Ethics and etiquette of informal peer review

Why the Stockholm Declaration will never work

Abstract The Stockholm Declaration calls for a moral reformation of scientific publishing—replacing commercial publishers with scholar-led journals, rewarding quality over quantity and instituting independent oversight. While noble in spirit, it fundamentally misdiagnoses the disease. The crisis of science stems not from paper mills or profit motives but from systemic incentives that reward volume, novelty and prestige over validity and reliability. Non-profit ownership will not neutralize the prestige economy, sleuth-led policing cannot scale, and ‘integrity registries’ would merely replace metrics with surveillance. True reform requires rebuilding the publishing infrastructure as a public utility: publicly funded, free to publish and read, and stripped of hierarchy and financial incentives.

The associations of social media attention, visibility, disinformation and retraction initiators with time to retraction: a Cox regression analysis

Purpose This study examines how retraction reasons, retraction initiators, journal visibility, access models and Twitter activity associate with the speed of retracting flawed scientific publications. Design/methodology/approach Using a Cox proportional hazards model, we analyzed 1,179 articles retracted in 2019–2021, including a subset of 98 papers tweeted before retraction. Findings The results reveal that higher journal impact factor and open-access status were associated with faster retractions. However, a significant negative interaction indicated that the effect of high-impact journals diminished for open-access publications. Journal-initiated retractions were slower overall, except in cases of misconduct such as co-authorship deception and plagiarism, where journals acted more quickly. Among retraction reasons, only deception in co-authoring was associated with significantly slower retractions, but this trend reversed when journals led the process. The association of social media attention with retraction speed was statistically robust, albeit modest in magnitude: each additional pre-retraction tweet was associated with a slight reduction in time to retraction. Bootstrap validation confirmed the stability of this finding. Originality/value Public scrutiny, institutional responsibility and publication visibility jointly shape the time to retraction. This study advances altmetrics discourse by positioning social media as a conditional, yet meaningful, participant in the retraction lifecycle. Beyond altmetrics, our findings highlight retractions as part of a broader network of relationships between public accountability, digital ethics and science communication, positioning them as moments of accountability shaped jointly by journals, ethical responsibilities and digital publics.

Consider seniority of authors when criticizing published work?

I’ve written my fair share of letters to the editor and commentaries over the years, most of them languishing in the file drawer. It used to be impossible to get them published. The situation has improved a bit, but not enough.

Consider seniority of authors when criticizing published work?

I’ve written my fair share of letters to the editor and commentaries over the years, most of them languishing in the file drawer. It used to be impossible to get them published. The situation has improved a bit, but not enough.

π = 3: Pointing out flaws does not require solving them

I think science often takes the requirement that criticism be constructive too far. Most definitions of constructive criticism refer to feedback that is intended to help by pointing out flaws in a way that is specific, actionable, and respectful. This is good, I’m in favor of it. However, in practice, the demands for constructive criticism in science go much further: frequently, we are told that, to publicly point out serious flaws, you must also solve them, and to do otherwise is somehow rude, unscholarly, or low effort.

Guest post: If you’re going to critique science, be scientific about it

Loren K. Mell Editor’s note: This post responds to a Feb. 13 article in The Atlantic, “The Scientific Literature Can’t Save Us Now,” written by Retraction Watch cofounders Adam Marcus and Ivan Oran…

Guest post: Should universities investigate questionable papers students and faculty wrote elsewhere?

Be-Art/iStock I am a research ethicist and often get asked by my university to investigate when potential concerns are raised about our staff or students. One example involved the recent case of th…

A response to: Should universities investigate questionable papers students and faculty wrote elsewhere?

Editor’s note: We recently published a guest post on universities’ responsibility for investigating misconduct allegations related to work by staff and students conducted and/or published while the…

DataColada: No Comments - Replicability-Index

Science is like an iceberg. The published record is only a fraction of the things that university -paid academics do. Some time ago, Brian Nosek dreamed about a scientific utopia of open science that would make the workings of academia more transparent, but all we got was preprints and some badges - that are apparently DataColada: Open Science, but Closed Comments?

A journal named a sleuth in a correction. The sleuth says that was ‘ethical editorial malpractice’

As the publishing community debates the merits of naming sleuths in retraction or correction notices, one journal did so without the sleuth’s permission — by publishing an email from the authors na…

Should you include a list of retractions, corrections, and errors, along with a list of publications, on your CV?

Thanks for kind words about our paper in your blog post. I very much agree about the main advantage being able to ask the right questions, because you’re not so constrained by available analyses.

Michael Baym on Twitter / X

Remember that you, by definition, cannot distinguish between a good idea and a failure of your own knowledge, judgement, or taste. This is why external (ideally expert) feedback is crucial— Michael Baym (@baym) March 25, 2026

Arjun Raj on Twitter / X

Less review, not more, please. Review can support rigor, but often stifles innovation. I fear that in pursuit of the former, we have ended up with too much of the latter. https://t.co/e8y0gEr3VF— Arjun Raj (@arjunrajlab) March 25, 2026