Very proud of the improvements made by the Leiden Ranking team to the Open Edition of the ranking. This demonstrates our commitment at CWTS to @barcelonadori.bsky.social and the open research information transition. Great work by @neesjanvaneck.bsky.social and the rest of the team!

Some real fake news! Paper mills are creating fake authors who can then serve as fake reviewers. The illustration of the fake reviewer sitting at their desk is excellent. www.nature.com/articles/d41...

It is very good to see reforming academic reward and recognition as the first point listed in this Publishing Futures from @universitypress.cambridge.org report in considering ways forward for the future of academic publishing 🤩 Read more below 👇

this is relevant jamanetwork.com/journals/jam...

"The scientific hegemony the USA had for decades has gone...the percentage of papers with a Chinese author [i]n 2025 is 23%, the USA 11%...transition to open access is only possible if Chinese researchers change their publishing habits" newsletter.journalology.com/p/the-rise-o...

AI-powered fraud: Chinese paper mills are mass-producing fake academic research www.scmp.com/tech/tech-tr...

Our periodic review of the coverage of the major bibliographic databases (October 2025) GS no longer the largest due to the huge increase of OpenAlex. New data for Xueshu

Undercover investigation reveals shocking secrets of a "paper mill": The head claims to have earned 80 million yuan last year by publishing 130,000 papers, claiming he has exclusive resources and that manuscripts without ... (Google Translate) news.ifeng.com/c/8nQISfY6x7l

Low quality papers are flooding the cancer literature — can this AI tool help to catch them? www.nature.com/articles/d41..., Revealing the Paper Mill Iceberg: AI-Based Screening of Cancer Research Publications www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Powerful piece, highly recommended!

The Proceedings of WOOC 2025 are online! 🎉 📖 Index volume: zenodo.org/records/1719... 📚 All papers: zenodo.org/communities/... @barcelonadori.bsky.social @opencitations.bsky.social @unibo.it #WOOC2025

Thanks @iansample.bsky.social at @theguardian.com podcast for chatting #ScientificPublishing. This pod follows from The Strain on Scientific Publishing & reports of publisher profit margins rivalling Google etc... Paper: direct.mit.edu/qss/article/... Pod: podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/s...

There’s a striking pattern among the top journals targeted by an Indian paper mill. All have sharply increased their publication number in recent years. Is this growth driven by publisher goals, a surge in submissions due to AI, or both? #papermills

Excited to work with a wonderful group of international colleagues to promote openness of publication metadata in negotiations with publishers! @cwts.nl

Rethinking the narrative on vaccine policy and public trust doi.org/10.1136/bmj....

Open Science Workshop - detecting errors and misconduct in science Dates: 20-22 October Location: Radboud University, Nijmegen, The Netherlands Registration link: tinyurl.com/3xkd8twf ONLY PHYSICAL ATTENDENCE POSSIBLE! NO ONLINE POSSIBILITIES.

OurResearch rebrands to OpenAlex. blog.openalex.org/were-now-ope...

AI models are using material from retracted scientific papers www.technologyreview.com/2025/09/23/1...

This is a great article on paper mills by Lea Wolz (in German). It provides a general overview of paper mills and their impact on science. It gives examples of how fake papers penetrate Cochrane reviews and bias recommendations. Highly recommended! www.quarks.de/gesellschaft... #papermills

First thing after the summer break: getting ready for Bristol, where I’ll present our work on stealth journal takeovers and their telltale signs at @stienid2025.bsky.social. Already available at doi.org/10.5281/zeno...

Truly grateful by the interest our presentation on stealth journal takeovers generated at the STI in Bristol last week. Thanks to everyone who approached me to discuss it during the conference! @stienid2025.bsky.social read the whole story at zenodo.org/records/1476... and zenodo.org/records/1521...

Can large language models stand in for human participants? Many social scientists seem to think so, and are already using "silicon samples" in research. One problem: depending on the analytic decisions made, you can basically get these samples to show any effect you want. THREAD 🧵

How to Fight Fraudulent Publishing in the Mathematical Sciences: Joint Recommendations of the IMU and the ICIAM arxiv.org/abs/2509.09877

RetractBASE (retractbase.csic.es), the largest open search engine specialized on retracted literature, makes publicly accessible their datasets here: osf.io/xtrsb/files/...

Whoa! Elsevier fired @richardtol.bsky.social, longstanding Editor-in-Chief of the journal Energy Economics. Richard's side of the story should be ringing alarm bells. #EconSky Fraud and cover-up richardtol.substack.com/p/fraud-and-...

New Comment Online: The rising danger of AI-generated images in nanomaterials science and what we can do about it. #MaterialsScience #Nanoscience #ArtificialIntelligence #ResearchIntegrity #AcademicChatter www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Systematic fraud in mathematics publishing has been documented, highlighting the impact of non-transparent metrics and commercial pressures on research quality and integrity. Recommendations for reform have been proposed. doi.org/g93rhg

"The university will stop sharing the data required to be included in the ranking as of 2026. As a result, Sorbonne University will no longer feature in future rankings produced by THE, which include the World University Rankings, the Rankings by Subject or the Impact Rankings." Excellent!

This is another wake-up call about what is happening with scientific literature, which is being flooded by template papers produced by paper mills. One example is the use of open-access databases like FAERS or NHANES, combined with analyses that rely on biased or incorrect methodologies.

The Scandal of Academic Publishing link.springer.com/article/10.1...

Der Einfluss von Beall’s Liste auf die Wissenschaft und den wissenschaftlichen Diskurs / The Influence of Beall’s List on Science and the Scientific Discourse refubium.fu-berlin.de/handle/fub18...

📢 New RoRI paper out in Science & Technology Studies The study explores how 8 research funders navigate the ambiguous role of “excellence” - not simply as a matter of fact, but increasingly as a matter of concern requiring reconfiguration: sciencetechnologystudies.journal.fi/article/view...

Fraudulent Publishing in the Mathematical Sciences #ResearchIntegrity #Math #Mathematical #WCRI2026 #WCRI arxiv.org/abs/2509.07257

Methods to detect #LLM-generated #PeerReview: in ms, add command to LLM to: 1. Watermark (insert a random start string, fake citation, or technical term) 2. Hidden prompt (insert white-colored text, different language, font manipulation) @cmu.edu

Comparing #LLM vs human #PeerReview of 5 @bmj.com mss, LLM reviews matched or exceeded humans on key elements of identifying strengths/weaknesses, commenting on writing, organization, and Tables and Figures, and constructiveness peerreviewcongress.o...

Retracted articles in Wikidata (~22k) now visualized in Scholia: why they're cited and their impact on research. Egon Willighagen's presentation uses Retraction Watch data via the Crossref REST API. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.17013354

Today, I presented retractbase.csic.es, our open database about retractions, in Bristol STI-ENID Conference. @stienid2025.bsky.social with a very good reception

This great new initiative highlights lots of interesting research and initiatives, including (on p.40) a primer on what MetaROR is doing, by @andre-brasil.bsky.social 👏 Congratulations to everyone involved for producing such a great magazine!

Estimating the predictability of questionable open-access journals www.science.org/doi/10.1126/..., AI tool labels more than 1000 journals for ‘questionable,’ possibly shady practices www.science.org/content/arti...

Our latest work showing the alignment between the global distribution of research efforts and disease burden, and the effects of the US withdrawal from global funding www.nature.com/articles/s41...

A paper that combines #peerreview & cheese... what could be better? Answer: writing said paper with @abalkina.bsky.social @image-integrity.bsky.social & Marie Souliere. Read on to learn how the Swiss Cheese Model could help peer review & #researchintegrity onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...

‘Wasted’ research and lost citations: A scientometric assessment of retracted documents in Scopus between 2001 and 2024 journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

My team at OSTP helped craft and implement the Biden administration’s scientific integrity policies to help keep politics out of government science. Unsurprisingly, the Trump administration has rolled back these safeguards for independent science. It’s an open invitation to political interference.

What counts as plagiarism? AI-generated papers pose new risks www.nature.com/articles/d41...

AI content is tainting preprints: how moderators are fighting back www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Great to see the future vision of the German colleagues: "Instead of predominately focusing on ... proprietary data for its users, the KB’s own curational and enrichment work will take on a more prominent role, as it allows the KB to contribute to the ongoing transition to open bibliometric data."

The Data Infrastructure of the German Kompetenznetzwerk Bibliometrie: An Enabling Intermediary between Raw Data and Analysis doi.org/10.1162/qss.... This paper provides a very helpful overview of the data infrastructure of @bibliometrie-info.bsky.social.

Will AI speed up literature reviews or derail them entirely? www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Could AI slow science? www.aisnakeoil.com/p/could-ai-s...

AI in science: is it useful? sciencebusiness.net/news/ai/ai-s...