Weekend reads: Institute defends Nobel Prize winner; Stanford ex-president tries to refute fraud allegations; cardiologist’s ‘monstrous’ conflict of interest

If your week flew by — we know ours did — catch up here with what you might have missed. The week at Retraction Watch featured: - Editors of economics journal resign after Elsevier doesn’t renew EIC’s contract - Guest post: The uncomfortable truth an explosion of papers reveals about authors’ access to data - Elsevier to ‘soon investigate’ two Macchiarini papers more than a year after retraction request - Japan institute defends Nobel Prize winner amid allegations of image duplication - University press removes book about intelligent design for misquoting ID proponent In case you missed the news, the Hijacked Journal Checker now has more than 450 entries. The Retraction Watch Database has over 66,000 retractions. Our list of COVID-19 retractions is approaching 700, and our mass resignations list has more than 50 entries. We keep tabs on all this and more. If you value this work, please consider showing your support with a tax-deductible donation. Every dollar counts. Here’s what was happening elsewhere (some of these items may be paywalled, metered access, or require free registration to read): - “Former Stanford president releases emails to rebut fraud and cover-up allegations in new book.” - “A ‘monstrous’ conflict of interest”: Cardiologist involved in creating guidelines for drug profited from “lucrative contracts” with its maker. - “His Research on Pregnant Opioid Users Was Widely Celebrated. Auditors and Experts Found Major Flaws.” - “How the fraudulent Radboud researcher’s own journal uncovered his problematic publications.” A link to our coverage of the retractions. - “Staggering 90% of biomedical papers now show signs of AI help,” preprint finds. - After experiment, philosophy journal “Decides to Prohibit AI-Authored Content.” - “Researchers presented 6000 papers at a major meeting. Could AI reproduce their findings?” - “Peer-Unreviewed: When the Thread Replaces the Paper.” - Seven medical experts “sanctioned for review misconduct” in China. - “When misconduct disappears into university bureaucracy.” - “New tools help detect fraudulent images in scientific papers.” - “When Scholarship Goes Off Course”: A video Q&A with our cofounders. - A “rocky path to publication” for two dueling papers on lymphatic tubes in bone tissue. - “Adjusted for inflation, annual spending [on APCs] quadrupled from $0.9 billion in 2019 to $3.7 billion in 2025, with >85% concentrated among a few large publishers.” - “South Africa’s scientists must register with official body or risk prison, according to draft law.” - “Why retractions alone do not protect India’s scientific record.” - “After Nolan Interview Fame, Chinese Scholar Accused of Plagiarism.” - “Paper mill or paper mine? A tentative answer to the sharp increase in research papers based on the Global Burden of Disease database.” - Retractions of psychiatry and psychology papers indexed in Web of Science are due to scientific misconduct more than half the time, researchers say. - “Sleuth identifies dozens of studies that used the wrong antibody.” And: “At least 15 companies are selling antibodies using faked validation data.” - “Comments on OMB research rule mysteriously removed from federal website.” - “Western Men Still Dominate Journal Editorial Boards.” - “When misconduct moves on: Universities need a fair way to share serious misconduct findings across institutions.” Last year, our cofounders suggested universities make misconduct reports public. - Court upholds $776,000 judgment for “negligence, defamation and intentional infliction of emotional distress against a professor who repeatedly and falsely accused a former student of scientific misconduct.” - “Disclosure is not documentation: an open science framework for documenting generative AI use in scholarly research and publication workflows.” - “What if publication bias isn’t that? At least not always?” - Wiley’s director of research integrity operations has moved to the Association for Computing Machinery, where she will be the first director of research integrity. - Researcher Rebecca Sear, who has long critiqued the ‘fundamentally flawed’ database linking IQ and nationality, says its most recent version is “not fit for purpose.” - “Professors Were Singled Out for Using AI in Public Writing. Now They’re Defending Themselves.” - “Can AI Judge Study Quality? Researchers Weigh In.” - Researchers say “a cultural evolution is needed to move from ideals we celebrate” — reproducibility, transparency and open science — to implementing them. - “When AI writes the words, who is the author?” - In scientific publishing, shutting down a paper mill would be considered good news. In the original paper mill industry, it’s the opposite. Like Retraction Watch? You can make a tax-deductible contribution to support our work, follow us on X or Bluesky, like us on Facebook, follow us on LinkedIn, add us to your RSS reader, or subscribe to our daily digest. If you find a retraction that’s not in our database, you can let us know here. For comments or feedback, email us at [email protected].