Open as Antidote – addressing the big challenges facing science

This course, called Open as Antidote – addressing the big challenges facing science, was part of the 2026 FORCE11 Scholarly Communication Institute which ran with the theme of ‘FSCI2026: Critical Thinking and evolving open scholarship in the era of AI’

These blog posts are a series of ‘explainer’ pre-reading to start participants thinking about the issues the course considered in relation to the general decline of scholarly publishing. The blog posts in this series considered the problem of questionable research practices, the mechanisms to manage these through corrections and retractions, the problem of university rankings and the uneasy nexus between Open and AI. They finish with some suggestions of where we go from here.

How big is the mess really?

Originally written 28 July 2026.

The many guises of 'authorship'

Contrary to the nomenclature, ‘authorship’ of a research article does not actually mean that all listed authors actually wrote the article, rather it is a list of people who made a contribution to the work. That said, the term does have a very specific meaning, set down in 1988 by the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors which lists four criteria for authorship including a substantial contribution, drafting and reviewing, final approval and agreement to be accountable for the content. That last criteria refers to the understanding that credit in research goes hand in hand with responsibility.

Attributing ‘authorship’ correctly can be complex, leading to guides such as this one from the Committee on Publication Ethics. The Australian Code for the Responsible Conduct of Research notes in its guide for authorship that it must be an honest reflection of contribution to research, assigned fairly, and consistently with established disciplinary practice and communicated clearly and transparently between contributors to the research. The guide also specifically states that authorship should not be ‘gift’ or ‘guest’ authorship.

Gift or guest authorship is where a person is listed as an author without having made any substantive contribution to the work. This can manifest in multiple ways. A 2023 study surveyed over 1300 European PhD students across multiple countries and disciplines. A significant proportion (approximately three in 10) reported that they had granted at least one guest authorship to “a person in power”. Of those people who had granted guest authorship, half had been told to do so by the person involved. The understanding of what constituted authorship appeared to vary across the students. In the same year, a study of Australian early career researchers identified dissatisfaction, bullying and ‘questionable research practices’. One of the practices described was pressure to include or exclude authors on papers.

A different mechanism for institutions to increase the number of papers they can claim is the practice of ‘multi-affiliation’. A 2023 paper noting this is a growing problem for scientific integrity found that in some cases authors were listing 20 or 30 affiliations and called for “careful scrutiny of the actual scientific contributions made by these authors and the importance of safeguarding the integrity of scientific output and networks”. One example is a Saudi institution that was paying foreign researchers up to €70,000 a year to lie about their place of employment, in order to artificially elevate Saudi institutions in international academic rankings.

Hyper-prolific authors are another manifestation of this problem. A 2018 study considered authors who has published more than 72 papers in any one calendar year between 2000 and 2016. After eliminating physics authors (physics papers often include upwards of 1000 members and famously in one case had over 5000 authors), the researchers were able to identify a distinct pattern of increased number of people who were publishing at this high rate over time. The paper suggests “loose definitions of authorship, and an unfortunate tendency to reduce assessments to counting papers, muddy how credit is assigned” with authorship. This may be a generous take on the situation. A 2023 article talked about a Spanish researcher publishing a paper every second day – many outside his area of speciality. The volume is so high “he doesn’t have time to read them” prior to submission.

Given authorship on a paper is used to measure success or contribution for promotion there is incentive to have one’s name on as many papers as possible. This opens up a commercial market. The idea of authorship for sale is not new. Indeed, in August 2023, Retraction Watch reported on the publisher Frontiers retracting nearly 40 papers across multiple journals linked to “the unethical practice of buying or selling authorship on research papers”, reported in a press release on the company site.

Sometimes simply having a publishing association with people who have been suspected of buying or selling authorship can be problematic for authors. One example is an Australian author was involved in retractions of papers that had been coauthored with international authors who had been identified as advertising authorship for sale. In these cases, the papers had added several authors “post-acceptance with claims of their significant contribution to the research”. In some cases this makes financial sense – if the recompensation for a paper by an institution is higher than the cost of buying the authorship, for example.

A different issue is to give a paper credibility by using the name of a prominent author in the author list without them knowing. This issue can cause problems for the unsuspecting researcher because fraudulent works can automatically be added to a researcher’s profile, which could damage a researcher’s career if not corrected. A different twist on problematic authorship is the invention of a fictional author at a prestigious university to increase the chances of a paper being accepted.

Citations

While authorship of publications is the central currency of most research assessment, citations of an author’s work add in to other metrics, such as an author’s ‘h-index’. Journals also benefit from citations in terms of their Journal Impact Factor. University rankings also consider issues such as citations. Citations therefore have ‘value’ to authors, journals and universities and there are multiple ways these can be manipulated.

Citation cartels are becoming more prevalent, for example citation cartels in medical and dental journals where journals agreed to cite each other's publications to boost their own impact factors. The problems with this practice include the distortion of the impact factors of participating journals and undermining the integrity of the scientific process. Within the research community there are examples of citation manipulation. For example groups of mathematicians at institutions in China, Saudi Arabia, and elsewhere have been artificially boosting their colleagues’ citation counts by churning out low-quality papers that repeatedly reference their work. This means their universities apparently produce a greater number of highly cited maths papers each year than universities with a strong track record in the field.

Like the authorship issue, there is a market in citations. One study found a company that was offering 50 citations for USD300 or 100 citations for USD500. A particularly famous example of this is Larry the cat who was created in response to an advertisement from a paper mill offering to boost the buyer’s citation count and h-index. The issue of coercive citation requests has been identified as an underexplored area of concern amongst journal authors, reviewer and editors.

Citations have also been inserted into the metadata about a work. This technique was uncovered when a computer scientist noted a large discrepancy between the citations in Google Scholar and Altmetrics. The former text mines PDFs, but Altmetrics uses CrossRef, a repository for unique identifiers for scholarly metadata. The references are inserted at some point into metadata files that are submitted to CrossRef and automatically ingested (metadata files can be submitted anytime after an article is published).

It should be noted that citation manipulation can backfire, with journals losing their impact factor for suspected citation manipulation. In 2024 seventeen journals lost their impact factor, and in 2025 twenty journals were affected.

Journals are not immune

Identify fraud can extend beyond people. In 2024 the Liverpool University Press write in two blogs about an issue they were managing where their website had been duplicated in something called ‘brandjacking’. The duplicate site offers authors the opportunity to rapidly publish their research online for a fee. The press published both a description of the challenge they were facing as well as sharing their investigations and work they had to do to counter this. Another manifestation of this issue is a journal ‘impersonation’. From June 2025, the Cambridge Law Journal has had to indicate on their website that they do not work with a list of organisations and that: “Anyone contacted by the following organisations claiming that they offer publication in CLJ should be aware that we do not work with these companies”.

An alternate approach is to purchase a small legitimate journal from a reputable publisher and then turn it into a predatory, low-quality publication. A news report last year identified 36 journal titles where this had occurred. After the acquisition, the journals introduce or raise article processing charges and publish a much higher number of papers. These journals have been delisted from indexing databases such as Scopus and Web of Science which is likely one of the attractors to the buyers and publishing authors in the first place.

Anything else?

The above does not paint a very positive picture. It does not even encompass the full gamut of what is described as ‘questionable research practices’. Consider the proliferation of fake peer reviews – in one instance in 2017 Springer retracted 107 papers from a single journal because they had been accepted with fake peer reviews.

It is not surprising that we are seeing headlines like There’s far more scientific fraud than anyone wants to admit (August 2023), Why research fraud is getting worse (November 2023) and Why scientific fraud is suddenly everywhere (May 2024).

How does the scholarly system 'self correct'?

Originally written 28 July 2026.

What happens if something gets published by mistake? Is there a process to manage this? Yes

A core practice of publication is the management of debate and correction after publication. If the paper contains flaws that need to be addressed there is a process described by the Council of Publication Ethics for Expressions of Concern to be raised and the work can be corrected. If the concerns are serious the paper might need to be retracted. This process is considered to be an “important element of the foundation of trust that distinguishes scholarly communications from other publication genres”.

Over the past few years, retractions have been on the increase. In December 2023 Nature reported that more than 10,000 research papers were retracted in that year. This was a record, noting that in that case the bulk of the retractions related to journals owned by the disgraced publisher Hindawi.

The following year a news report asked why biomedical paper retractions have quadrupled in 20 years. Concerningly two thirds of the papers uncovered in the study being reported were withdrawn for reasons related to research misconduct. The study observed an increase in prevalence in Europe over the 20 years studied, with a possible reason for this that detection tools are becoming more effective. Regardless, the length of time the study covered does indicate this is not a new problem.

But what actually happens if a paper is retracted? Unfortunately, in many cases a retracted paper remains in circulation in some form. For example, one study considered 441 retracted papers in public health that had 2841 records across all distributors. The study found that less than 5% of publications were identified as retracted through all the resources they were available and that no retraction notices met all the criteria for a retraction. This means the majority of these retracted papers remain ‘in the wild’ and retracted papers continue to be cited.

Once cited, retracted papers perpetuate the problem. A study by a company that provides technology solutions for research integrity found that in the second quarter of 2025 9,445 articles contained references to retracted papers, stating the industry average retraction citation rate was 1.34%. There are also challenges with the period of time between publication and retraction, and delayed retractions enable flawed findings to distort secondary research. This means that the methodological or ethical flaws of these papers remain in the system. Equally journalists who report on research findings are also susceptible, with news coverage of retracted research focusing predominantly on high interest topics like COVID19, gender identity and controversial scientific claims.

Retractions are now such a problem that in some cases funding bodies are starting to crack down. One example is applicants to the Indian Anusandhan National Research Foundation (ANRF) Advanced Research Grants who will be obliged to disclose any retractions in the past five years and the reasons why these journal papers were removed from publication.

This lack of consistency on how to manage these issues has resulted in a Recommended Practice on the communication of retractions, removals, and expressions of concern from NISO. An article about the Recommended Practice notes: “Consistent practice across the community is key to ensuring that retracted research is no longer shared and relied upon in research”. Some recommendations are obvious – including adding the word ‘RETRACTED’ to the title of the paper in all versions. But others point to the complexity, including the need to contact all other versions of the work such as preprints and versions in institutional repositories to inform them of the retraction status.

In all this is an expensive process - opening up questions about who pays.

Who pays?

In 2024 the Scholarly Kitchen asked ‘Should Publishers Invoice Authors for Retraction Costs?’, arguing that “retractions represent a significant loss of time and effort invested by both researchers and peer reviewers”. The piece explores the accountability of different players in the publishing process and asks whether we could devise a system to hold all parties financially accountable.

At least one publisher has considered this issue, with the Institute of Physics pledging to donate authors fees from retracted papers to a publishing charity, Research4Life. The reasoning is that the publisher cannot refund the money in the instance the paper was retracted because it was from a papermill. They note that the article processing charges of retracted papers should not be kept by publishers because this would hinder incentives to correct the record.

Why does this matter?

We are living in an environment where trust in research and facts is under pressure. A 2025 event noted that research is facing major integrity challenges, with some of the prevailing incentives in the sector presenting “a global systemic problem that requires a global systemic solution”. Research misconduct cases are increasing, with integrity sleuths uncovering instances of questionable research practices such as data manipulation. This is not restricted to smaller institutions, high profile researchers such as senior Harvard cancer researchers have been caught out. In 2023 the president of Stanford University, Marc Tessier-Lavigne, resigned after an investigation found several of the papers he had authored contained manipulated data.

There have been attempts to address these questions of integrity with many countries establishing national offices including Canada, Japan, China and the UK. In Australia there have long been calls to also establish a national body to address research integrity, but to date, responsibility for the management of research integrity issues have remined in-house, with institutions required to appoint research integrity advisors and carry out investigations themselves. This approach has multiple challenges, not least the conflict of interest of an institution being responsible for managing an issue that could be reputationally problematic. For example, increased reporting of publication misconducts by an institution is associated with lower Trust Scores in the research institution involved.

The effectiveness of research integrity roles in institutions is under question. In almost two thirds of the 99 Australian institutions considered in one study had no information about their research integrity advisors on their websites, and shockingly ‘some [research integrity advisors] only realised they had been appointed advisors when they were contacted by the census team’.

In summary, while there is a formal process for scholarly publishing to ‘self-correct’, in practice this is not working as intended. There is a lot of work to be done.

Why is this all happening? The university rankings effect.

Originally written by 29 July 2026.

This blog post considers some of the reasons why we are in the situation we are.

It is reasonably straightforward to draw a causal line between questionable research practices and research assessment processes. Individuals are under pressure to publish in specific journals in order to gain promotion or grant funding. This graphic is an excellent description of the drivers for academics’ need to publish in prestigious journals. It shows the common drivers for academic and universities of grants but identifies another driver in the landscape which is highly problematic and extremely influential – university rankings.

Despite being a ‘global confidence trick’, over the past couple of decades university rankings have increased their prominence worldwide. A good book that considers the impact of university rankings is Breaking Ranks – How the Rankings Industry Rules Higher Education and What to do about it which describes the extent to which a commercial product such as the US News & World Report has on the operation and strategy of the university landscape in the US. (In an act of deliberate self-promotion, here is a link to my review of the book).

Amongst the many criticisms of university rankings is their reliance on a narrow and incomplete sets of data. Three bibliometric products dominate the research assessment space. As an example, Web of Science and InCites (both Clarivate products) and SciVal (an Elsevier product) – collectively are used for the following research assessment processes: Journal Impact Factor, Times Higher Education Rankings, QS Rankings, ARWU rankings, Excellence in Research for Australia (2023), Research Excellence Framework (2021), amongst others. But these three products don’t align well, with significant differences contributing to “drastic changes in rank positions of universities, which are most prevalent for non-English-speaking universities and those outside the top positions in international university rankings”, according to one 2020 comparison.

And it is not just differences between these databases that are problematic, it is their incomplete coverage. A study from 2025 considered the ‘long tail’ of smaller and independent publishers. The study covered the period from 1980–2021 and retrieved 32% more articles from Dimensions compared to the ‘more selective’ WoS. There was a disciplinary bias - with the Dimensions’ data including small publishers in the Social Sciences and the Arts and Humanities and picking up publications outside of English-speaking countries and/or those located in northwestern Europe. The authors noted that “the rest of the world [is] relatively independent of the oligopoly.”

This exclusion of smaller journals was also found in a substantial 2023 analysis of 25,671 journals that use Open Journal Systems as their publishing platform found that most were missing from the main commercial bibliographic databases. Between them these journals represented 5.8 million items; from 136 countries, with 79.9% in the Global South. The majority (84.2%) charge neither reader nor author, following the diamond open access model. “For all their geographic, linguistic, and disciplinary diversity, 1.2% are indexed in the Web of Science and 5.7% in Scopus”. The authors point out that “it is not that this literature is invisible, as 88% of it is found in Google Scholar due to its deliberate efforts to be globally inclusive”. They call for this to be an opportunity to decolonise knowledge distribution.

This is a serious issue for researchers outside the English speaking and northwestern Europe, with calls to rethink global indexing to include Middle East and North African (MENA) journals. This argument notes the technical (and resource hungry) barriers to inclusion in indexing platforms like Scopus or Web of Science and bemoans the privileging of English language content - a major challenge for areas such as public health or education policy where context matters.

It is this focus on such a small subset of all research globally that has surfaced arguments that university rankings entrench privilege. One example is the 2023 report from United Nations University International Institute for Global Health: World-class Universities? Interrogating the Biases and Coloniality of Global University Rankings . As the editor of The Lancet argues in an editorial “Offline: The silencing of the South”: “If we truly believe in equity, we need to resist and repudiate the current discriminatory and exclusionary system of university rankings.” University Rankings are “a system that stains the reputation of scholarship.”

These are not new sentiments. Pleas that universities should “concentrate on what matters – helping the majority of students earn credentials for sustainable living and employment, rather than ensuring that your institution matches criteria established by different rankings” appeared in a 2017 argument that most universities should quit the rankings game.

Rhodes University has taken a principled stand not to participate in university ranking systems, citing their ‘neocolonial nature’ and their ‘flawed methodologies’, joining Harvard and Yale Law Schools.

Rhodes is not alone in rejecting university rankings. Utrecht University made the deliberate decision not to submit data to the Times Higher Education World University Ranking in 2024. Their stated reason was “rankings put too much emphasis on comparison and mutual competition, while we want to focus on collaboration and Open Science”. Cheers to that.

I admit to some incredulity that the academic community, whose entire raison d’etre (in theory) is to question, test, and provide evidence to support claims, seem to have not only swallowed the fairy dust of rankings but actively changed strategy and activities to serve them. This is particularly acute writing from Australia, where the Chancellor of the University of Adelaide noted the decision to merge two universities in South Australia was because the merger “will allow us to … achieve recognition among the world’s top 100 universities on an ongoing basis”.

Perhaps the fundamental problem with university rankings (apart from the above and that their methods are not transparent, change over time and would never pass an ethics committee), is best put by the argument that there simply is no meaningful relationship between a ranking, on the one hand, and what a university is and does in comparison to others, on the other.

AI and Open – 'it's complicated'

Originally written 29 July 2026.

Something I am working on with my institution (and in Australia) is discussion around the uneasy nexus between AI and Open. Uneasy indeed, I would argue it is possible to consider AI a parasite on Open. Those are harsh words, perhaps better expressed by the Confederation of Open Access Repositories (COAR) in a report as the “Uneasy interdependence of AI and Open Science”. The report that states “open resources are the raw materials for training AI models and for their application”. The report identifies three areas of particular concern about this – lack of attribution, misinformation and aggressive bots.

This last issue relates to the need to provide large amounts of information to Large Language Models on which to train. Unless the organisation developing a tool can pay for access to paywalled material, the obvious choice of training material is open resources. This has serious implications for any infrastructure that is hosting open information.

A report on Sustaining the Commons in the AI Economy noted “AI labs bring insatiable demand for training data...bots [are] overwhelming servers and inflating costs...collections stewards have deployed [d]efensive access restrictions [that] risk undermining the openness they were designed to protect”, prompting an infrastructure manager to note that ‘the strain on infrastructure that provides the training data is considerable … which is not reimbursed by the bot owners creating the load’.

The strain on infrastructure that provides the training data is considerable and there is insufficient reciprocity. The extra cost to open infrastructure of managing bot attacks and other overwhelming use is unsustainable, particularly considering that infrastructure is often community funded. This is creating frustration for open database managers: “Our database capacity is just being ruined every time they initiate a fresh scrape and our tech team has to scramble, taking radical measures, to keep the platform up.” COAR have released a resource for repository managers on Dealing with Bots which addresses the aligned problems of overwhelming traffic from badly behaved bots alongside countermeasures adversely affecting or impeding welcome traffic.

It is not just fending off bots that are trying to access the material in repositories, there is also a problem with the supply of material to them. Preprint servers are increasing their moderation in response to AI generated content and junk science which makes it more difficult for genuine research to be published and “fundamentally goes against the spirit of open science and the commitment to advancing inclusive, rapid knowledge sharing that is at the heart of preprints’ value for both science and society”.

AI causing open to close

AI activity is also causing individuals and organisations to reconsider making work open. Because bots are routinely mining open access databases and, in some cases, analysing and combining data sets to create new results and papers there is concern in the academic community about the potential extraction of sensitive information such as patient information. Some open databases such as OpenAlex and Europe PMC are working on mediated access to their data sets.

In the UK, in response to computer hacking AI models like Mythos, the National Health Service has made the decision to make all of its source code repositories private by default “given rapid advancements in AI models capable of large-scale code ingestion, inference and reasoning”. This is an override of NHS rule that all software that has been created with public money should be publicly available.

This is affecting non-academic and research publication as well. The Internet Archive has been in operating for 30 years. Because the material it captures is made openly available and therefore can be scraped, commercial organisations like news publishers (for example The Guardian, the New York Times and others) are blocking the archive’s access to their pages. The situation is so problematic that this is causing calls that AI’s biggest casualty could be history itself. Being blocked from gathering information is not the only threat to the Wayback Machine. Players in the AI space are buying up hard drives, causing a shortage in the types of large hard drives that the Internet Archive needs to host the Wayback Machine. Apparently these drives are either out of stock or considerably more expensive.

It is not just newspaper publishers who are closing ranks. AI also opens up new markets for publishers, to on sell subscription material to the companies. Over the past few years there has been a series of publishers removing abstracts from open bibliodatabases such as OpenAlex. Springer Nature ‘s abstracts were removed in November 2022. By November 2024 Elsevier were also removing abstracts. This has resulted in a sudden collapse from approximately 80% abstract coverage to about 20-35% for two of the largest publishers. This will have a significant impact on LLM assisted search. To give an indication of how deeply this will hit, an Elsevier study released in November last year that considered the ‘Researcher of the Future’ said that researchers currently use AI tools to find and summarise the latest research (61%). Elsevier is almost working against itself by removing its own abstracts from search LLMs that are relying on open abstracts.

Any solutions?

Then on the other hand - the fact that AI is supercharging the production of paper mill papers, and overwhelming the publishing infrastructure means that research integrity needs open more than ever - the links between open research practice and research integrity are strong.

So overall we have a situation where a combination of AI use and the AI companies themselves is causing multiple problems for open and not providing many (if any) solutions. Open needs to be mainstreamed and in doing so we need to fund it properly. Imagine if we redirected the millions we spend on commercial organisations back into the open ecosystem…..

Where do we go from here?

Originally written 30 July 2026.

The course has taken a very wide perspective in considering the scholarly publishing ecosystem and the challenges it is facing, incorporating the incentives of the reward system, and the impact of artificial intelligence. A recent question posed on the Scholarly Kitchen about the use of AI in authoring papers was ‘is it right to use AI to write papers when publishing papers are used as a barometer of researcher competency, tenure and promotion?’ I would argue this is the wrong question. The more pertinent question is “Is it right that publishing papers is used as the primary assessment tool of researchers?”.

It is time to rethink this whole endeavour.

The Merton Norms of science

Considering all of the issues covered by the course, it seems to be a bleak time for the scientific enterprise. And the focus has deliberately steered away from current geopolitical activity which is a further serious and immediate threat. As bad as things appear, it can be easy to forget that this is not the first time that science has been under serious threat.

Robert Merton was a foundational figure in modern sociology, who pioneered the sociology of science, functional analysis, and criminology. He introduced many influential concepts including, the self‑fulfilling prophecy and the Matthew Effect. In 1942 he wrote an essay on “The Normative Structure of Science”. My copy of this work is published in a 1973 book The Sociology of Science edited by Norman W Storer.

In the essay Merton notes (my emphasis):

“Incipient and actual attacks upon the integrity of science have led scientists to recognize their dependence on particular types of social structure. Manifestos and pronouncements by associations of scientists are devoted to the relations of science and society. An institution under attack must re-examine its foundations, restate its objectives, seek out its rationale. Crisis invites self-appraisal. [my emphasis]

These are words that resonate strongly today. Forget ‘incipient’, there are clear actual attacks on science happening now.

In the essay Merton identifies four norms of science: Universalism, Communalism, Disinterestedness and Organized Scepticism. Between them they represent the broadly understood approach to science (and by science I mean all research) across the globe.

It is very clear these norms are under significant strain, due to a combination of the reward system both incentivising questionable research practices and generating new markets for paper mills and the like, and political interference in research funding and research focus.

Considering Universalism - “scientific validity is independent of the sociopolitical status/personal attributes of its participants” – it would be hard to argue the current environment in the US with a high level of political interference in research is not running counter to this. A couple of examples include CDC staff being prohibited from co-authoring papers with World Health Organisation personnel  and significant numbers of grants being terminated on ideological grounds.

The norm of Disinterestedness - that “scientific institutions act for the benefit of a common scientific enterprise, rather than for the personal gain of individuals within them” is not served by the gamification of publication. Publication patterns of researchers and institutions are transformed by the publication types that are included in their performance evaluation.

The threat to ban or restrict researchers’ ability to publish in particular journals and insisting they publish in an ‘in-house’ journal challenges the norm of Communalism - that “all scientists should have common ownership of scientific goods (intellectual property), to promote collective collaboration; secrecy is the opposite of this norm”

But the norm that has been under the greatest pressure for some time now is that of Organized Scepticism – that “scientific claims should be exposed to critical scrutiny before being accepted: both in methodology and institutional codes of conduct”. This is the process we now know as peer review, which began in its current form in the mid 1970s.

What has happened since?

Merton wrote his piece towards the end of World War Two. From the end of the war until the mid-1970s, the commercial model of academic publishing fitted well with the needs of an expanding international and specialised academic research base. Since then, the industry has simply continued to expand.

The increase of submissions to journals has exploded since the release of ChatGPT, with one journal experiencing a rise of 42% since late 2022. An analysis showed this was “almost entirely due to manuscripts with substantial AI-generated text …By early 2026, the majority of manuscripts submitted to Organization Science contain detectable AI-generated writing. The fastest growing category is … manuscripts where 70% or more of the text appears to be AI generated.”

The sheer volume of articles being submitted for publication is causing major disruptions to the editorial process. A study from eight years of activity in the publication management tool ScholarOne showed that while the global reviewer pool grew 54% between 2018 and 2025, the rate at which the reviewers accept invitations has fallen. According to the study: “It now takes editors an average of 4.5 invitations to secure a review, …[and] per 100 invitations sent, editors wait a combined 407 days for reviewers who ultimately say no or say nothing at all.”

Commentary abounds about the pressure peer review is currently under, such as this depressing screen grab of the editorial processes for an article before finally being withdrawn after multiple months and eight rounds of contacting reviewers without a single review being undertaken.  One editor has called for “scientists, universities, publishers, and funders … to treat peer review as the essential work that it is, not as an optional favour”.

Peer review cannot be the only line of defence

This increase in submissions appears to be accompanied by a drop in assessment. Different publishers are exponentially increasing the number of articles they are publishing but approaching the issue in different ways. Large publishers such as Elsevier and Springer Nature have increased the number of journals they publish, and distributed articles across them. Newer publishers such as MDPI and Frontiers have simply increased the number of articles published in any given journal and for these publishers “articles, regardless of initial quality or field of research, and despite the expectation of heterogeneity, are all accepted in an increasingly similar time frame”. Peer review appears to be a victim of these approaches.

The system is dysfunctional in other ways, with one author humorously noting that given they could not understand the title of the manuscript they had been sent to review that “an AI powered toaster oven would be an improvement over me”.

So what is the future of peer review? This is a live topic, itself generating more articles that themselves require peer review (!) Suggestions abound. In some cases, publishers are embracing AI in the peer review process. Springer Nature is claiming in a press release that this results in “less friction and increased author satisfaction”. The result, claim Springer Nature, is that “authors can spend more time doing research and editors and reviewers can make better and faster decisions”.

At least one editor of Neuroscience journal is not happy with these developments, resigning over concerns about automation stating “these are … intentional features, designed to essentially remove the human editors as much as possible”.

Many proposals are turning to introducing a series of quality control measures across the research process. One commentator, who argues “the scientific publishing model is facing a systemic crisis that should be addressed” proposes a ‘continuum of consensus’ as a quality control system. There appear to be more options in the market considering the question of ‘trust markers’. In May this year a group of scholarly societies in the biological and biomedical sciences announced the launch of the Trust Seal framework initiative “to provide greater confidence in publications that have adopted community-led best practices for trustworthy science”. The TrustMarc Initiative is an open effort to make trust in content visible, verifiable, and portable and is currently looking for development partners such as research organisations to help the development of the initiative.

The possibly natural end point of this would be a journal that accepts AI generated articles, peer reviews them using AI and all the editorial decisions are made by AI tools. Oh wait, it exists – it is called the Journal of AI by AI (JAAI).

If we collectively don’t really start addressing the whole scientific ecosystem, we may well all drown in a sea of AI slop.

PS: For more insight into the question of Merton’s Norms, you may wish to read: Messing with Merton: The intersection between open science practices and Mertonian values.

This is the final reading in the series for the course – thank you for staying to the end! 

Background

Every year, since 2017 the FORCE11 Scholarly Communication Institute runs a series of courses for the scholarly communication community. This started in person, went online during COVID and after a one year gathering at UCLA in 2024 is online once more.

References

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Where do we go from here?

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