Scholarly Publishing

Article processing charges dominate every conversation about open access uptake, and a Q1 study of twenty humanities and social sciences professors at Canada's research-intensive universities confirms they are the most frequently named obstacle. The more useful finding is what sits behind them. Four of the five barriers the study identifies are not prices at all: tenure criteria that reward paywalled prestige, researchers whose methods never generate grant money to publish from, time lost to caring and service loads, and institutions that mandate open access without resourcing it. A waiver removes a fee. It does not move any of those.

A Nature Human Behaviour study classified 194,631 cross-sectional social science articles and found causal language in 46.3% of titles and abstracts, rising from about 20% in 2000 to over 60% by 2024, and more common in higher-impact journals than lower ones. Two experiments then tested what that language does. Readers given an abstract rewritten to remove every causal claim still used causal language in 49.6% of their own summaries. Five language models overclaimed more than the abstracts they were summarising under ordinary prompts asking for plain language or practical meaning, and only reduced it when explicitly asked to attend to methodological limits. The paper also reports the prevalence of overreach at 26.8% and at 81.8%, both correct, because the unit being counted changes.

A Scopus-wide analysis of Education journals found subscription titles, not open-access ones, dominate the top citation tiers. It complicates a claim open-access advocacy has repeated for over a decade.

A Lancet-published audit of 2.5 million biomedical papers found fabricated references rising twelvefold in two years. Named methodologists immediately flagged real limits in how the finding was produced and what it can and cannot support.

UK Research and Innovation tells assessors they will never be asked to score the individual modules of a narrative CV. That is a deliberate and defensible design choice, and it also removes the audit trail that made the case against the h-index possible in the first place. Research assessment has moved from a bad number to a judgment nobody has yet measured at scale, and the first careful measurements, presented in late 2025, are ambiguous rather than reassuring.

Persistent identifiers were built to keep the chain of citation intact, and they have done half the job: a DOI keeps the name alive, not the thing it names. When Crossref checked 7.4 million articles against the major scholarly archives, 27.64% appeared to be preserved nowhere. The failure is not evenly spread, and it concentrates on the small publishers most likely to close. That matters beyond librarianship, because the layer we routinely check when a reference looks suspicious is the name, which is the layer that persists, and a source nobody can retrieve is a source whose genuine and fabricated versions look identical from the reader's side.

In a single reviewing season, overlapping communities of AI researchers punished reviewers for using language models, permitted other reviewers to use them, and commissioned a machine to review every submission. Each venue was internally coherent, and the ICML chairs were admirably candid that their enforcement said nothing about whether the removed reviews were any good. That candour points at the real gap: peer review has become precise at identifying who produced a review and remains unable to say whether the review was worth having. A 2008 randomised trial at the BMJ, in which reviewers found an average of 2.58 of nine deliberately planted major errors, suggests the second question was going unanswered long before any machine was involved.

Elsevier's journal Ceramics International has retracted 56 papers in 2026, most of them after outside scrutiny rather than internal checks, Retraction Watch reported on 20 August. More than 50 were requested by an independent publishing-ethics adviser, and 43 of the notices cite comments on PubPeer. A scientific sleuth had flagged 80 of the papers to the publisher in April 2025, more than a year before the retractions began.

On 7 August the US short-selling firm Gotham City Research alleged image duplication across ten papers connected to Shinya Yamanaka, who shared the 2012 Nobel Prize for induced pluripotent stem cells. Kyoto University's CiRA has now responded, saying the report bundles cases of very different status into a single pattern claim, and that questioning Yamanaka's integrity on that basis is "completely unacceptable". Gotham's founder confirmed to Retraction Watch that the firm is short both companies whose share price the report targets. The evidence in a duplication claim can be assessed on its own terms; what a financial position changes is what gets selected for scrutiny and how it is framed.

New York University Press has pulled a 2025 monograph from sale and is destroying its remaining inventory because of a single quoted sentence. The interesting part is not that the quotation was wrong. It is that nobody invented it. The words started as a court brief's summary of a journal article, were adopted into a judge's ruling in italics with the note "emphasis added", and were then read as verbatim testimony and placed inside quotation marks by an author working from the ruling. Three defensible steps, no fabrication at any one of them, and a fake quotation at the end.

Elsevier's journal Ceramics International has retracted 56 papers in 2026, most of them after outside scrutiny rather than internal checks, Retraction Watch reported on 20 August. More than 50 were requested by an independent publishing-ethics adviser, and 43 of the notices cite comments on PubPeer.

The FY2027 NSF Graduate Research Fellowship solicitation, published on 25 August, removes eight subfields from Social Sciences and deletes STEM Education and Learning Research as a Major Field of Study. Political science, public policy, science policy, communications, cultural anthropology, international relations, law and social science, and all four education-research subfields are no longer eligible. Applications close between 19 and 23 October. We read both solicitations line by line and list every field that moved.

All seven editors of Games and Economic Behavior resigned by 14 August after Elsevier declined to renew editor in chief Herve Moulin's contract, gave "closer alignment with Elsevier strategic priorities" as the reason, dismissed two requests for further explanation by asserting its contractual right, and began recruiting replacements without consulting the board. Fifty-eight of the journal's 62 advisory editors have gone too. It is the eighth mass editorial resignation Retraction Watch has logged in 2026, against seven in all of 2025, and at least the ninth on that list triggered by a publisher removing or replacing editors.

A preprint posted on 11 August estimates that about 89 percent of biomedical papers published in December 2025 and archived in PubMed Central carry vocabulary signatures of large language model assistance, against 77 percent across all of 2025 and 52 percent in 2024. The signal is far stronger in discussion sections than in methods, and it measures assisted writing, not authorship, fabrication or misconduct.

Elsevier's journal Ceramics International has retracted 56 papers in 2026, most of them after outside scrutiny rather than internal checks, Retraction Watch reported on 20 August. More than 50 were requested by an independent publishing-ethics adviser, and 43 of the notices cite comments on PubPeer. A scientific sleuth had flagged 80 of the papers to the publisher in April 2025, more than a year before the retractions began.

The Journal of the New Zealand College of Clinical Psychologists removed a peer-reviewed viewpoint article roughly ten months after publishing it, after the college's council decided the piece could perpetuate harm to Maori. There is no retraction notice and the article is no longer accessible, a step publication-ethics guidance reserves for rare cases such as legal orders or serious risk to health. The removal has prompted resignations and criticism from within the field, and raises a question about what happens to the scholarly record when an article simply disappears.

Sage retracted 43 papers from the Journal of Intelligent and Fuzzy Systems in July and 34 from another former IOS Press title in August, all for peer-review manipulation. Several named authors are contesting the retractions publicly, saying they were never shown article-specific evidence. The case exposes a hard question in inherited mass retractions: batch-level suspicion is strong, but the records needed to judge each paper often sit with the previous owner.

On August 1 OpenAI said an internal version of its next model, Astra, had produced proofs on ten long-standing open problems in mathematics and theoretical computer science, for about $2,000 in compute. Within days, named mathematicians told Scientific American that two of the headline results reuse earlier published arguments without citing them, and that the release invoked a declaration on AI in mathematics while bypassing the peer review that would have caught the omission. The dispute is a useful early template for how an 'AI solved X' claim should be read.

An updated preprint by Anna Abalkina and colleagues matched 2,062 papers in 366 IEEE conference proceedings to publication offers advertised on social media, and Science reports that 66 have been retracted so far. The count rose from 1,720 in the April version without any change in method, which tells you the figure is a floor rather than an estimate. The wider point for anyone screening literature is that conference proceedings sit outside every journal-level check a researcher would normally apply.

Elsevier's International Journal of Biological Macromolecules has retracted 120 papers since June for systematic peer review manipulation in guest-edited special issues, nearly all published in 2024 and 2025 while the journal's annual output doubled. The count is the least useful figure in the story. One researcher reported 352 suspect papers to the journal and 12 have been retracted, and the papers already sit in reference lists a notice cannot reach.

JAMA Internal Medicine has declined for the third time to retract a 2000 study concluding that controlled-release oxycodone rarely caused withdrawal in osteoarthritis patients, after clinicians pointed to 2007 court records showing the sponsor, Purdue Frederick, withheld contradicting withdrawal data. The journal gave two reasons: no evidence of fabrication or falsification, and no agreement from all surviving coauthors. Both are narrower than what COPE and the ICMJE actually ask of editors, and the gap is the story.

The American Journal of Political Science published a revised AI policy for authors and reviewers on 11 August 2026. Alongside the familiar requirements, no AI authorship and disclosure of any use that shaped the research, it asks for something most journal policies do not: the degree of human oversight applied to AI output, meaning whether it was reviewed, edited, or approved before it entered the manuscript. Non disclosure is stated grounds for decline. The revision lands while COPE and four partner organisations work toward a global AI disclosure standard due at the end of 2026.

AJPS published a new AI policy on 11 August requiring authors to name every AI tool used in a manuscript, and barring reviewers from uploading manuscripts to any AI tool at all.

Clarivate confirms Heliyon will regain its Web of Science impact factor in October, two years after a quality hold and a mass self-correction of 1,197 items.