Research commissioner appears to cite discredited study in AI speech
https://sciencebusiness.net/news/ai/research-commissioner-appears-cite-discredited-study-ai-speech
The EU’s research commissioner appears to have cited a widely discredited and possibly fabricated study in a speech extolling the benefits of AI in science...
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Identifying common patterns in journals that retracted papers from paper mills: a cross-sectional study
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1186/s41073-025-00177-9
This study suggests that paper mill retractions are concentrated in a small number of journals with common characteristics: high open access rates, intermediate impact factor quartiles, a high volume of citable items, and classification in medicine and health categories. Short editorial times may indicate a higher presence of paper mill publications, but more research is needed to examine this factor in depth, as well as the possible influence of acceptance rates...
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Is science retracting enough papers?
https://conexiant.com/internal-medi...old-yet-represent-fraction-of-flawed-research
As paper mills and fraud proliferate, experts warn the retraction rate should reach 2% of published literature—ten times current levels. [...] Scientific retractions have increased approximately 10-fold over the past two decades [...] Despite this dramatic increase, Dr. Oransky argued that retraction rates remain inadequate. [...] Misconduct now accounts for two-thirds of all retractions, a shift driven largely by increased detection rather than necessarily higher rates of fraud...
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“The system is not designed for replications”
https://www.uni-muenster.de/news/view.php?cmdid=15006
The verification of research results by means of replication studies is decisive for safeguarding the reliability of science. However, such replication studies have not so far attracted a great deal of attention from researchers. The Münster Center for Open Science (MüCOS) aims to remedy this and has therefore started up a series of scientific publications entitled “Replication Research”. In this interview with Linus Peikenkamp, psychologist Dr. Lukas Röseler, the Managing Director of MüCOS, explains why replications are indispensable for preserving quality in science and what the role of the new publication is...
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eLife’s New Model: Changing the way you share your research
https://elifesciences.org/inside-el...odel-changing-the-way-you-share-your-research
From next year, eLife is eliminating accept/reject decisions after peer review, instead focusing on public reviews and assessments of preprints...
Scientific publishing without gatekeeping: an empirical investigation of eLife’s new peer review process
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11192-025-05422-y
ABSTRACT: At the end of January 2023, eLife introduced a new publishing model (alongside the old-traditional-publishing model): all manuscripts submitted as preprints are peer-reviewed and published if they are deemed worthy of review by the editorial team (“editorial triage”). The model abandons the gatekeeping function and retains the previous “consultative approach to peer review”.
Even under the changed conditions, the question of the quality of judgements in the peer review process remains. In this study, the reviewers’ ratings of manuscripts submitted to eLife were examined in terms of both descriptive comparisons of peer review models, and the following selected quality criteria of peer review: interrater agreement and interrater reliability.
eLife provided us with the data on all manuscripts submitted in 2023 according to the new publishing model (group 3, N = 3,846), as well as manuscripts submitted according to the old publishing model (group 1: N = 6,592 submissions from 2019; group 2: N = 364 submissions from 2023). The interrater agreement and interrater reliability for the criteria “significance of findings” and “strength of support” were similarly low, as previous empirical studies for gatekeeping journals have shown.
The fairness of peer review is not or only slightly compromised. We used the empirical results of our study to recommend several improvements to the new publishing model introduced by eLife as for example, increasing transparency, masking author identity or increasing the number of expert reviewers...
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