A CRO has been scamming academic and industry labs in the US with fraudulent data that has been published in Nature and other high impact journals. Leonid has written a great piece on my findings: forbetterscience.com/2025/09/22/i...

Dr. El-Deiry again asserts he's a victim of criminal behavior "by @pubpeer.com." And again, he provides no evidence of the crimes nor shared which statutes have been violated in what jurisdictions. If he's a victim of a crime, he should report that to the authorities, not to social media.

A "balanced" paper would make it absolutely clear that they did NOT study vaccine shots... but they don't. Instead vaccines are mentioned over and over.

Another comment on the Taylor & Francis DNA contamination paper: “This paper has serious methodological flaws… [it] should not have been fit for publication.” See: retractionwatch.com/2025/09/18/c...

Today I find myself in an unusual territory. I will give a talk at the legendary International Mathematical Union in Berlin! I'm very grateful to Prof.Agricola for the invitation to discuss the problem of paper mills.

Dr. El-Deiry once again claims my concerns about his papers are about politics. Bollocks.

First *stealthy* revision for the Taylor & Francis "DNA contamination" paper by Kevin McKernan and gang. Say goodbye to the World Health Authorization. Say hello to the World Health Organization. "This article has been corrected with minor changes."

Speedy action by British Journal of Cancer. About 10 months from my report to retraction. 😺 Authors reused data from earlier paper, and more. pubpeer.com/publications...

Complete bogus Correction: Oxford University Press doing everything in their power not to retract a fake breast cancer paper by Italian frauds Marcello Maggiolini, Sebastiano Andò: Lanzino et al. 2010 (DOI: 10.1093/nar/gkq278). "Corrected" without correcting any figure. pubpeer.com/publications...

The magnificent @deevybee.bsky.social gave a #fosci talk pointing out to the major issue in #scientificpublishing that corporations are desperately trying to ignore — the editors who let all the garbage in their prestigious journals 🎇 + brilliant term: Negligent Open Access Publisher = NOPE

The cat is causing more trouble.

"Treating careful scholarship as somehow less important than the acquisition of data can adversely affect the reliability of the scientific record and consequently, the course of science," writes H. Holden Thorp in a new #ScienceEditorial. https://scim.ag/4mqrKet

For most of my career I was tied to NYC market times. 9:30am for the stock exchange and 8:00am for money markets, wherever I lived. Now, I have radio silence for most of my day, until Europe wakes up. Then I get a barrage of emails from journals, reporters, researchers. Fun! 😇

another big win for the application of New York §70-a anti-SLAPP counter-claims to recover attorney fees in SDNY, from an opinion by Judge Dale Ho in Watson vs. Doe opinion: storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.us... docket: www.courtlistener.com/docket/85129...

Oopsies. Courtesy of researchers from Turkey and a "journal" from MDPI.

RETRACTED! I am sure the University of Tennessee will come up with some random made-up explanation of how one of their scientists ended up on this paper with hand-drawn figures. It took Springer "only" 6 months to retract this, which is lightning-speed for the publisher. #ResearchIntegrity

Kicking a weekend of sleuthing off with a nice (but unfortunately completely fake) fluorescence microscopy image: Karimi & Namazi et al. 2021 (DOI: 10.1016/j.colsurfa.2021.127205) pubpeer.com/publications... prev. flagged by @mumumouse2.bsky.social & others for other things. Completely made up...

Once you start seeing them they are everywhere!

AJP Journal published a correction I just stumbled upon. They replaced the Kl-/- image in 5C with a new image that now *overlaps with the previous WT image*. No mention of the rest of the issues. 🙄 Image below is before the correction. pubpeer.com/publications...

Happy Friday to those who celebrate! forbetterscience.com/2025/09/12/s...

This paper, published in Scientific Reports, has it all: Apparent duplications of molecular weight markers, protein bands, graphs, and reuse of images from the author's previous lab. #ImageForensics www.nature.com/articles/s41... Take a look here: pubpeer.com/publications...

If your Google search experience has degraded to the point of uselessness, I've had good luck with this. It might not work forever. udm14.com: "An easy-to-use shortcut for an AI-free Google search." udm14.com

COPE's new guidance on Expressions of Concern ask editors to predict the future. If a problem hits any one of the other criteria, why shouldn't the journal flag the paper immediately? publicationethics.org/guidance/gui...

Yes, I really marked every duplication of a particle in this SEM image. It might have taken me longer than it took them to fake it... Khan et al. 2017 (DOI: 10.1016/j.jallcom.2016.11.260) This Elsevier article is a complete clown show... pubpeer.com/publications... #ImageForensics

I was surprised to see this today. Do the panelists and sponsors and members know about @SabinehazanMD? Maybe they will read this Retraction Watch piece: bit.ly/47tCmW6, or this: bit.ly/41HZRad. @theaacr.bsky.social @mdanderson.bsky.social

This Friday, September 12, COSIG maintainer @reeserichardson.bsky.social will be participating in a panel discussion (16:00 CEST, 10:00 AM EDT) as part of the all-day event "Making Sense of Open Science" hosted by the Czech Academy of Sciences. Watch online! www.projekt-amulet.cz/index.php/en...

INACTION: Tackling paper mills requires us to prevent future contamination & clean up the past–the case of the journal Bioengineered www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.... T&Fs lack of visible editorial action has left the scientific community vulnerable to reading & citing 100s of problematic articles

Predictably, Dr. El-Deiry finds it “well-written,” World Health Administration and all. 😻

🙃

Please, @tandfresearch.bsky.social, look into this mess.

"World Health Authorization?" In the Abstract? Did anyone read this? www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

For LLMs to be useful for mission critical applications, they need to be transparent about their training data and limitations. A trivial example, that renders ChatGPT 5.0 totally useless for film and TV info, below. Think what it might miss in your own search.

A Cuban article on Carlo Croce @OhioState . It doesn't get all the facts correct, but it does include an image of @smutclyde.bsky.social @thatsregrettab1.bsky.social @forbetterscience.bsky.social @elisabethbik.bsky.social www.juventudtecnica.cu/articulos/fr...

😐

Here we are!

It took @springernature.com's ethics team over 3 years to retract this paper after they were notified, even after a reminder. Someone else flagged an issue in 2019. pubpeer.com/publications... h/t anon Hoya

COPE retraction guidelines updates: * batch retractions * communicating with authors * purpose of retraction * editor’s decision to retract * aligning with NEW expressions of concern guidelines publicationethics.org/guidance/gui...

New paper on AI out in @frontiersin.bsky.social journal. Unfortunately, although the authors disclose their use of AI to write the paper about AI, they do so in a way that demonstrates the worst of AI-generated research. pubpeer.com/publications...

A big thank you to Spandidos (!). pubpeer.com/publications... h/t anon Hoya.

Latest batch of the National Natural Science Foundation of China's scientific research misconduct cases. www.nsfc.gov.cn/publish/port...

Also on the list are RICO and securities laws.

We'll have to add copyright law to the things that Dr. El-Deiry doesn't know anything about. And yes... he posted this multiple times to hammer the point home. 😹

In case you were wondering why certain people engage in citation fraud schemes: Rabiul Awual (see thread below) has actually explained his motivation a while ago: He hated a professor in class and so he made it his mission to exceed that dudes h-index! scientificbangladesh.com/without-rese...

Dr. who? pens a ChatGPT-style plea to defend his non-peer-reviewed “study” in a predatory journal. “DNA and RNA isolation was performed using… QIAamp DNA Mini Kit (Qiagen, DE).” Really?🤔 www.heraldopenaccess.us/openaccess/q...

Adam @clearskiesadam.bsky.social brought this post to my attention and he does a good job of explaining the weaknesses and strengths in the current state of GenAI detection in the text of papers. clearskiesadam.medium.com/genai-detect...

Here's Wiley "recommending" a retracted article. 😼

Here's George Howard saying the quiet part out loud. youtu.be/XyVKTJYxmnc?... #YDIH

Grateful that @lonnibesancon.bsky.social‬, @gcabanac.cpesr.fr, Cyril Labbe and Alexander Magazinov chose to donate the proceeds of their ASIS&T Best Paper Award for 2025 to the @elisabethbik.bsky.social Fund to support the work of sleuths. More here: centerforscientificintegrity.org/our-projects...

What would we do without AI?