(27 Dec 2022) From Retraction Watch: “On several occasions this year, publishers announced they were retracting several times that number, all at once. (For some of the stories among 2022’s retractions that captured the most attention, see our 10th annual roundup for The Scientist.) This year’s 4,600-plus retractions bring the total in the Retraction…
(2 Dec 2022) Publishers are testing prototypes of automatic systems to flag submitted manuscripts bearing the hallmarks of paper mills — businesses that produce fake research papers. The tools, which will eventually form part of an online integrity hub, are the result of a year-long collaboration between 24 publishers and scholarly analytics providers. Together, the companies…
(31 Oct 2022) Open Science, as a movement, evolved, grew, and now shapes the future through a variety of projects, initiates, organizations, and services. Consequently, on one hand, Open Science offerings to users grow in number, like the exponential growth of scholarly works. On the other hand, new and even more experienced users of Open Science…
(21 Nov 2022) The phenomenon of predatory publishing is well known following the work of Jeffrey Beall and others in highlighting and popularising the issue. In a new book titled The Predator Effect, Simon Linacre draws on his experience in tackling deceptive publishing practices, and urges the scholarly communications industry to focus, less on predatory…
(8 Nov 2022) The publishing giant Elsevier is withdrawing around 500 fake conference papers from one of its materials science journals, Retraction Watch reports. Many of the manuscripts published in Materials Today: Proceedings are off-topic, incomprehensible to the point of nonsense or seem to have been written by software. They all seem to have come from conferences that never happened,…
(27 Oct 2022) Despite rules brought in two years ago to reduce publishing pressure on postgraduate students in China, severe pressure on research students continues to distort the research environment in the country, a new study has found. A recently published paper by Hugo Horta, associate professor in the faculty of education at the…
(21 Oct 2022) Preparing to publish a research output can be daunting, especially if it is for the first time. It is not always easy to identify a trusted publisher! Think.Check.Submit provides researchers with the tools they need to decide which publishing venue is the most appropriate for their work. Think.Check.Submit. encourages researchers to…
(20 Oct 2022) Clarivate, a global leader in providing trusted information and insights to accelerate the pace of innovation, today released an in-depth look at formal regional research assessment, co-authored by the Institute for Scientific Information at Clarivate, together with esteemed industry partners: Kate Williams, University of Melbourne; Jonathan Grant, Different Angles; Lutz Bornmann, Max Planck Institute and Martin Szomszor,…
(14 Oct 2022) Researchers worldwide will need further assistance to help comply with an increasing number of open data mandates, according to the authors of a new report. The State of Open Data Report 2022 – the latest in an annual collaborative series from Digital Science, Figshare and Springer Nature – is released today (9:00am BST Thursday 13 October). Based on a…
A Nobel prizewinner is six times more likely than someone less well known to get a thumbs-up for acceptance, finds study. (11 Oct 2022) As a journal editor, Palan wanted to check on the impact of double-anonymized review in his journal. He approached Nobel prizewinner Vernon Smith to see whether he had a paper in the…