 research funders navigate the ambiguous role of “excellence” - not simply as a matter of fact, but increasingly as a matter of concern requiring reconfiguration: sciencetechnologystudies.journal.fi/article/view...

Fraudulent Publishing in the Mathematical Sciences This report is the first of two publications of a joint Working Group of the International Mathematical Union (IMU) and the International Council of Industrial and Applied Mathematics (ICIAM). In it, ...

Fraudulent Publishing in the Mathematical Sciences

#ResearchIntegrity #Math #Mathematical #WCRI2026 #WCRI

arxiv.org/abs/2509.07257

Detecting LLM-Generated Peer Reviews The integrity of peer review is fundamental to scientific progress, but the rise of large language models (LLMs) has introduced concerns that some reviewers may rely on these tools to generate...

Methods to detect #LLM-generated #PeerReview: in ms, add command to LLM to:
1. Watermark (insert a random start string, fake citation, or technical term)
2. Hidden prompt (insert white-colored text, different language, font manipulation)
@cmu.edu

LLM-generated reviews matched or exceeded human reviewers on a few key dimensions of review quality. A fuller analysis will shed more light on the potential value of LLM peer reviews and how they could complement human peer reviewers’ work.

Comparing #LLM vs human #PeerReview of 5 @bmj.com mss, LLM reviews matched or exceeded humans on key elements of identifying strengths/weaknesses, commenting on writing, organization, and Tables and Figures, and constructiveness
peerreviewcongress.o...

Retracted articles in Wikidata (~22k) now visualized in Scholia: why they're cited and their impact on research. Egon Willighagen's presentation uses Retraction Watch data via the Crossref REST API.

https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.17013354

Today, I presented retractbase.csic.es, our open database about retractions, in Bristol STI-ENID Conference. @stienid2025.bsky.social with a very good reception

This great new initiative highlights lots of interesting research and initiatives, including (on p.40) a primer on what MetaROR is doing, by @andre-brasil.bsky.social

👏 Congratulations to everyone involved for producing such a great magazine!