(8 Sept 2025) Earlier this year, China’s supreme court said companies selling fake or low-quality research papers should be punished. But shady middlemen there continue to offer questionable deals to journal editors across the globe in a bid to secure publications for their customers, emails obtained by Retraction Watch suggest. In the emails, sent between May and…
(26 Aug 2025) Researchers need details about journals in order to select the most appropriate venues for submitting manuscripts. While a wide variety of tools exist to provide such information, perhaps none curates in one place as many details as Cabell’s Journalytics and Predatory Reports. Cabell’s presents researchers—and the librarians who support them—with a user-friendly…
(23 Jul 2025) Open Access (OA) is often celebrated as a global success story, but behind the promise of openness lies a persistent issue: licensing and copyright confusion. Nowhere is this more apparent than in many regions of Asia, where OA adoption is accelerating, yet the legal and structural underpinnings of this openness remain fragile.…
(9 Jul 2025) The US National Institutes of Health (NIH) will introduce a cap on how much publishers can charge NIH-supported scientists to make their work publicly accessible. Scheduled to take effect in Fiscal Year 2026, the move aims to curb excessive article processing charges (APCs), promote transparency, and ensure broader public access to federally funded research. …
(28 Mar 2025) A spate of research findings offer fresh evidence in the debate about whether peer reviewers should be paid for their time and expertise — a fraught topic that has provoked discussion among researchers. This month, two journals released data from their own experiments that suggest that offering payments of around US$250 to researchers…
(1 Apr 2025) Open Journals Collective (OJC), an equitable, sustainable, community-led alternative to the big deals and transformative agreements offered by corporate academic publishers is recently launched. The OJC is a collective of libraries and university-based publishers working to change the way academic research is supported and disseminated. Drawing on more than a decade…
(11 Dec 2024) An experimental journal is paying peer reviewers the equivalent of US$150 per review in a specially developed cryptocurrency. The publication is hosted on a platform aiming to make science more open and efficient, and rewards users with a token called ResearchCoin for engaging with content. The platform, called ResearchHub, launched in 2020 and is backed…
(1 Nov 2024) NISO is pleased to announce publication of an update to the Journal Article Tag Suite Standard (1.4), ANSI/NISO Z39.96-2024. Last revised in 2019, JATS defines a suite of XML structures describing the content of journal articles using a common format that enables the exchange of that content between publishers and archives. It is…
(24 Oct 2024) Citing eLife’s unusual practice of publishing articles without accepting or rejecting them, Clarivate says it is re-evaluating the inclusion of the open-access biology journal in Web of Science, its influential database of abstracts and citations. In contrast to the other journals recently placed on hold from indexing, including Elsevier’s Science of the Total Environment, Clarivate has…
(30 Sep 2024) Web of Science, Clarivate’s influential database of abstracts and citations, has paused indexation of new content from the open-access journals Heliyon and Cureus, apparently due to concerns about the quality of their articles. Retraction Watch has gathered comments over social media on this news here.