A lawsuit filed under the U.S. False Claims Act accuses Elsevier, Springer Nature, Wiley and Informa of perpetrating a decade-long scheme to defraud the government by charging exorbitant article processing charges.

Federal lawsuit accuses four major publishers of extorting article processing charges

iStock A lawsuit filed under the U.S. False Claims Act accuses four major publishers of perpetrating a decade-long scheme to defraud the government by charging exorbitant article processing charges…

retractionwatch.com

After Arday enlisted Carter-Ruck, one of the United Kingdom’s leading defamation law firms, to send @timeshighered.bsky.social a letter, the publication spiked the story, according to three sources who spoke to Retraction Watch.

Exclusive: News outlet killed story on plagiarism allegations after Cambridge prof hired law firm

Jason Arday In September 2025, Times Higher Education had a bombshell story in the works: A star sociology professor at the University of Cambridge had allegedly plagiarized parts of his Ph.D. thes…

retractionwatch.com

Today I'm posting a blog about another ridiculous antibody blunder. Dozens of papers in the senescence and ageing field have mistakenly used an antibody for E. coli β-galactosidase when trying to stain for the human protein with the same name. forbetterscience.com/2026/07/21/d...

Amusing spelling mistake in the title... Makes it sound quite ominous! And probably hard to search.

www.chemistryworld.com/news/thermo-...

Thermo Fisher antibody data manipulation is a breach of trust, say researchers

Science sleuths say the problem is impacting research progress and Thermo's response falls short

chemistryworld.com

Nice article from The Scientist about the antibody "problem". www.the-scientist.com/altered-anti... @reeserichardson.bsky.social @sholtodavid.bsky.social @jwoodgett.bsky.social @mbonini.bsky.social @bwjones.bsky.social

Altered Antibody Validation Data on Vendor Sites Alarms Researchers | The Scientist

After several examples of undisclosed alterations in reagent suppliers’ antibody catalogues surfaced, researchers call for transparency to rebuild trust.

the-scientist.com

Can bees spontaneously solve problems - and what does "spontaneously" mean? An interesting @pubpeer.com discussion. pubpeer.com/publications...

AEC staining. Something looks off to me, any thoughts? 10.1152/ajplung.00362.2025

Is science self-correcting? Not in this Elsevier journal. Two 'five-second-retractions' were never retracted, even though I reported them to the journal in 2015. Eleven years later.... nothing. My latest blog post: scienceintegritydigest.com/2026/06/24/i...

Is science self-correcting? Not in this Elsevier journal.

Around 2014-2015, I screened 20,000 biomedical articles for image duplication in 2014-2015. About 4% of those papers, 782 to be exact, contained inappropriate duplications. Together with my coautho…

scienceintegritydigest.com

Scale bar: 50 pixels - Not sure that's as helpful as the authors imagined it would be. 10.1016/j.jtumed.2025.12.008

Lab leaks are scientifically impossible. In all of history of pathogen research, there hasn't been even a single lab leak. Besides, several raccoon dogs and a pangolin already admitted, in writing, to have smuggled the virus to Wuhan.

Jeremy Berg@jeremymberg.bsky.social · last mo.

Interesting point-counterpoint related to the Matt Ridley "Scientific Freedom" lecture. First, @angierasmussen.bsky.social posted a short comment on The Scientific Literacy Project. geneticliteracyproject.org/2026/06/15/v... 1/9

706 days? In a freezer, perhaps 😋 I don't like to gang up on poor @weldeiry.bsky.social but this one does need a source. Grokipedia references this claim which circles back to this slide deck, so it's an urgent situation!

David Sanders@davidsanderssci.bsky.social · 2mo ago

Here is what you say. Show me a source for it.

This is a ridiculous paper in the category of "computational bestiary" but Fig. 1 is wonderful: fcampelo.github.io/EC-Bestiary/

Recently published "Expert Review of Clinical Immunology": A so called "scattered plot", which plots something against nothing in particular. A diagram that looks convincing but is back to front; assigning low COVID-19 mortality to western countries. 10.1080/1744666X.2026.2664060

@smutclyde.bsky.social discusses the recycling of kaggle datasets into the scientific literature. A paper from Scientific Reports used the "eye disease data set" which includes only a few hundred images, including animals, diagrams, and people in sunglasses. forbetterscience.com/2026/06/09/b...

I am sending an open letter to Thermo Fisher. Their response to my response to their manipulated western blot is bullying and petty. Yes, this western blot really is manipulated, it is unfair on me to say otherwise. I don't make those accusations lightly, and I have a (minor) reputation to defend.

This is a very compelling animation and another good thread from @reeserichardson.bsky.social. I understand these are catalogue images... but size matters. A lot of energy is wasted on troubleshooting experiments. Thermo doing stuff like this will not help!

Reese Richardson@reeserichardson.bsky.social · 2mo ago

The Thermo Fisher situation keeps getting worse. We've now collected 450+ problematic images presented as verification data in TF's antibody catalog. This includes: 🖌️ Dozens more images with duplications or painting 🖨️ Hundreds of blots that all share the same background (behold slideshow below)

Today I'm posting a new blog about an astonishing scientific own goal. Hundreds of papers have reported using a totally wrong antibody to investigate the tumor suppressor p16. This mistake has happened because scientists have muddled the names of two proteins. forbetterscience.com/2026/06/02/m...

I GOT THE DOMAIN! I FINALLY GOT IT!!!!!!!!!!1 🥳🎉 Paint​.NET is now at paint.net! Well, it will be just as soon as I push all the buttons to migrate content and set up redirects from getpaint​.net etc. For now it's just a "hey go here" redirect page.

Unreliable and underperforming antibodies are a longstanding problem, so while the reveal of apparently manipulated antibody data in Thermo Fisher's catalog was a shock, the frustration it sparked among many researchers is perhaps no surprise. My reporting:

Science sleuths uncover more than 100 suspicious images in Thermo Fisher antibody catalogue

Scientists have long worried about the reliability of commercial antibodies, and the latest findings have sparked fresh concerns.

nature.com

Reluctant to post too much about this but I did want to share my favourite finding from the dozens of manipulated or duplicated ThermoFisher verification blots. This one has a giant square. Enjoy!

Reese Richardson@reeserichardson.bsky.social · 2mo ago

TL;DR: We've identified more than 100 cases of apparent manipulation in Thermo Fisher Scientific's antibody verification data. @sholtodavid.bsky.social @johanduchene.bsky.social reeserichardson.blog/2026/05/28/h...

TL;DR: We've identified more than 100 cases of apparent manipulation in Thermo Fisher Scientific's antibody verification data. @sholtodavid.bsky.social @johanduchene.bsky.social reeserichardson.blog/2026/05/28/h...

How much of Thermo Fisher’s antibody data has been manipulated?

We’ve documented more than 100 instances of apparent data manipulation in Thermo’s catalog

reeserichardson.blog

By @arbitraryeffect.bsky.social

Leonid Schneider@forbetterscience.bsky.social · 2mo ago

Graphyne Chronicles forbetterscience.com/2026/05/26/g...

“At Thermo Fisher, consistency is more than a goal.”

Reese Richardson@reeserichardson.bsky.social · 3mo ago

@johanduchene.bsky.social @sholtodavid.bsky.social Spent the last hour looking, found ten more apparently manipulated Western blots in Thermo Fisher's antibody verification data (across eight different catalogued products). Thread below. www.thermofisher.com/antibody/pro...

Earlier this week I posted an example of a fake western blot provided by ThermoFisher to demonstrate the validity of a p53 antibody. I considered it an amusing curiosity. In fact Thermo Fisher Scientific has systematically manipulated antibody validation data!

@johanduchene.bsky.social @sholtodavid.bsky.social Spent the last hour looking, found ten more apparently manipulated Western blots in Thermo Fisher's antibody verification data (across eight different catalogued products). Thread below. www.thermofisher.com/antibody/pro...

@sholtodavid.bsky.social Have you seen this WB from ThermoFisher? Still anti-p53 antibody, but another clone (MA-12648 instead MA5-12557). It also looks like that the band in lane 3 was rotated and reused in lane 4. Moreover, it seems that same band was used for the 2 different clones.

Surprised to discover that Thermo Fisher appears to show a fake western blot for the validation of one of their p53 antibodies. I've added a diagram to show the very similar bands. This does not appear to be one of the "published figures" but their own internal data.

TREM2+ macrophages have rapidly emerged as key regulators in diseases. Studying them requires specific antibodies. Among 14 tested antibodies in KO cell lines by WB, 5 are specific. Pick up the right human TREM2 Antibody. Full report: tinyurl.com/TREM2Ab Or here: tinyurl.com/OGA-TREM2

A 2018 paper with an astonishing muddle of overlapping images has finally been retracted. The authors include the infamous (in some circles at least) Alexander Seifalian, a bunch of Iranians, and for some reason, a bloke from Lancaster. pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/...