“[@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

Screenshotted for the record, in case it vanishes. The Editor-in-Chief of Science, explaining how the citations in his latest piece were checked. Short thread. 🧵

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/...

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...

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

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.

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

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:

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...

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...

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

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

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...

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.

A copy of the full ethical approval document should be attached to the submitted manuscript. As a reviewer I sometimes see "Ethical approval was received, ref KC256/541" and for all I know it's the model number of the PI's dishwasher.

Jay Bhattacharya has been a constant critic of the CDC and of public health strategies to protect the public from infectious disease. After mass firings of expert staff, he’s now looking for untrained volunteers to screen airport passengers for Ebola symptoms. A lot could go wrong with this.

Today PLOS publishes Redefining Publishing: Practical pathways to open science, the public report from our 18-month research and design project. The report asks how publishing can better support open science. Explore the report: plos.io/4o3bsun #OpenScience

TL;DR: We've identified more than 100 cases of apparent manipulation in Thermo Fisher Scientific's antibody verification data. @sholtodavid.bsky.social @johanduchene.bsky.social reeserichardson.blog/2026/05/28/h...

Excellent news! Nature is expanding Registered Reports to all the fields in which they publish! A great result by all those proposing this strong solution to publication bias and selective reporting (and getting expert feedback before data collection)! www.nature.com/articles/d41...

On panelView, and why we should always look at our data first.. yiqingxu.substack.com/p/plot-your-...

The @nejm.org peer review from beyond www.wjst.de/blog/science...

Prompt-Hacking: The New p-Hacking? | Communications of the ACM https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3744911 > Avoid LLMs unless their use is essential and justifiable. The scientific community must resist the temptation to normalize LLM-based analysis and instead uphold the rigor and integrity of […]

Emmy Noether (1882 – 1935) was a German mathematician, described by Einstein as the most important woman in the history of mathematics. She developed many leading theories of rings, fields, and algebras at a time when academia was mostly closed to women. #CelebratingWomen

Published less than two weeks ago. Retracted today. Impressively quick retraction from NEJM, but you have to wonder how it got published in the first place!

Did you know there's a barely hidden market for authorship of fake scientific papers in conferences? New preprint w/ @abalkina.bsky.social, @mkunesova.bsky.social, and @yaamurozturk.bsky.social : arxiv.org/abs/2604.22458 We found 4,000+ ads & matched them to 1,720 IEEE conf. papers! ...🧵

Dismissing all members of the National Science Board will only continue the destabilization of American fundamental research and scientific workforce development. Read our statement: brnw.ch/21x1Z8n

Trump and Elon Musk destroyed most of the global H.I.V. program that saved hundreds of thousands of lives in Zambia. Now the US is threatening to cut remaining support, unless Zambia gives access to the country’s mineral resources. www.nytimes.com/2026/04/25/h...

'$1,000 for first author': Study of paper mill adverts reveals cost of buying authorship on dodgy scientific papers. My latest for @cenmag.bsky.social: cen.acs.org/policy/publi... @abalkina.bsky.social, @reeserichardson.bsky.social, @image-integrity.bsky.social, @jabyrnesci.bsky.social

We need to talk about failure in science. Everyone fails at some point at something & failure is an integral part of success. Our editorial this week is inspired by a recent meeting at @imperialcollegeldn.bsky.social on this topic which I helped co -organise 🧪 www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Forty years after Chornobyl, there’s a kind of nuclear renaissance & many think that civil nuclear technology is key to helping humanity manage & mitigate the effects of climate change. Regulation will be key & it’s everyone’s responsibility 🧪 www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Elon Musk has big plans for Starlink. "Imagine a future in which Musk owns not only a major social network, but a large chunk of the infrastructure through which the world’s information flows," write Ben Tarnoff and Quinn Slobodian.

Once you pull on one thread, more starts to unravel.

A federal misconduct registry for academia? A fine proposition - provided @pubpeer.com and @retractionwatch.com are accorded their rightful seat at the table. 🔗 nature.com/articles/d41586-026-01147-x

For context on another seminal example of the @thelancet.com commitment to the scientific literature, see: pubpeer.com/publications...

The Internet's Most Powerful Archiving Tool Is in Peril www.wired.com/story/the-in...

CRUK goes green [OA] news.cancerresearchuk.org/2026/04/01/w...

Finally - retraction of www.bmj.com/content/391/... Cudos to @deevybee.bsky.social

Florida bans sociology from core university curriculum www.miamiherald.com/news/politic...

Uh oh. NASEM workshop on 'scientific integrity' features fireside chats w/leaders of the flawed Santa Clara serological survey - Jay Bhattacharya and John Ioannidis - who claimed that COVID was 50x-85x milder than believed and perhaps similar to flu. 🧵 www.nationalacademies.org/projects/DBA...

NEW: Wikipedia has banned AI-generated content.