How can one learn to investigate the #integrity of published #scientific papers? This Community Page by @cosig.net, @reeserichardson.bsky.social, @solalpirelli.bsky.social presents COSIG, a collection of guides enabling anyone to perform forensic peer review 🧪#AcademicSky plos.io/43uZsbC

@smutclyde.bsky.social discusses the recycling of kaggle datasets into the scientific literature. A paper from Scientific Reports used the "eye disease data set" which includes only a few hundred images, including animals, diagrams, and people in sunglasses. forbetterscience.com/2026/06/09/b...

Hope you read! :)

prediction markets doing press and paying people to make society trust they’re accurate, then giving someone the trump admin has hailed as a “journalist” a paid sponsorship post to cast doubt on elections is horrifying. prediction markets need to be made illegal immediately

INVESTIGATION: 🚨 A Polymarket exec used a personal PayPal account to pay major political influencers like Riley Gaines and Brian Krassenstein, who then hyped how "accurate" Polymarket is at predicting outcomes. We uncovered $350,000+ flowing to influencers this way www.politico.com/news/2026/06...

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"There is absolutely nothing to see here" seems hard to reconcile with the section title "How will Thermo Fisher prevent this from happening again?".

this line is now also apparently being employed for physical poster presentations. Unclear how recently this has started, but the hair under this sticker suggests a rather hasty application bsky.app/profile/poph...

Thermo Fisher now has a page up in response to our observations. They flatly deny that images were manipulated or fabricated while repeating that images were "optimized for presentation and clarity on the website", no lie, six times. www.thermofisher.com/us/en/home/l...

The Thermo Fisher situation keeps getting worse. We've now collected 450+ problematic images presented as verification data in TF's antibody catalog. This includes: 🖌️ Dozens more images with duplications or painting 🖨️ Hundreds of blots that all share the same background (behold slideshow below)

COSIG is 1 year old 🥹

The biohackers subreddit banned all posts about peptides and HRT because peptide companies were spamming + manipulating the sub in order to manipulate Google AI and ChatGPT answers. Very insidious industry that is drastically changing the internet www.404media.co/companies-ar...

oops! reminds me of previous misadventures in human gene nomenclature: www.theverge.com/2020/8/6/213...

NSF uses staffing cuts to strip Inspector General's office of its ability to investigate research misconduct www.science.org/content/arti...

Unreliable and underperforming antibodies are a longstanding problem, so while the reveal of apparently manipulated antibody data in Thermo Fisher's catalog was a shock, the frustration it sparked among many researchers is perhaps no surprise. My reporting:

@dangaristo.bsky.social reports on the brouhaha for @nature.com : www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Thermo Fisher has now made public the company line, which is ?!??!?!??!?!?! you really gotta read it. cen.acs.org/research-int...

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...

@reeserichardson.bsky.social and @johanduchene.bsky.social identified more examples. Check out Reese's thread. Also summarised on For Better Science today: forbetterscience.com/2026/05/22/s...

@johanduchene.bsky.social @sholtodavid.bsky.social Spent the last hour looking, found ten more apparently manipulated Western blots in Thermo Fisher's antibody verification data (across eight different catalogued products). Thread below. www.thermofisher.com/antibody/pro...

"Science is not simply a sequence of tasks that can be optimized....The scientific system thrives on inefficiency: redundant efforts, failed attempts, and divergent paths. These are not costs to be eliminated but sources of discovery." Excellent essay! ⬇️ www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Haven't seen one of these in the wild in AGES. Scientific error-checking difficulty: very easy Why is this table definitely not real data?

Uncritical use of Al in science needs reality check www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Thank you so much @natureportfolio.nature.com @springernature.com @nature.com for publishing this piece very close to my heart and some of my work. Go read it here. www.nature.com/articles/d41...

A conference taught me that scientists and journalists must work together to protect research - great insights from @lonnibesancon.bsky.social www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Good piece by Jefferson Pooley on how LLM-powered “research” tools like Google’s “Deep Research” and Elsevier’s “AI Discovery” likely strengthen the “Matthew effect”: highly-cited authors are amplified while undercited (often female) authors are increasingly ignored: blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsoci...

the latest find: a nanoparticle in a published, peer-reviewed article, cited 58 times, that is shaped suspiciously like the "Cloud" shape from Microsoft Office.

Like a good ten percent of the images in this dataset are stock photos. At least three images are the same exact drawing. I've counted at least seven unique images of Sylvester Stallone can't stop laughing, just brilliant stuff

1. What I found in Trump's new 113-page financial disclosure report. It doesn't look good.

well, this is certainly a new low!

Devastating piece by @nickkristof.bsky.social on how sexual abuse against detained Palestinians has been normalized. The Silence That Meets the Rape of Palestinians www.nytimes.com/2026/05/11/o...

The problem is not the idea that if you invest resources in something, you shouldn’t expect a return. That is sensible. The problem is that the word “return” has been so narrowed as to mean only “money.“ Institutions cannot see the non-monetary returns on investment as *returns.*

Cool, so NSF is now going to be used to essentially launder money to tech bros because universities are just too cumbersome and disciplinary oversight and regulations and accountability are all just too stifling for innovation. $1.5B for “X-Labs.”

Breaking news: Indiana University plant microbiologist Roger Innes has been locked out of his laboratory by the school in response to a request by one of his federal funders. The move comes after Innes complained about the government’s prosecution of Chinese postdocs. https://scim.ag/4tsDqRr

Fellow @cosig.net maintainer @solalpirelli.bsky.social notches a victory ⚖️

Well, #WCRI2026 was an amazing conference! Spent 5 days mingling with #ResearchIntegrity enthusiasts from all disciplines! Inspiring to hear all the efforts going towards battling #papermills Huge thanks to @jabyrnesci.bsky.social for organising this sleuth get together. Too many legends to tag! 💜

Hooray for Hopkins as they prepare to welcome back their Professor of Medicine.

Sleuths face various legal risks but they can also use the law for their advantage. ⚖️ COSIG's newest guide, number 3️⃣5️⃣, covers legal considerations for taking part in forensic peer review. Read it here: osf.io/q3y7s

The COSIG team is at #WCRI2026 ! Our poster is up at station 120. We'll all be there today from 12:00 to 1:30; come stop by!

For many Iranian students, Neuromatch was one of the few bridges to the international neuroscience community. Iranian students and TAs have contributed so much to it. Many of us, including me, found neuroscience through Neuromatch. This decision by Trump’s gov is cruel, unjust and a loss for science

With the COSIG team, we are also presenting our poster on the 5th, number 120, come see some examples of problematic content in scientific papers and try to catch them! @cosig.net @solalpirelli.bsky.social @yaamurozturk.bsky.social @reeserichardson.bsky.social

I'm at #WCRI2026 to present about: 📃 The Collection of Open Science Integrity Guides (@cosig.net, cosig.net, poster 120, Tuesday May 5 at 12-1:30 PM) and 🧻 Our paper mill ads dataset BuyTheBy (link below, oral presentation session 5D Tuesday May 5 at 4 PM) Come find me! 🦦

not quite

When Bhattacharya discusses “academic freedom”, he exclusively refers to his own claims of being persecuted... He falsely claimed that the rejection of the [Great Barrington] declaration by the scientific community was an attempt to prevent discussion. www.timeshighereducation.com/opinion/nih-...

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!

While the non-disclosure of the conflict of interest is a serious issue, it is also important to point out that @sholtodavid.bsky.social and others found several instances of image duplication in this paper. pubpeer.com/publications...

The "fraud is thankfully rare" era is clearly over. Jack's work (et al) is incredibly timely and important. If you review trials, please consider attending or otherwise learning more about INSPECT-SR.

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! ...🧵

How much does it cost to buy your way onto a scientific paper? To answer this question (and better understand the global market for academic reputation manipulation), we compiled BuyTheBy, a massive dataset of thousands of advertisements from paper mills in seven different countries. Link below!

I've been getting questions about this paper all week: www.cell.com/cell/abstrac... They make EXTRAORDINARY claims - fortunately, these are trivial to verify/falsify. Unfortunately, there's other concerns.