Scholarly Publishing

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.

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.

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in 366 IEEE conference proceedings to publication offers advertised on social media, and Science reports that 66 have been retracted so far.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.

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.

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.

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.