Correction of scientific literature: Too little, too late!

The Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic has highlighted the limitations of the current scientific publication system, in which serious post-publication concerns are often addressed too slowly to be effective. In this Perspective, we offer suggestions to improve academia’s willingness and ability to correct errors in an appropriate time frame.

What happened to Science Goodreads and how do we rebuild it? A 65 million dollar question (at least) - CAIROS Blog

The story of the rise and fall of Mendeley

When Nature Calls: The Enshittification of Science and Its Enablers

Proof-of-work papers, policy laundering, and the collapse of self-correction

“Paging Dr. Fraud”: The Fake Publishers That Are Ruining Science

For years, spurious journals have proliferated online, promising academic credibility in exchange for cash.

The State of Papers, Retractions, and Preprints: Evidence from the CrossRef Database (2004-2024)

A 20-year analysis of CrossRef metadata demonstrates that global scholarly output -- encompassing publications, retractions, and preprints -- exhibits strikingly inertial growth, well-described by exponential, quadratic, and logistic models with nearly indistinguishable goodness-of-fit. Retraction dynamics, in particular, remain stable and minimally affected by the COVID-19 shock, which contributed less than 1% to total notices. Since 2004, publications doubled every 9.8 years, retractions every 11.4 years, and preprints at the fastest rate, every 5.6 years. The findings underscore a system primed for ongoing stress at unchanged structural bottlenecks. Although model forecasts diverge beyond 2024, the evidence suggests that the future trajectory of scholarly communication will be determined by persistent systemic inertia rather than episodic disruptions -- unless intentionally redirected by policy or AI-driven reform.

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.

This blog is on ATProto

This blog and its posts are now on ATProto, the data backend that powers Bluesky. To what end, I couldn't say just yet. I'm just playing around. This didn't involve any changes whatsoever to the website that you're looking at. It just means that when I publish a new post I also write a new record into my Personal Data Server (PDS) which includes the post's title, publication timestamp, and a URL. This gets slurped off by ATProto relays that subscribe to me and if there's anybody who cares about my posts, they get to find out about it more or less in realtime.

The Journal of Scientific Integrity

by Laura Luebbert and Lior Pachter Background (by LL) Four years ago, during the first year of my PhD at Caltech, I participated in a journal club organized by the lab I was rotating in. I was assi…

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.

Is replication <i>possible</i> in qualitative research? A response to Makel et al. (2022)

There has been much debate in recent years about how open research practices, which have been promoted in efforts to improve research robustness, may (not) be appropriate for qualitative methodolog...

Landing — Open Journals Collective

We're a collective of libraries, university presses, and non-profit publishers reshaping academic research.