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

Tip for peer reviewers of manuscripts studying human #miRs #miRNAs (1) Check whether claimed miRs are indexed by MirGeneDB. (2) Not indexed?? Strongly consider manuscript rejection. Life's too short to review "miR manuscripts" that aren't about miR's #PaperMills share.google/uQNYjpKGJH3S...

www.researchsquare.com/article/rs-7...

Review mills are setting off a war in academic publishing. What happens to those caught in the middle? go.nature.com/4wIPjVW

‘A waste of time for all of us’: caught in the crossfire of the peer-review wars

Review mills — researchers who write fake referee reports with coercive citation requests — are setting off a war in academic publishing. What happens to those caught in the middle?

go.nature.com

David Latchman has been appointed Vice Chancellor of University of London He was found guilty of research misconduct by University College, London. He blamed his postdocs. Nice to see strategy, networking & playing the long game win out in the end 😉

“Seven days after the girl’s medical team infused trillions of viruses carrying the recipe for the base editor into her spinal fluid, she died of a severe immune reaction linked to the therapy…” This, in @science.org, is an important and tragic story. (It’s also an incredibly well reported one.) 🧪

Exclusive: Death of girl in Chinese gene-editing trial was never made public

Parents want accountability after study went disastrously wrong, Science and Retraction Watch investigation reveals

science.org

This is not how science works AT ALL.

1. We—@eduede.bsky.social, @mjcrockett.bsky.social, Kevin Gross, and I—have a new preprint on the arXiv today, based on ideas that emerged during an @sfiscience.bsky.social workshop in November 2024: The unintended consequences of large language models as a labor-augmenting technology in science.

The unintended consequences of large language models as a labor-augmenting technology in science

As a labor-augmenting technology, large language models (LLMs) have the potential to accelerate scientific activity across the research pipeline. But even if LLMs perform on par with human experts at ...

arxiv.org

𝗙𝗼𝗿𝗲𝗶𝗴𝗻 𝗲𝘅𝗽𝗲𝗿𝘁𝘀 𝗼𝗳𝘁𝗲𝗻 𝘀𝗵𝗮𝗽𝗲 𝗔𝗳𝗿𝗶𝗰𝗮𝗻 𝗵𝗲𝗮𝗹𝘁𝗵 𝗽𝗼𝗹𝗶𝗰𝘆 𝘄𝗶𝘁𝗵𝗼𝘂𝘁 𝗮𝗰𝗰𝗼𝘂𝗻𝘁𝗮𝗯𝗶𝗹𝗶𝘁𝘆, 𝗽𝗿𝗼𝗺𝗼𝘁𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗳𝗹𝗮𝘄𝗲𝗱 𝗿𝗲𝗳𝗼𝗿𝗺𝘀 𝘄𝗵𝗶𝗹𝗲 𝗳𝗮𝗰𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗻𝗼 𝗰𝗮𝗿𝗲𝗲𝗿 𝗰𝗼𝗻𝘀𝗲𝗾𝘂𝗲𝗻𝗰𝗲𝘀. 𝗥𝗶𝗱𝗱𝗲 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝗰𝗼𝗹𝗹𝗲𝗮𝗴𝘂𝗲𝘀 (𝟮𝟬𝟮𝟲) 𝘂𝗿𝗴𝗲 𝘁𝗿𝗮𝗰𝗸𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗲𝘅𝗽𝗲𝗿𝘁 𝗮𝗱𝘃𝗶𝗰𝗲 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝗼𝘂𝘁𝗰𝗼𝗺𝗲𝘀 𝘁𝗼 𝗲𝗻𝘀𝘂𝗿𝗲 𝗿𝗲𝘀𝗽𝗼𝗻𝘀𝗶𝗯𝗶𝗹𝗶𝘁𝘆. Link: doi.org/10.1136/bmjg...

Making experts accountable in global health

International donors are transnational actors that pursue various strategies to influence policy decisions in Global South countries. In addition to conditionality, which typically involves imposing p...

doi.org

Why are academics using GenAI to write articles, grade assignments, compose emails and a lot of other tasks that they would/should otherwise be doing themselves? A brief summary of our anonymous survey of over 200 academics' 'grey uses' of GenAI ... researchwhisperer.org/2026/07/21/a...

Academic (mis)uses of GenAI

This second post by Neil Selwyn and his collaborators shares some of the preliminary results from their research survey, which was discussed in an RW post earlier this year ‘Academics’ …

researchwhisperer.org

“[@SpringerNature’s] Whitehead also says that, like many other publishers, she and her colleagues work closely with external sleuths who draw attention to problematic papers. “We find the work they do really valuable,” she says.” Via @retractionwatch.com’s Weekend Reads bit.ly/3T3p8KB

‘Everything we catch is a huge win’: the rise of integrity specialists - Research Professional News

Publishers have massively expanded their research integrity teams to combat fraud. Will it work?

researchprofessionalnews.com

Tim Harford writes about me in the Financial Times. He claims I think it’s hopeless for scientists to try to explain their work to the public. That’s false. I suspect link rot and Harford’s faulty memory are to blame. I’ll explain my actual view below. 🧪 1/10 giftarticle.ft.com/giftarticle/...

Explain it to me like I’m 10

Simplifying how we explain complex concepts can lead to surprising benefits

giftarticle.ft.com

I had the honor of giving a keynote at the International Conference on Machine Learning last week. I addressed the widespread anxiety about how we should adapt as AI capabilities increase. I was thrilled by the talk’s reception, so I have made my slides available www.cs.princeton.edu/~arvindn/tal...

What will be left for us to work on?

ICML 2026 invited keynote — slides and edited transcript, presented click-by-click as delivered. Arvind Narayanan, Princeton University.

cs.princeton.edu

The April–June 2026 issue of REACH is now live! 🎉 🔗 www.sci-integrity.com/reach Our special coverage takes you inside the 9th World Conference on Research Integrity in Vancouver, where 700+ people from 57 countries met to confront the forces reshaping how science is done and trusted. 🧵 1/7

paulkrugman.substack.com/p/oligarchy-...

Oligarchy in Action: The Case of Corporate Tax Cuts

How big money trumps the people’s will — and how to reclaim democracy

paulkrugman.substack.com

Chop Suey (1929) captures interwar cosmopolitanism and modern emotional distance: two women talk, detached, while a couple behind sits in silence. The public solitude contrasts with the restaurant’s vivid color, sharpening the isolation.

The most spectacular 2026 retraction? www.nejm.org/doi/10.1056/...

I just fulfilled my annual pledge today by donating 21% of my income this year to clean water projects in DRC and Somalia. The biggest aid cuts took place over a year ago, but because of runways & emergency bridge funding, some of the worst effects are still to come. We can help reduce them.

We don't have to sit back and just watch the horror unfold

This month, I signed a pledge to donate at least 10% of my lifetime income to effective charities.

scientificdiscovery.dev

Something I always suspected but couldn‘t prove: immoral behavior in scientific environments is contagious journals.plos.org/plosbiology/...

Social learning dynamically shapes moral decision-making by biasing subjective valuation

Observing others’ immoral behavior can increase one’s own dishonesty, but the neurocomputational mechanisms driving this moral contagion remain unclear. This study shows that cheating increases in dis...

journals.plos.org

People who are healthy despite being born with genetic mutations that normally cause grave illness may hold the key to treating those diseases, Roxanne Khamsi writes. She reports on what “modifier” genes could mean for the future of lifesaving therapies:

The Genes That Could Cancel Out a Fatal Diagnosis

The key to treating genetic disease might be hidden in other “modifier” genes.

bit.ly

Some legacies aren’t measured by how long we live, but by the courage we leave behind. In Oslo, Norway, a statue honors Cecilie Flatval, a mother of three diagnosed with metastatic breast cancer at 42. It is the world’s first statue dedicated to a woman living with incurable breast cancer. #SheShed

Elon Musk says that no one died because of his demolition of USAID, and that "Kristof is lying through his teeth." So here I invite him to join me on a visit to Africa to see for himself: www.nytimes.com/2026/07/01/o...

Opinion | U.S.A.I.D. Cuts Killed People. That’s the Truth.

nytimes.com

Academic freedom assessment across the world. The US is on a steep decline, below >120 countries www.scientificamerican.com/article/see-...

www.wired.com/story/a-cour... should not go unnoticed. The original Munich court decision is at www.gesetze-bayern.de/Content/Docu...

A Court Has Ruled That Google Is Liable for False Statements Generated by AI Overviews

The ruling holds that a company that designs, trains, operates, and manages an AI system must assume legal liability for any damages caused by the responses it generates.

wired.com

An inevitable development for for-profit Open Access publishers is Fordism: automation & massification. If you earn money piece-rate for each paper you want to increase the flow of papers while minimizing cost. e.g. very low and *uniform* turnaround times at Frontiers and MDPI

Michael Okun@michael-okun.bsky.social · 2mo ago

I’ve officially resigned as Associate Editor for Frontiers in Systems Neuroscience. It used to be a reputable journal, but became a case study in how forced automation destroys academic integrity. 👇

Dangerous? www.theguardian.com/society/2026... Super Dangerous!

Palantir’s access to identifiable NHS England patient data is ‘dangerous’, MPs say

Health service has given US tech firm ‘unlimited access’ to certain data to build integrated platform, according to reports

theguardian.com

Researchers at the 2026 ADA conference were chucked out Friday for distributing an editorial that had been published in the ADA'S flagship journal, b/c it was critical of NIH research cuts, & Bhattacharya was scheduled to speak at the conference. (He didn't.) 🧵1/5 www.nytimes.com/2026/06/05/w...

Police Remove Diabetes Experts From Conference for Distributing Critique of Trump Administration

nytimes.com

1. How common is LLM use in scientific publishing, and how does it vary across field, publisher, journal prestige, author demographics etc.? @kylesiler.bsky.social has new paper in PNAS that addresses this question on a massive scale: 7.3 million papers from Elsevier, PLOS, MDPI, and Frontiers.

The diffusion of large language models in published academic articles | PNAS

Large language models (LLMs) are rapidly changing academic research, raising questions of who is adopting these tools and under what conditions. Th...

pnas.org