WAME Newsletters 2020-2025 (Members only)
The WAME Newsletter offers content curated for medical journal editors and others involved in medical journal publishing. WAME Newsletters are accessible to WAME Members only. Selections from each newsletter are listed. Providing the links does not imply WAME's endorsement. Please send any suggestions for content or format to Margaret Winker.
See also WAME Newsletter Compilation for prior newsletters listed by topic. Covid-19 content is available and updated as of March 18, 2025.
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Newsletter #126, May 21, 2025: Is it OK for AI to write science papers?; Classifying AI Use in Manuscript Preparation; Editors' non-financial conflicts of interest; Regional profile of publishing; The Threat of Paper Mills; When Do Scholarly Retractions Become a Form of Censorship?; Updated COPE Flowcharts
Newsletter #125, April 21, 2025: CONSORT 2025 reporting guidelines; New COPE policy on author fees and waivers; Threat of Political Interference in Scientific Publishing; Publishers Embrace AI as Research Integrity Tool; NIH Scientific Integrity Policy cancelled; Domino Effect of Faulty Metadata; AuthorAID is now Rising Scholars
Newsletter #124, March 19, 2025: NIH to terminate hundreds of active research grants; Copyright’s Big Win in US AI Case; Guidelines on use of AI in research needed; Trying to Write a Paper with LLM Assistance; China’s supreme court calls for crack down on paper mills; bioRxiv and medRxiv form openRxiv; Will medical publishers fight Trump’s war on 'woke'?
Newsletter #123, February 10, 2025: ICMJE Guidance Notice on recent actions of US gov't; COPE Publication Integrity Week 2024 recordings; Predatory journals: what can we do to protect their prey?; Bibliodiversity; New updates to ICMJE Recommendations; UK Consultation on Copyright and AI; WithdrarXiv’ database of 14,000 retracted preprints
Newsletter #122, January 6, 2025: Act now to stop millions of research papers from disappearing; Declaration of Helsinki embraces health equity; How much content can AI legally exploit?; Trusted Identity in Academic Publishing; Scopus content policy and selection changes; Standard Terminology for Peer Review: Where Next?; Paris declaration to spearhead fight against fake science
Newsletter #121, November 12, 2024: Declaration of Helsinki adds statement on scientific integrity and research misconduct; Peer reviewers have financial conflicts, too; Reviewer experience detecting and judging human vs AI content; Are Indian higher education institutes gaming the ranking system?; Afrostructuring – Why we need an African future for African research publishing; Cross-national variations in scientific ethics; Clarivate re-evaluating the inclusion of eLife in WoS; Unveiling scientific articles from paper mills with provenance analysis; COPE's Publication Integrity Week 2024
Newsletter #120, October 6, 2024: Antitrust Lawsuit Filed Against Large Academic Publishers, Citation indexes make research more unequal, Recommendations on the Use of AI in Scholarly Communication, Can Large Language Models Provide Useful Feedback on Research Papers?, Quantifying Data Distortion in Bar Graphs in Biological Research, Hidden hydras: uncovering the massive footprint of one paper mill’s operations, Gender inequity persists among journal chief editors, 'Stealth corrections': when journals quietly fix papers, Why it’s time to banish bad-mannered reviews
Newsletter #119, September 10, 2024: The staggering death toll of scientific lies; How paper mills are undermining scientific publishing; Intellectual property and data privacy: the hidden risks of AI; A new ‘AI scientist’ can write science papers without any human input. Here’s why that’s a problem; Journal Conflict of Interest Disclosure Policies Are All Over the Map; How Africa can help to tackle global bibliometric coloniality; Swiss medical association accused of forcing publishing subsidiary into insolvency; Ethical considerations in surgical research conducted in African LMICs; ICMJE seeks new member journals in Africa and SE Asia
Newsletter #118, August 7, 2024: Taylor & Francis and Wiley sign deals for author content and data with AI companies; The Misplaced Incentives in Academic Publishing; The new EASE Interactive Checklist for Submitting Authors; COPE on retraction for inappropriate image manipulation; Uncovering ‘sneaked references’; Unethical Cancer Study Designs: Why Clinical Trials Aren't Always Best for Patients; IRBs fail to assess trials’ scientific merit, putting participants at risk; Meta-Experiment on Peer Review; Pricing framework to foster global equity in scholarly publishing; NISO recommendations for retraction metadata
Newsletter #117, July 2, 2024: At the Nature picket line, Journal hijackers still infiltrate Scopus despite its efforts, The ethics of using AI in scientific research, Associate Editors: Please Jump in the Mosh Pit, Meet the dismissive literature review, Structured peer review: pilot results from 23 Elsevier journals, Practical advice for implementing double anonymous peer review, The case for criminalizing scientific misconduct
Newsletter #116, May 28, 2024: Protecting scientific integrity in an age of generative AI; Will chatbots wreak havoc on academic publishing?; Is group authorship a better way of recognising team-based research?; How legitimate publishers allow paper mills to flourish; Consequences of research published in predatory/deceptive journals; Firms offering a fast track to publication target foreign applicants to U.S. medical residency programs; Peer review capacity not used to its full potential; Fresh incentives for reporting negative results; Publishers’ vastly different retraction times
Newsletter #115, April 22, 2024: Gates foundation says grantees must post preprints, Fast and fair desk assessment of papers, When is it ok to recycle text, Editorial input on peer review feedback, More disappearing journals, Structure peer review to make it more robust, Peer reviewer training, Putting research integrity checks where they belong, Publishing negative results is good for science
Newsletter #114, March 19, 2024: Free eLearning Program; Digital Scholarly Journals Are Poorly Preserved: A Study of 7 Million Articles; Peer Reviewer Mill and Plagiarism; Misconduct’s forgotten victims; Use of AI in Writing Scientific Review Articles; ScopusAI; The gender citation gap; Ethics is not a checkbox exercise; Up to 1 in 7 submissions to 100s of Wiley journals flagged by new paper mill tool; Endorsements of 5 reporting guidelines for biomedical research; China's Early Warning Journal List updated; Global Versus Local Science in Explaining Academic Plagiarism
Newsletter #113, February 19, 2024: Editorial freedom vs editorial misconduct; Peer review mills; More mass editor resignations; Hail the AI journal editor; Proving work wasn't written by AI; Citations for sale; Silent switching; New looks at P value significance; Oligopoly of Open Access Publishing
Newsletter #112, January 7, 2024: Generative AI in Scholarly Communications, from STM; ICMJE seeks new member journals; Some papers with misconduct findings aren't being retracted; New project to strengthen Diamond OA in Africa; Pairing preprints with articles; New editor mass resignations list; Track article impact on policy; Wiley to stop using 'Hindawi' name; Scopus no longer links to journal home page after hijacking issues
Newsletter #111, December 5, 2023: WAME AI Statement in Spanish; Worldwide AI Ethics; Correction is courageous; Indexjacking; Open peer review urgently requires evidence; persistence of eugenics in mainstream publications; The role of results in decisions to publish
Newsletter #110, October 15, 2023: The Publication Facts Label: Ascertaining a Publication’s Adherence to Scholarly Standards; Publishers, Don’t Use AI Detection Tools!; Key priorities for research on Open Peer Review; How to curb bias in manuscript assessments; What happens when a journal converts to open access?; SciELO's "Declaration in Support of Open Science with IDEIA; A call for African universities to define their research priorities; Research4Life launches a new committee to address equity for researchers in LMICs; Defining 'recklessness' in research misconduct proceedings; Women Are Underrepresented Among Authors of Retracted Publications; Signs of undeclared ChatGPT use in papers mounting; How thousands of invisible citations sneak into papers and make for fake metrics; Fake paper identification in the pool of withdrawn and rejected manuscripts
Newsletter #109, September 11, 2023: ENRIO publishes Handbook on Whistleblower Protection in Research; Scientists who don’t speak fluent English get little help from journals; Wiley journal editors resign en masse; AI can crack double blind peer review; Can Inadequate Corrections Turn Misinformation into Disinformation?; There’s far more scientific fraud than anyone wants to admit; Quality metrics in India's academia: time to revisit the rules?
Newsletter #108, August 8, 2023: COPE: Dealing with concerns about the integrity of published research; Medicine is plagued by untrustworthy clinical trials; The future of global academic publishing; Human intelligence tasks [HITs] to detect generative AI tools; The true cost of science’s language barrier for non-native English speakers; Cochrane UK to close March 2024
Newsletter #107, July 6, 2023: Africa’s journals struggle to compete on unequal playing field, Distortion of journal impact factors in the era of paper mills, PLOS employees unionize, WCRI Symposium video: Why Research Integrity matters, UK Report on Reproducibility and Research Integrity ‘Transformative’ journals get booted, Shaking up how UK universities are evaluated, Nature won't allow generative AI in images and video, Four journals won’t get new Impact Factors because of citation shenanigans, The Preprint Club
Newsletter #106, June 1, 2023: WAME revised AI Recommendations; Updated ICMJE Recommendations include AI; Guest-Edited Collections best practice from COPE; The case for free-format submissions with minimal requirements; Anonymizing peer review makes the process more just; What is the cost of peer review?; Entire board resigns over actions of academic publisher; Wiley journal editor-in-chief claims pressure to publish
Newsletter #105, April 23, 2023: WCRI's Cape Town Statement on fairness, equity and diversity in research; Geneticists should rethink how they use race and ethnicity; GPT-3 Wrote an Entire Paper on Itself. Should Publishers be Concerned?; Ten simple rules for socially responsible science; Incomplete reporting of complex interventions; Mapping Open Science Resources from Around the World by Discipline; Of Special Issues and Journal Purges
Newsletter #104, March 14, 2023: EU member states set out to reform scientific publishing; The rise of for-profit Institutional Review Boards; APC charges are heavy burden for Middle Income Countries; Authorship disputes: advice from the US NIH; PKP's OJS: 1.46m articles published by 34,071 active journals; Special issues, deceptive guest editors, and paper mills; Coercive citations; Article retracted when authors don’t pay publication fee
Newsletter #103, February 6, 2023: Journals ban ChatGPT; What can AI do for us?; Unearned authorship pervades science; Who are the whistleblowers?; “Gender inequality and self-publication are common among academic editors; The Preprint Club; Why Persistent Identifiers Are Having A Moment; Proposed Biosecurity Oversight Framework For The Future of Science
Newsletter #102, January 9, 2023: Detecting ChatGPT, AI and paper mill content; Peer Review Congress videos; Who is Responsible for Research Fraud?; Transparency Replications Project; Transparency tool to measure clinical trial diversity; Is my study useless? Why researchers need methodological review boards
Newsletter #101, November 26, 2022: Publisher refuses journal's request to retract; Retraction doesn’t mean “make it go away"; Does scholarly publishing have an innovation problem?; Faster journal turnaround time; A day in the life of a scientific journal editor; One subscription for all of India?; 7th World Congress of Research Integrity videos available
Newsletter #100, October 30, 2022: How much do manuscripts change from submission to publication?, Diamond OA, Editormetrics?, Manuscript withdrawals after undisclosed duplicate submission, Authors’ names have ‘astonishing’ influence on peer reviewers, Fake reviewer scams, Should preprints be included in meta-analyses? Publication laundering
Newsletter #99, September 27, 2022: Addressing Author and contributor misconduct; Diversity, equity, and inclusion; and Trust and transparency in peer review models at Peer Review Congress 2022; Good Publication Practice (GPP) Guidelines revised; Editors of aging journal resign en masse; We need to talk about editors; Reducing the Inadvertent Spread of Retracted Science: RISRS report
Newsletter #98, August 29, 2022: Results of US taxpayer-supported research to be immediately available; Acting on historically offensive content; Enhancing Partnerships of Institutions and Journals: A US Perspective for Best Practices; Support Europe’s bold vision for responsible research assessment...
Newsletter #97, July 27, 2022: US House hearing on paper mills; Plan S funders embrace journal-free peer review; Peer review 2.0; Hijacked journals...
Newsletter #96, June 27, 2022: Building capacity for open access publishing; Hijacked Journal Checker; Paper mills research; Peer Review Crisis; Equity must be baked into randomized controlled trials...
Newsletter #95, May 23, 2022: Updated ICMJE Recommendations; A Model Text Recycling Policy; Investigating hijacked journals; Downstream retraction of preprinted research; Publish in English or perish...
Newsletter #94, April 18, 2022: Should we get rid of the scientific paper?; Combatting Predatory Academic Journals and Conferences; Undisclosed industry payments rampant in drug-trial papers; Main authors in elite journals remain mostly white and male; Office of Research Integrity’s 2021 Annual Report...
Newsletter #93, March 16, 2022: What is the version of record?; Minimum standards for inclusion and diversity for scholarly publishing; Nature trials transparent peer review; Phrases used to discuss results that do not reach statistical significance
Newsletter #92, February 14, 2022: When is a paper published?; Publishing Ethics and the North-South Divide; What is peer review for?; The case for hard retraction...
Newsletter #91, January 24, 2022: 5 Things We Learned About Journal Peer Review in 2021; Breaking the stigma of retraction; Inside a Russian paper mill; Protecting the Integrity of [US] Government Science; How to spot AI-manipulated submissions?; How fake science is infiltrating scientific journals...
Newsletter #90, December 30, 2021: Accessibility and Equity in Open Research; 2021 In Review; UNESCO Recommendation on Open Science; The inner workings of a paper mill; How bad research clouded our understanding of Covid-19...
Newsletter #89, November 21, 2021: Strengthening Research Integrity—the Role and Responsibilities of Publishing; Predatory publishers’ latest scam; Incomplete retraction of published research; EPIFORGE 2020 guidelines; Manuscript Exchange Common Approach...
Newsletter #88, October 18, 2021: Image Alteration and Duplication Detection; Call for abstracts for Peer Review Congress; Meta-analysis of Instructions for Authors; How publishers can help support UN Sustainable Development Goals; NISO seeks to make retractions more visible...
Newsletter #87, September 20, 2021: Peer Review Week 2021; Over 200 health journals urge world leaders to tackle ‘catastrophic harm’"; Research4Life turns 20; What is a journal’s responsibility to release information about covid?...
Newsletter #86, August 16, 2021: Interventions to improve peer review outcomes; Is it self-plagiarism or text recycling? Scientific publishers expedite name changes for authors; Ten errors in randomization and how to avoid them; Should I include studies from ‘predatory’ journals in a systematic review?...
Newsletter #85, June 27, 2021: ICMJE seeks new member journals; watch 7th World Conference on Research Integrity 2021; Get a CLUE?; new Journal Citation Indicator; Money for nothing; Open access around the world
Newsletter #84, April 12, 2021: PRISMA reporting guidelines updated; OA Diamond Journals study; What is research misconduct? European countries can’t agree; AMWA-EMWA-ISMPP joint position statement on medical publications, preprints, and peer review...
Newsletter #83, March 7, 2021: Open Methods, Easing author name changes, How to spot manuscripts from paper mills, New approved journals list?...
Newsletter #82, February 7, 2021: What not to publish about covid and suicide rates; What should “recycled text” be called? Plagiarism isn’t just copy and paste; Overburdened peer reviewers speak out; The author contribution matrix...
Newsletter #81, January 7, 2021: Changes to Journal Impact Factor announced for 2021; Rapid Translation of COVID-19 Preprint Data into Critical Care Practice; STM Peer Review Taxonomy...
Newsletter #80, November 20, 2020: Crowd Peer Review; Editorial Boards Benefit from Virtual Meetings; Open Access, the Global South and the Politics of Knowledge Production and Circulation; Redesign open science for Asia, Africa and Latin America...
Newsletter #79, October 26, 2020: Journals and politics, Peer Review Week, How often do biomedical journals use statisticians for peer review?, Open Access: challenges and opportunities for Low- and Middle-Income Countries, UNESCO’s Recommendation on Open Science, AfricArXiv...
Newsletter #78, September 8, 2020: Strengthening Research Institutions in Africa, Open Access uptake by universities worldwide, A study of vanished open access journals, Responsibility of Medical Journals in Addressing Racism in Health Care...
Newsletter #77, June 16, 2020: What’s coming for HINARI?; Open peer review adoption; Arguments of the US Federal Trade Commission vs OMICS; NIH launches a Preprint Pilot on PubMedCentral; scite: “like Rotten Tomatoes but for scientific articles”; “Frontiers 2020: a third of journals increase prices by 45 times the inflation rate…”; PubMed gets a redesign...
Newsletter #76, May 18, 2020: Publishers launch joint effort to tackle altered images in research papers, what are innovations in peer review and editorial assessment for?, the limitations to our understanding of peer review, there is no black and white definition of predatory publishing, more than a century of sponsorship bias in clinical trials, TOP Factor will be added to Web of Science...
Newsletter #75, April 12, 2020: COVID-19: free resources, how journals and editors are coping, potential consequences of rapid review and preprints when the media can't wait, effects on academia and research, clinical resources, plus more...
Newsletter #74, March 14, 2020: COVID-19 free research and resources; World Medical Association on healthcare information for all; China's new publication policy; UNESCO, the UK, US, and Canada consider open science policies; and new publishing models...
Newsletter #73, February 17, 2020: New ICMJE Disclosure form: feedback requested; WHO retracts opioid guidelines; Preprint server closing; New more transparent models for paying for open access?...
Newsletter #72, January 9, 2020: Updated ICMJE recommendations; The need to simplify indexing and data sharing; Who will ROR? What is MDAR and will it help?...