Springer Nature, the stalwart publisher of scientific journals including the prestigious Nature as well as the nearly 200-year-old magazine Scientific American, is approaching the authors of papers in its journals with AI-generated "Media Kits" to summarize and promote their research.
The authors of a 2006 paper have retracted their article following an extensive correction in January, 2025. "Death-receptor activation halts clathrin-dependent endocytosis", published in July 2006 in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). Most of the authors were affiliated with the biotech company Genentech. Commenters on PubPeer raised issues about possible image duplications, spurring the authors to review the work. The January correction addressed about two dozen instances of image splicing and duplication in five of the paper’s figures.
For decades, the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) has failed to prioritize and fund research on women’s health, says a report released today by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM). It calls for nearly $16 billion in new funding and the creation of a new NIH institute to fix the problem.
Read more: NIH needs a new institute for women’s health research, expert panel says
An article by Genentech scientists received an extensive correction in January, 2025 for multiple instances of image duplications after comments on PubPeer spurred the authors to review the work. The article, "Death-receptor activation halts clathrin-dependent endocytosis", appeared in July 2006 in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, with a correction issued that September.
Read more: Exclusive: Extensive correction to Genentech PNAS article will get an update
In March, Omar, a biomedical researcher, posted a request in a private Facebook group for researchers. He was seeking to have his name added to a paper in the field of artificial intelligence (AI) and medicine, in exchange for a payment. To be promoted, he needed to publish at least ten more papers, in journals in the top half of those ranked by the Web of Science, a citation index. And to meet this demanding requirement, he’d turned to paper mills.
Read more: Authorship for sale: Nature investigates how paper mills work
In April, 2025 a site called Science Guardians, an "online journal club" with remarkable similarities – but also key differences – to PubPeer, launched what it called an "investigation" into PubPeer. Since then the anonymous account has posted numerous posts on X critiquing PubPeer while promising to reveal the "perpetrators of the PubPeer Network Mob".
When Rene Aquarius began a review of potential stroke treatments last year, he was shocked. His initial search of the literature on drug candidates for treating hemorrhagic stroke found some 600 studies when he expected only 50 to 60—a first red flag. On further investigation, his team discovered that many of those papers were riddled with fishy data and questionable images, such as duplicated lanes within Western blots. His plan for a systematic review—considered the gold standard method to synthesize multiple studies on a topic and extract a broader conclusion—was in jeopardy.
Read more: ‘Systematic reviews’ that aim to extract broad conclusions from many studies are in peril
The cybersecurity refrain when encountering phishing emails invariably advises: "don't click on that link" and "report that email"—but new research from Drexel University and Arizona State University has revealed a problematic reality: Most major companies do little to support reporting and few take action to shut down phishing sites disguised as their own after they have been reported.
Liping Zhang, a former assistant professor in the school’s nephrology section, “engaged in research misconduct in research supported by U.S. Public Health Service (PHS) funds,” according to a notice published in the Federal Register on March 19, 2025.
Read more: Kidney researcher debarred from federal U.S. funding for image manipulation