Defence against the dark arts: a proposal for a new MSc course

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...