All articles tagged with #academic publishing
Tyler Cowen asks for ideas on how AI should transform academic journals; commenters propose AI-led triage and grading, disclosures of AI use, open-access reforms, machine-readable submissions with supporting artifacts, transparent AI pipelines, auditing, and new funding models, while skeptics caution that AI cannot fully replace human reviewers or authorship, highlighting both opportunities and risks in rethinking scholarly publishing.
Retraction Watch’s Weekend Reads roundup recaps a week of publishing scrutiny: headlines about a researcher’s alleged poisoning obfuscation, plagiarism accusations, fake references, and dozens of retractions due to compromised peer review; it also highlights AI-related issues in arXiv’s new rules (endorsements for first-time posters and English submissions) and a broad set of discussions on replication, ethics, and data use. The post notes the Hijacked Journal Checker with 400+ entries, the Retraction Watch Database surpassing 63,000 retractions, COVID-era retractions over 640, and 50 mass resignations, and invites donations to support the work.
A Turkish associate professor and editor, Eren Öğüt, faces a Springer Nature investigation after reviewers flagged multiple 2025 papers that read like technobabble, use irrelevant MATLAB code, and lack reproducible data or overlaid brain images. His unusually high volume of peer reviews (about 650 in one year) and roles as editor across journals raise concerns about editorial bias and integrity, with critics noting AI-assisted editing and a pattern of single-authored works that resemble prior templates. The investigation focuses on methodological gaps, data sharing, and potential misrepresentation of results in Neuroinformatics and related journals.
A finance professor in Ireland, Brian Lucey, had 12 papers retracted from journals he edited by Elsevier, citing editorial conflicts, though Lucey disputes the grounds for retraction and highlights widespread similar practices in finance and economics publishing. The retractions, which involved highly cited articles, have sparked debate about editorial ethics and conflicts of interest in academic publishing.
The article summarizes recent developments in scientific publishing, including NEJM launching a new public health report rival, a former NIH official's paper receiving an expression of concern, and a study revealing that 1 in 5 chemists have intentionally added errors during peer review, highlighting ongoing issues of misconduct and integrity in research.
In the first half of 2025, a top philosophy journal, The Journal of Philosophy, accepted only one article out of 403 submissions, highlighting a notably low acceptance rate, though the reasons behind this are not definitively explained.
A study analyzing 18,400 articles suggests that peer reviewers are more likely to approve manuscripts if their own work is cited, raising concerns about citation bias and coercive practices in peer review. Reviewers who request citations of their own work tend to be less likely to approve the article, and language used in reviewer comments may indicate coercion, highlighting potential issues in the peer review process.
AI-generated research papers raise new concerns about idea plagiarism, with debates over whether methodological overlaps constitute plagiarism, highlighting challenges in maintaining academic integrity as AI tools become more prevalent in research.
The UK Royal Society is transitioning eight of its journals to the 'subscribe to open' (S2O) model, which makes content freely accessible if enough libraries subscribe, aiming for 100% open access. This move aligns with a broader trend among scientific publishers adopting the S2O model to promote open access, with varying degrees of sustainability depending on subscription levels and financial support from scientific societies.
A Northwestern University study reveals that organized scientific fraud, involving sophisticated networks and paper mills, is rapidly increasing, threatening the integrity of scientific literature and calling for urgent reforms in the research community.
Frontiers is retracting 122 articles across five journals after uncovering a network of authors and editors involved in unethical practices like citation manipulation and undisclosed conflicts of interest, linked to over 4,000 articles across multiple publishers, highlighting ongoing issues with research integrity in academic publishing.
A study led by James Zou from Stanford reveals that 7-17% of sentences in peer reviews for computer science articles in 2023-2024 were generated by large language models (LLMs). These AI-generated reviews are characterized by a formal tone, verbosity, and a lack of specificity, often appearing close to submission deadlines. Zou suggests that fostering more human interactions in the review process, such as through platforms like OpenReview, could mitigate the dominance of AI in peer reviews.
Arash Abizadeh advocates for "diamond" open access in academic publishing, where universities and libraries directly fund journals, eliminating commercial pressures and making research freely accessible. This model addresses the high costs and restricted access of current publishing practices, but faces challenges due to the prestige associated with established commercial journals.
Two major open-access publishers, MDPI and Frontiers, have been accused of excessive self-citation to inflate their journal impact factors, according to a study on SocArXiv. The study found that these publishers' journals have significantly higher self-citation rates compared to others, raising concerns about citation manipulation. Both publishers deny encouraging such practices and claim to have measures in place to monitor and prevent unethical citation behavior.
Predatory journals, which publish papers with little to no peer review in exchange for authors paying a fee, are a growing concern in academic publishing. While paying to publish is common among legitimate open access journals, predatory journals often exhibit red flags such as catering more to authors than readers, sending out flowery invitation emails, and having a broad scope. The rise of predatory publishing is a symptom of the publish-or-perish mentality in academia, and efforts to combat it include the use of whitelists and checklists to help authors identify reputable journals.