BishopBlog

Many publishers are getting nervous about infiltration by paper mills, who can torpedo a journal's reputation when they succeed in publishing papers that are obvious nonsense. In a recent Open Letter, a group of sleuths drew attention to an example in Scientific Reports, published by Springer Nature. After the Open Letter was published, the...

It's always interesting for a blogger to look back to see which posts have garnered most attention. In 2024 there were three standout items, my resignation from the Royal Society, an Open Letter about editorial failings at the journal Scientific Reports, and a guest post by René Aquarius about his experiences as a reviewer for MDPI. For each of...

It's been an odd week for the academic publisher MDPI. On 16th December, Finland's Publication Forum (known as JUFO) announced that from January 2025 it was downgrading its classification of 271 open access journals to the lowest level, zero. By my calculations, this includes 187 journals from MDPI and 82 from Frontiers, plus 2 others. This is...

The Royal Society is a venerable institution founded in 1660, whose original members included such eminent men as Christopher Wren, Robert Hooke, Robert Boyle and Isaac Newton. It promotes science in many ways: administering grants, advising government, holding meetings and lectures, and publishing expert reports on scientific matters of public...

There's been a fair bit of discussion about Clarivate's decision to pause inclusion of eLife publications on the Science Citation Index (e.g. on Research Professional).  What I find exasperating is that most of the discussion focuses on a single consequence - loss of eLife's impact factor.  For authors, there are graver consequences.   I've...

Last week this blog focussed on problems affecting Scientific Reports, a mega-journal published by Springer Nature. This week I look at a journal at the opposite end of the spectrum, the Journal of Psycholinguistic Research (JPR), a small, specialist journal which has published just 2187 papers since it was founded in 1971. This is fewer than...

Source: http://www.weblogcartoons.com/2008/11/23/ideas/ Those of you who follow this blog may have noticed a lack of thematic coherence. I write about whatever is exercising my mind at the time, which can range from technical aspects of statistics to the design of bathroom taps. I decided it might be helpful to introduce a bit of order into this...

16th October 2024 to: Mr Chris Graf Research Integrity Director, Springer Nature and Chair Elect of the World Conference on Research Integrity Foundation Governing Board. Dear Mr Graf, We are a group of sleuths and forensic meta-scientists who are concerned that Springer Nature is failing in its...

2023 was the year when academic publishers started to take seriously the threat that paper mills posed to their business. Their research integrity experts have penned various articles about the scale of the problem and the need to come up with solutions (e.g., here and here). Interested parties have joined forces in an initiative called...

Like many academics, I was interested to see an announcement on social media that a US legal firm had filed a federal antitrust lawsuit against six commercial publishers of academic journals: (1) Elsevier B.V.; (2) Wolters Kluwer N.V.; (3) John Wiley & Sons, Inc.; (4) Sage Publications, Inc.; (5) Taylor and Francis Group, Ltd.; and (6) Springer...

There is growing awareness that Special Issues have become a menace in the world of academic publishing, because they provide a convenient way for large volumes of low quality work to be published in journals that profit from a healthy article processing charge. There has been a consequent backlash against Special Issues, with various attempts to...

An article was published last week by Caron et al (2024) entitled "The PubPeer conundrum: Administrative challenges in research misconduct proceedings". The authors present a perspective on research misconduct from a viewpoint that is not often heard: three of them are attorneys who advise higher education institutions on research misconduct...

Guest post by René Aquarius, PhD Department of Neurosurgery Radboud University Medical Center, Nijmegen, The Netherlands After a recent zoom-call where Dorothy and I discussed several research-related topics, she invited me to write a guest blogpost about the experience I had as a peer-reviewer for MDPI. As I think transparency in research is...

"Here's one for you", said my husband, as he browsed the online Daily Telegraph*: "Severe autism can be reversed, groundbreaking study suggests". My heart did not lift up at this news, which was also covered in the Daily Mail; it is a near certainty that any study making such claims is flawed. But I found it hard to believe just how flawed it...

Book ReviewCarl Elliott. The Occasional Human Sacrifice: Medical Experimentation and the Price of Saying No. W. W. Norton, 2024. ISBN: 978-1-324-06550-0 This book should be required reading for three groups of people. First, every member of university or hospital administration, and those who sit on ethics committees (Institutional Review...

Yesterday, Retraction Watch published a piece about a notorious 2020 article by Gautret et al that had promoted the idea that hydroxychloroquine could treat COVID-19. Despite numerous concerns, the article has not been retracted from the International Journal for Antimicrobial Agents, a journal that is co-owned by the publisher, Elsevier, and...

As Betteridge's law of headlines states: "Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no." So you know where I am going with this. I'm a longstanding fan of open data - in fact, I first blogged about this back in 2015. So I've been gratified to see the needle shift on this, in the sense that over the past decade, in...

I've just been sent an email from eLife, pointing me to links to a report called "eLife's New Model: One year on" and a report by the editors "Scientific Publishing: The first year of a new era". To remind readers who may have missed it, the big change introduced by eLife in 2023 was to drop the step where an editor decides on reject or accept...

I have a lifelong interest in laterality, which is a passion that few people share. Accordingly, I am grateful to René Westerhausen who runs the Oslo Virtual Laterality Colloquium, with monthly presentations on topics as diverse as chiral variation in snails and laterality of gesture production. On Friday we had a great presentation from Lottie...

At the weekend, the Observer ran a piece by Robin McKie entitled "‘The situation has become appalling’: fake scientific papers push research credibility to crisis point". I was one of those interviewed for the article, describing my concerns about a flood of dodgy papers that was polluting the scientific literature. Two days later I received an...

Guest Post by Nick Wise A couple of months ago a professor received the following email, which they forwarded to me. "Dear esteemed colleagues, We are delighted to extend an invitation to apply for our prestigious remote research fellowships at the University of Religions and Denominations (URD). These fellowships offer substantial financial...

In my last blogpost, I looked at a study that claimed continuing improvements of symptoms of autism after eight 5-minute sessions where a low-level laser was pointed at the head. The data were so extreme that I became interested in the company, Erchonia, who sponsored the study and in Regulatory Insight, Inc, whose statistician failed to notice...

'Light enters, then a miracle happens, and good things come out!' (Quirk & Whelan, 2011*) I'm occasionally asked to investigate weird interventions for children's neurodevelopmental conditions, and recently I've found myself immersed in the world of low-level laser treatments. The material I've dug up is not new - it's been around for some...

Since I retired, an increasing amount of my time has been taken up with investigating scientific fraud. In recent months, I've become convinced of two things: first, fraud is a far more serious problem than most scientists recognise, and second, we cannot continue to leave the task of tackling it to volunteer sleuths. If you ask a typical...

I was recently contacted with what I thought was a simple request: could I check the Oxford University Gazette to confirm that a person, X, had undergone an oral examination (viva) for a doctorate a few years ago. The request came indirectly from a third party, Y, via a colleague who knew that on the one hand I was interested in scientific fraud,...