got inspired by some questions from phd students the other day — and also really irritated by senior academics who seem to refuse to get the issues and continue to blame students; hope useful for you! 🩷
olivia.science/cheating
Join us at #WCRI2026 for a networking session for anyone working on #PaperMills and #GenAI on the context of #ResearchIntegrity. There'll be lightning talks, networking and probs drinks/ dinner afterwards. May 4, 6.00-7.30 pm, all welcome!
iDiv Leipzig is organizing a symposium for early career researchers from all fields interested in scientific integrity & reproducibility.
Some good stuff, e.g.: @haesleinhuepf.bsky.social on generative AI for science, @rmcelreath.bsky.social on a guerilla approach to scientific workflow.>
I tried an even harder example on Gemini Pro image generation and this is quite scary/amazing. I asked for a microscopy image of around 20 HeLa cells, GFP tagged 20% nuclear, 10% membrane, +1 nuclear staining, + overlap. Image below and prompt in the following post.
Promotional graphic for STM’s Innovation & Integrity Days Research Integrity Workshops on 9 December. The design features three workshop topics: 1) Forensic Scientometrics – Enhancing Research Integrity and Security for the Scholarly Ecosystem, 2) Communication and collaboration with Institutions, and 3) Helping your editors and reviewers understand research integrity issues. Text highlights that the workshops are new this year. Bright gradient background with STM and I&I Days branding.
Heading to Innovation & Integrity Days? Don’t miss the 9 Dec #ResearchIntegrity workshops: expert-led, interactive & focused on practical skills.
--> Forensic Scientometrics
--> Collaboration with Institutions
--> Supporting Editors & Reviewers
Join us! stm-assoc.org/events/stm-i... #STMinLondon
@hkoers.bsky.social @image-integrity.bsky.social @tonyhopedale.com @danielacuna.bsky.social
"By inventing fake scientists, paper mills can create a ready supply of publications and favourable peer reviews, ensuring more of the mills’ submissions get published [and] increase[d] credibility for paying customers" www.nature.com/articles/d41...
if you see this post, your actions are:
- if you have a spare buck, give it to Wikipedia, then repost this
- if you don't have a spare buck, just repost
your action is mandatory for the world's best source of information to survive
The new landing page for COSIG, available at cosig.net. It reads: Anyone can do post-publication peer review. Anyone can be a steward of the scientific literature. Anyone can do forensic metascience. Anyone can sleuth. However, investigating the integrity of the published scientific literature often requires domain-specific knowledge that not everyone will have. This open source project is a collection of guides written and maintained by publication integrity experts to distribute this domain-specific knowledge so that others can participate in post-publication peer review. COSIG currently hosts 31 guides and was last updated on 25 September 2025. Guides can be downloaded as individual PDFs. A combined PDF with all guides included can be downloaded here.
COSIG has a new landing page! Check it out at cosig.net.
(Files for COSIG are still hosted on OSF!)
Can we measure trust in scientific publications?, via @lseimpactblog.bsky.social
blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsoci...
#AcademicPublishing #Expertise #OpenResearch
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...
A paper that combines #peerreview & cheese... what could be better? Answer: writing said paper with @abalkina.bsky.social @image-integrity.bsky.social & Marie Souliere. Read on to learn how the Swiss Cheese Model could help peer review & #researchintegrity onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...
Annual global scientific activity captured by WoS as measured by the number of actively publishing journals, the number of journals deindexed annually by WoS, the number of journals with retractions, the number of journals with PubPeer comments, and the number of journals with suspected paper mill products. It is visually apparent that deindexing now occurs at a level far below the level of occurrence of journals publishing suspected paper mill products. These patterns hold for Scopus and MEDLINE. R.A.K. Richardson, S.S. Hong, J.A. Byrne, T. Stoeger, & L.A.N. Amaral, The entities enabling scientific fraud at scale are large, resilient, and growing rapidly, Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 122 (32) e2420092122, https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2420092122 (2025).
A powerful new study, Richardson et al. @pnas.org reveals the scale of systematic research fraud: fake papers are doubling every 1.5 years - ten times faster than real science! Retractions and deindexing can't keep up: 📄 doi.org/10.1073/pnas... #ResearchFraud #Integrity #PaperMills #AcademicEthics
Reese and colleagues are doing incredibly important work to identify large scale credibility challenges for the research literature. The latest report is disquieting.
Today, our article "The entities enabling scientific fraud at scale are large, resilient, and growing rapidly" is finally published in PNAS. I hope that it proves to be a wake-up-call for the whole scientific community.
reeserichardson.blog/2025/08/04/a...
hot off the press: huge infestation of crooked editors involved on paper mills unmasked. www.pnas.org/doi/abs/10.1...
Once upon a time, two science journalists had an idea for a blog about retractions. And on Aug. 3, 2010, Retraction Watch launched.
And now, 15 years and 6,700 posts later, that work seems more important than ever.
Happy 15th anniversary, Retraction Watch.
La haine et véhémence de mes harceleurs (qui prouvent malgré le point exact de l'article) est l'un des premiers moteurs de:
- ma motivation à ne pas flancher face à la mauvaise science
- mais aussi de la réussite de cet article (nature.com/articles/d41...) 🤣
Changez rien :)
Screenshot aus dem im Post verlinkten Artikel. Darauf zu sehen: Überschrift "Kommerzialisierung wissenschaftlichen Fehlverhaltens und die Herausforderung von Paper Mills in der Forschung", darfunter Autorinnenzeile "Von Anna Abalkina & Jana Christopher, Berlin", wiederum darunter Vorspann mit dem Text: "Paper Mills produzieren in großer Zahl gefälschte Forschungsarbeiten – oft unterstützt durch KI. Wie groß ist das Ausmaß dieser Schattenindustrie? Welche Spuren hinterlässt sie im wissenschaftlichen System? Und welche Gegenstrategien braucht es, um ihre Methoden zu erkennen und sie zu stoppen?" Angeschnitten dann die ersten Sätze des Artikeltexts. Auf der rechten Seite ein KI-generiertes Aufmacherfoto von vielen Papierlappen, die zum Trocknen in langer Reihe von der Decke hängen.
#PaperMills fälschen in großer Zahl Forschungsarbeiten. Wie sehr schadet diese Schattenindustrie dem #Wissenschaftssystem? Wie kann man ihre Methoden erkennen und sie stoppen? – Thema eines Essays von @abalkina.bsky.social und @image-integrity.bsky.social: www.laborjournal.de/rubric/essay...
Interesting look at the enormity of the paper mill problem, via @abalkina.bsky.social @image-integrity.bsky.social www.laborjournal.de/rubric/essay...
Jana Christofer and I wrote a piece on #papermills for Laborjournal. We discuss challenges of paper mills and AI for scientific publishing. Science needs immediate solutions to correct it and prevent it from massively produced fraud.
@image-integrity.bsky.social
www.laborjournal.de/rubric/essay...
This piece nicely summarizes the situation and features thoughts from @elisabethbik.bsky.social, @mumumouse2.bsky.social, @davidsanderssci.bsky.social, @image-integrity.bsky.social and myself.
Great piece from Renee Hoch and Joanna Clarke. „It is likely not a coincidence that in the genAI era publishers are seeing an increase in large-scale publication ethics issues, including peer review integrity rings, authorship integrity issues and paper mills“
Surely no real Journal would have you submit to a gmail address ?! 🤥
Amazing talk this morning by Hub Zwart ‘Trust in science in an era of social fragmentation’ @EMBLEvents #SciSoc2025
The great Prof Csaba Szabo speaking now about the reproducibility crisis #SciSoc2025
Good morning! Looking forward to two days at EMBL, starting today: EMBL Science and Society Conference: In science we trust?
@EMBLEvents #SciSoc2025
@cosig.net coverage in Nature news!
Collection of Open Science Integrity Guides
Anyone can do post-publication peer review.
Anyone can be a steward of the scientific literature.
www.nature.com/articles/d41...
A group of research-integrity experts has launched a toolkit for researchers that outlines how to spot suspicious scientific papers.
https://go.nature.com/43U32fj
COSIG logo: COSIG (Collection of Open Science Integrity Guides) Now available at cosig.net!
Anyone can do post-publication peer review.
Anyone can be a steward of the scientific literature.
Anyone can do forensic metascience.
Anyone can sleuth.
That's why we are launching COSIG: the Collection of Open Science Integrity Guides, an open source resource for all of the above.
cosig.net
