Seven reasons for keeping Elon Musk as a Fellow of the Royal Society

 

Last November, I wrote a blogpost explaining why I had resigned as a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS). In brief, over the summer a group of 74 FRSs asked the RS Council to consider revoking Musk's FRS on the grounds that he had attempted to interfere with British politics by spreading disinformation with the aim of stirring up unrest. The Council took advice, considered carefully and concluded that nothing should be done. I discussed this decision with senior figures in the RS and presented them with additional evidence of Musk's unsuitability for the honour of FRS. I was told that they could take another look, but they had to abide by the procedures laid out in the Statutes, and this could take some time. Last week I heard that the Council had met again to discuss this issue and come to the same conclusion: nothing should be done.  

It's hard to evaluate their reasoning, as no details have been given. Colleagues of mine who remain as FRSs occasionally report snippets of information they have heard from members of Council, but these have been inconsistent and unreliable. But meanwhile, I've had many members of the public contact me about this issue. The majority are strongly supportive of my position; even those who were on the fence leapt off it after the infamous "Roman" salute. Musk's involvement in the dissolution of US academic institutions, achieved by suppressing some of their activities and starving them of funds, has further solidified opinion against him. But few FRSs have spoken out. Such information that I've gleaned has come from informal contacts, where I've heard seven different arguments against the expulsion of Elon Musk.  Given that I've previously laid out a set of reasons in favour of Musk's expulsion,  in the interests of balance,  I present here the counter arguments.  

1. Musk should not have his FRS withdrawn because he does important and innovative scientific research, and is a role model for scientists worldwide. 

In fact, I include this one for completeness, but I've not encountered a single person who has made this case.  It seems generally accepted that he is the antithesis of the scholarly ideal set out by Jacob Bronowski (2008: Science and Human Values) - if you turn all the negative statements to positives, and positives to negatives, this is a fair description of Musk: 

... they do not make wild claims, they do not cheat, they do not try to persuade at any cost, they appeal neither to prejudice nor to authority, they are often frank about their ignorance, their disputes are fairly decorous, they do not confuse what is being argued with race, politics, sex or age, they listen patiently to the young and to the old who both know everything. These are the general virtues of scholarship, and they are particularly the virtues of science.  

Instead, I've seen a weary procession of arguments that all begin with someone saying "Of course, Musk is terrible but we shouldn't expel him because...."  

2. The Royal Society can't be political.  

This argument has some merit. On the one hand, the Royal Society is a registered charity, and on the other hand it offers science policy advice to government. As this blogpost from the Charity Commission makes clear: 

 Charities are required to be independent and cannot have political purposes, and this is important for public trust in charities. As such, charities must never stray into party politics – they must never promote, or be seen to promote, a political party or candidate. As trustees and charity leaders you must protect your charity’s reputation and not allow your organisation to be used as a vehicle for the expression of the party-political views of any individual trustee, employee, political party, or candidate.

There are two reasons why I think the expulsion of Musk is entirely compatible with the Charity Commission rules.  

First, there are plenty of reasons to object to Musk's FRS that have nothing to do with politics. He has repeatedly used his social media platform to attack Anthony Fauci, a respected scientist and Foreign Member of the Royal Society. This is not usual academic discourse: it is calling for Fauci to be prosecuted, and blaming him for medical crimes. Fauci needs personal security protection because there is credible threat to his life, stirred up by various factions who disapproved of his role in the Covid-19 pandemic - including Musk, who loathed having restrictions on movement imposed and is now arguing that Fauci's research somehow caused the pandemic. It is easy to find examples of Musk's attacks on Fauci by Googling for "Musk Fauci" - e.g. this piece in the New York Post. 

Other reasons are provided in my blogpost: lack of appropriate regulatory approval for Neuralink, and spreading of disinformation about climate science and vaccinations. 

Second, the fact that Musk also does overtly political things shouldn't make people timid about disapproving of his other actions. And most of Musk's political activities are part and parcel of his disinformation campaigns, and can be objected to on the grounds that they are dishonest. 

In sum, if the Royal Society were to campaign against the Reform Party, that would be improper. But to dissociate themselves from the spreading of disinformation seems to me to be a valid and desirable activity, compatible with their charitable status, and their stated aims: 

The Society ... is a registered charity, undertaking a range of activities that provide public benefit either directly or indirectly. As a national academy, it represents the UK and collaborates with international partners to advocate for science and its benefits.  

3. The Royal Society has other odious people as Fellows. 

I was amused to see this argument trotted out in a couple of pieces in the media - first in the Spectator by Toby Young (someone whose own ennoblement has raised eyebrows), and then by Jawad Iqbal in the Times. Both pieces noted that James Watson remained an FRS despite his abhorrent views on eugenics. Iqbal also noted that Prince Andrew had been made a Royal Fellow in 2013. This was perhaps an unwise example to use, given that Prince Andrew's name quietly disappeared from the list of Fellows in 2022, after he was encouraged to resign from a number of honours.

I haven't heard this case made by many FRSs, and maybe that's because they can see what a grubby argument it is. But there is more appetite for a related point:  

4. Expelling Musk could set a dangerous precedent.

As it happens, some people who contacted me after my resignation have taken the opportunity to tell me about other dodgy FRSs - not because they adopt argument 3, but on the contrary, because they think that if the Royal Society were to start taking its Code of Conduct seriously, there are others who should also be looked at. One can see that this line of argument might generate a degree of nervousness among Council members.  

5. Musk's supporters might say bad things about the Royal Society if he were expelled.  

There's three versions of this: (a) they'd say the RS was political (see point 2); (b) they'd say the RS was 'woke', and (c) they'd say RS was 'elitist'.  

These arguments remind me all too sadly of the decline in the state of debate in British politics. It seems to be accepted as a defensible line of argument these days to warn against doing something that you know to be right because someone else might, either mischievously or sincerely, misattribute your motives for doing so. The solution is to state clearly what your reasons are, and not get derailed by name-calling. If the Royal Society is really worried about reputational damage, then they should realise that being designated as 'woke' or 'elitist' by your opponents is far less of an insult than being described as cowardly by your friends.  

6. There could be bad consequences for science and scientists if Musk were expelled. 

This argument sounds suspiciously like a case for appeasement of a bully. History has taught us that appeasement does not end well. Indeed, even in the past weeks, we've seen various academic organisations and institutions scrabbling to obey directives from the Trump regime to remove all mention of diversity, equality and inclusion from their documents and websites: it has not saved them from the depredations of DOGE. Philip Ball has written in Chemistry World about the tendency for institutions to show "anticipatory obedience" and the importance of resistance.  

A more specific version of this argument maintains that it could make matters worse for Anthony Fauci if the Royal Society were to expel Musk, particularly if his attacks on Fauci were cited as a reason. Sadly enough, it seems to me we have here what scientists call a floor effect - i.e. the situation for Fauci is so bad - with serious threats on his life and his personal security protection now removed - that it's not clear it could get any worse. Showing him some solidarity may not achieve much, but it would confirm that the Royal Society is prepared to stand up to bullies and support those who do deserve the accolade of being honoured.  

7. There could be bad consequences for the Royal Society if Musk were expelled.  

The main bad consequence that goes beyond name-calling (see 5) would be if Musk decided to mount a legal challenge to his expulsion. No doubt the legal counsel that the Royal Society has employed will have judged how likely this is to happen, and how likely it could be successful if it did happen. Nobody wants to get embroiled in legal battles, which can be expensive and arduous. My personal view is that the Royal Society would have a stronger defence against legal action if it polled the whole Fellowship and the result turned out in favour of expelling Musk. I suggested that the Fellowship should be consulted last Summer but was told that was not in line with the Statutes. (I should add that I'm not confident that the Fellowship would vote to expel Musk - many of them seem swayed by arguments 2-6, but with every day that passes, his malign influence on science and society increases, and so I think it's possible he might be voted out).  

Personally, I think the Royal Society should take the risk of a legal challenge. They are a wealthy organisation, and they represent the voice of scientists in the UK. Our fellow scientists in the USA are now under a level of pressure that even the most pessimistic of us had not anticipated. It is hard for individual scientists to resist. But the Royal Society has the clout and the resource to weather the storm. If they would take a stand, this would show solidarity with our friends across the pond, by confirming that the Brits aren't going to honour someone who is playing a major role in dismantling scientific research in the USA.

Tomatoes roaming the fields and canaries in the coalmine: another embarrassing paper for MDPI

 

Many publishers are getting nervous about infiltration by paper mills, who can torpedo a journal's reputation when they succeed in publishing papers that are obvious nonsense. In a recent Open Letter, a group of sleuths drew attention to an example in Scientific Reports, published by Springer Nature.

After the Open Letter was published, the paper that instigated our concern was promptly retracted by the journal, but as far as I can tell, not much else has changed. The point about a paper like this is that it is so blatantly bad that it cannot have been through any kind of serious editorial scrutiny or peer review. It acts as a canary in the coalmine: if gobbledegook is published in your journal, it's an indicator that you need to look very carefully at your editorial processes, and act immediately to remove editors who let this stuff in. Sadly, I haven't yet seen much evidence of that happening at Scientific Reports.

This post, however, concerns another publisher, MDPI, who have regularly featured on my blog, and not in a good way. Last month, I commented on the strange state of affairs whereby Finland had downgraded its classification of 187 MDPI journals because of evidence of "minimum time spend for editorial work and quality assessment", at the same time that German universities had secured a national publishing agreement with MDPI. The story I have to tell here may confirm Finland's judgement, and give Germany pause for thought. It concerns this article: Abbas, R., Amran, G. A., Hussain, I., & Ma, S. (2022). A Soft Computing View for the Scientific Categorization of Vegetable Supply Chain Issues. Logistics, 6(3), https://doi.org/10.3390/logistics6030039 

As with the Springer Nature example, the first indication of problems came via the Problematic Paper Screener, the excellent system that checks articles for various red flags, including "tortured phrases". These provide an indicator that a paper has probably been plagiarised but then passed through a process that substitutes synonyms for main words, with the aim of evading plagiarism detection software. So, as noted on PubPeer, in this case we have "fluffy logic" for fuzzy logic, and "unaided ML" for unsupervised machine learning. 

However, example sentences in which tortured phrases were embedded indicated a deeper problem. Most of the text is incomprehensible, and things start to get seriously weird when the authors get on to tomatoes. We are told: 

.... the third creation framework considered for the creation phase is tomatoes. This creation framework is devoted to developing homegrown creatures brought up in rural settings to create vegetables. This can bring domesticated tomatoes likewise to broad or serious frameworks. Broad frameworks include creatures wandering meadows (ordinarily under the oversight of a herder). Differently, serious tomatoes are situated in shut foundations and are outfitted with ICT innovation, which empowers creatures to be observed continuously. Inside these creation frameworks, the most run-of-the-mill issues we run over are meadow observing [75], creature government assistance [76], creature conduct following [77], and tomato creation forecast and enhancement [78,79], as displayed in Figure 3. 

According to a VSC point of view, the formal meanings of these issues are recorded beneath. 

• Field checking: This issue is connected with the exact recognizable proof of meadow inventories to separate between the most reasonable sorts for tomatoes purposes. 

• Tomato government assistance: This is centered around the example arrangement of the dehydration way of behaving in brushing creatures for investigations of creature nourishment, development, and well-being. 

• Tomato growth checking: This depends on the utilization of conduct investigations to recognize early indications of medical problems and advance early negotiation. 

A clue to the origin of this material comes from the cited references, which are about pigs and cattle. Anonymous PubPeer commenter Nerita vitiensis found that a substantial part of the text was adapted from a previous work by different authors, but with the topics of "livestock and fish" changed to "tomatoes and cruciferous vegetables". This explains the description of tomatoes as "creatures" under the oversight of a herder. 

The authors of this piece seem seriously out of their depth, as evidenced by the bland comments apparently written by Chat GPT that they provided on PubPeer. 

Now, one very good thing about MDPI is that it generally identifies the academic editor who handled a paper, and it sometimes also makes public the reviewer reports. This should mean that when a major foul-up like this occurs, it should be possible to identify and purge those responsible for accepting the work. 

The academic editors who accepted this article are Xue-Ming Yuan, who is currently soliciting papers for a special issue in the MDPI journal Mathematics, and Anrong Xue.

The MDPI website shows reports from three named reviewers. 

The first reviewer, Edyta Kardas, was concerned about the use of first-person language, and punctuation, but not apparently about statements about animated tomatoes. She reviewed 8 papers for MDPI journals in 2024.

The second reviewer, Alejandro Vega-Muñoz focused solely on the structure of the article, but apparently did not look at the content. He has edited two special issues for other MDPI journals. 

 The third reviewer, Francesco Barreca, attempted a synopsis of the article (which I could not understand) and then had just two suggestions:

"The work is well done but I have some remarks:

• The figures should be review, the dimension are variable

 • Moderate English changes are required"

The "moderate English changes" were unspecified. Barreca has a track record of editing a special issue of another MDPI journal.

 
Last week, I contacted Publication Ethics at MDPI to draw their attention to this article, noting the dereliction of duty by reviewers and editors, and suggesting that as well as retracting the paper, they should remove the editors and peer reviewers from their database. They replied to say: 

"We confirm that the Editorial Office is investigating the concerns related to this paper following the guidelines of the Committee on Publication Ethics https://publicationethics.org/ of which we are a member and our policy https://www.mdpi.com/ethics#_bookmark29.

We would like to inform you that this case is a priority for us, and we are actively working to resolve it. We will update you on the outcome of this investigation as soon as possible."

I await developments with interest. It is widely recognised that COPE guidelines are not well-suited for dealing with this kind of situation: they make the default assumption that authors should be consulted to give their perspective when criticisms are raised - a reasonable assumption in many cases, but not when there is such blatant evidence of fakery.

The most serious case of infestation of a publisher by nonsense occurred in 2022-3, when the publisher Hindawi (owned by Wiley) was targeted by paper mills who, among other things, generated numerous papers that I labelled as AI gobbledegook sandwiches. Eventually, the publisher withdrew literally thousands of papers and closed the Hindawi brand, after complaints by shareholders started impacting profits.

Like many of the sleuths who track down paper mills, I have become cynical about the commitment to research integrity that is claimed by many publishers, including MDPI. But I do believe they will act when it is in their interests to do so. As the amount of nonsense and disinformation in the scientific literature increases, I think we'll enter a new phase where trustworthiness of journal contents will start to have much higher value. If you want to be taken seriously as a peer-reviewed journal, you just cannot continue to pump out articles accompanied by superficial verbiage from "peer reviewers" that makes no real contact with the subject matter. Publishers will need to act now to clean up their editorial boards if they want to stay in business.   

Update 7th February 2025

 

I am pleased to report that I have now heard from MDPI as follows:

Following a thorough investigation of this paper and according to the recommendations of the journal's Editorial Board, we have decided to retract this publication, in line with MDPI’s retraction policy: https://www.mdpi.com/ethics#_bookmark30

Further details regarding this retraction can be found at: https://www.mdpi.com/2305-6290/9/1/20

However, as far as I can tell, no action has been taken against the editors and reviewers who were responsible for accepting the article.  The only thing I notice is that the peer reviewer comments are no longer linked to the main page for the article on the journal website (though they are still available here).  I have written to MDPI Publication Ethics to ask for clarification as to whether any action will be taken to replace the editors, and to remove the peer reviewers from their register.  Unless a robust approach is taken to removing those who admit such nonsense into the journal, readers and potential authors can have no confidence in the integrity of MDPI's editorial processes.

Update 12th February 2025

I have now received a response from MDPI Publication Ethics to my query about editors and peer reviewers.  The plan is to educate them rather than remove them.  

We are happy to provide additional details regarding our approach to this situation. 

In line with the recommendations from COPE for ethical and transparent scholarly publishing (https://publicationethics.org/guidance/guideline/principles-transparency-and-best-practice-scholarly-publishing), we are adopting an educational approach. 
This implies sending notifications to the reviewers and the editor to inform them of this retraction, clarify their responsibilities in the review process, and outline the potential consequences of a superficial review, according to our guidelines for reviewers (https://www.mdpi.com/reviewers#_bookmark11) and information for editors (https://www.mdpi.com/editors). 

Given the significant responsibility that comes with the role of peer reviewers, which directly impacts the credibility of both the journal and the broader scientific literature, we take proactive steps to offer additional guidance and resources beyond our standard guidelines. An example of this initiative can be found on our MDPI Blog: https://blog.mdpi.com/2025/01/22/reviewer-responsibilities/

Moving forward, we will closely monitor the activities of both the editor and reviewers to ensure adherence to the highest standards of academic publishing.

We remain at your disposal for any further information.

Papermillers must be feeling very cheerful right now.

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Retrospective look at blog highlights of 2024: What happened next?

It's always interesting for a blogger to look back to see which posts have garnered most attention. In 2024 there were three standout items, my resignation from the Royal Society, an Open Letter about editorial failings at the journal Scientific Reports, and a guest post by René Aquarius about his experiences as a reviewer for MDPI. For each of these blogposts, it's interesting to consider not just the number of hits, but also the broader impact. Blogging is a great way to let off steam, but does it actually achieve anything?

Resignation from the Royal Society 

As I said at the time of writing the post, I don't expect my resignation to change much at the Royal Society, but I was surprised at the amount of interest in the matter. The story was picked up by national media (e.g. here and here), and even got covered in France and the Netherlands. I had anticipated I might be attacked by a swarm of trolls, but there was no more than a handful of rude emails, saying the Royal Society was better off without me. What was more remarkable was the outpouring of positive reactions. My inbox was swamped with people thanking me for taking this step - not just academics, but people from all walks of life. It's customary when elected to the Royal Society for colleagues to send congratulatory emails: the number of congratulations I received for resigning was about five times as many as I had for being elected. I felt I had struck a chord with many people who were fed up with unsuitable individuals being honoured. British people in particular were outraged that the Royal Society was honouring someone who was spreading misinformation with the apparent aim of undermining our democracy.

I've seen only one serious attempt to challenge the arguments in my blogpost - by Toby Young in the Spectator. I can imagine that the comms team at the Royal Society may not have been overjoyed at his main line of argument, which was to say that there had been many Fellows of the Royal Society with rebarbative opinions who hadn't been thrown out, so why should they start now? He described me as a left-wing Torquemada, which I rather enjoyed, except that his implication was that my objections to Musk were political. Had he read my blogpost, he'd see that politics didn't come into it - it is the lack of scientific integrity that is the issue.

As a delightful twist to the story, Toby Young, who is notorious for his foul-mouthed comments on women and disabled people, has just been appointed to the House of Lords, showing that the Royal Society is not alone among the British establishment in honouring those who represent the antithesis of their core values. I can only assume that Kemi Badenoch, who was responsible for his elevation, did it to own the libs.

Open letter regarding Scientific Reports

This letter, cosigned by 22 scientific sleuths, noted that laughably awful papers were getting published in the Springer Nature journal Scientific Reports, which is generally regarded as a serious journal. It looked to us as if the journal was being infiltrated by paper mills who were using it as an outlet for fraudulent or low quality work. For this to happen, there need to be editors who are either turning a blind eye to such articles, or were actively working with a paper mill to accommodate them. A quick analysis of the editors listed on the journal website turned up 28 who had records on PubPeer indicative of involvement in research misconduct.

So what has happened since? We received a reply from Chris Graf, the Research Integrity Director at Springer Nature, thanking us for our letter and emphasising the extent to which the publisher was putting resources into tackling research fraud and paper mills. The article that had sparked off the Open Letter was retracted fairly promptly.

But when I rechecked the Editorial Board list today, 26 the 28 editors we'd listed were still in position - even though we'd given links to PubPeer entries that specified problematic behaviours of all of them. The two who are no longer listed are Ilyas Khan, and Achyut Shankar. I have no idea whether their disappearance from editorial roles at Scientific Reports has anything to do with the Open Letter. (Rule 1 of sleuthing: don't expect anyone in power to tell you if they have acted on information you provided).

And a final wrinkle to the story: a fellow sleuth told me about another editor linked to paper mills, Masoud Afrand, who had not been included in our list. He had actually been removed from the list of editors in March 2022, but then reappeared at some point in the summer of 2024 (as verified by the Wayback Machine). The Editor-in-Chief, Rafal Marszalek, explained this as a "clerical error". In email correspondence I pointed out to him that this was a pretty odd kind of clerical error, and that it did nothing to assuage growing concerns that there may be someone at a senior level at Scientific Reports who was actively working with paper millers.  I did not get a reply.

My experience as a reviewer for MDPI: guest post by René Aquarius

In this post, René describes the fate of a paper that he agreed to review for the Journal of Clinical Medicine, published by MDPI. The paper had numerous methodological flaws, including lack of a control group and discrepancies between the registered protocol and the final study, and René recommended rejection. What then followed was a bizarre series of exchanges with MDPI editors, who encouraged resubmission by the authors, then attempted to block René from re-reviewing the paper, after he'd agreed to do so. Eventually the paper was transferred to  another MDPI journal, Geriatrics, where he was again asked to review it. When he pointed out that the paper was largely unchanged from the original submission, it was withdrawn - but he then found it published a few weeks later in yet another MDPI journal.

This blogpost attracted a lot of comments, not least from people who had had similar experiences with MDPI. I have to say that these experiences, coupled with other evidence such as this and this make me very dubious about standards of peer review at MDPI. The impression is that hard-pressed editorial staff are expected to ensure peer review of submissions is achieved in 2-3 weeks, and they accordingly come to rely on anyone who will do a speedy job, without regard for quality. Indeed, high-quality reviews that raise difficult issues are problematic for them, because they will slow up the process. Accordingly these are sidelined or quietly forgotten about, in favour of minimalist 'reviews' such as those you can see here in reviews 1, 3 and 4.

Will anything change? Hopefully, René's post has helped raise awareness of the problematic aspects of peer review at MDPI journals. I doubt the publisher will do anything to change their peer review model unless the reputational damage from such revelations starts to hit their bottom line. Interestingly, in my last post of 2024, I noted that just before the Christmas break, Finland's Publication Forum (JUFO) downgraded the status of 187 MDPI journals in their index, a move that will disincentivize Finnish researchers from publishing there. However, a day later, MDPI announced that it had secured a national publishing agreement with ZB Med, which offered substantial discounts to authors from over 100 German Universities.

Epilogue

In each of these cases, we can see that a blogpost has raised the profile of an issue that is of relevance to academic scientists. Concrete impacts are harder to demonstrate - where changes happen, it's not clear if they are related to the blogpost, or just coincidental. And for most topics, it's a case of two steps forward and one step back, at best. But if I've learned one thing from my many years writing about such things, it's that you can't trust the people in positions of power to actually do the right thing unless they are prodded repeatedly and publicly (and sometimes not even then). So I hope to continue blogging through 2025, even though it may at times seem futile.

Happy New Year, and Illegitimi non carborundum.

Comments are moderated. Those that are in scope and from an identified person will be published after a delay. 

Finland vs. Germany: the case of MDPI

It's been an odd week for the academic publisher MDPI. On 16th December, Finland's Publication Forum (known as JUFO) announced that from January 2025 it was downgrading its classification of 271 open access journals to the lowest level, zero. By my calculations, this includes 187 journals from MDPI and 82 from Frontiers, plus 2 others. This is likely to deter Finnish researchers from submitting work to these journals, as the rating indicates they are of low quality. As explained in an article in the Times Higher Education, JUFO justified its decision on the grounds that these journals “aim to increase the number of publications with the minimum time spend for editorial work and quality assessment”. 

Then the very next day, 17th December, MDPI announced that it had secured a national publishing agreement with ZB Med, which offered substantial discounts to authors from over 100 German Universities publishing in MDPI journals. On Bluesky, this news was not greeted with the universal joy that ZB Med might have anticipated, with comments such as "an embarrassment", "shocking", and "a catastrophe".

To understand the background, it's worth reading a thread on Bluesky by Mark Hanson, one of the authors of a landmark paper entitled "The Strain on Scientific Publishing". This article showed that MDPI and Frontiers stand out from other publishers in terms of having an exponential growth in number of papers published in recent years, a massive shift to special issues as a vehicle for this increase, and a sharp drop in publication lag from 2016 to 2022.

In their annual report for 2023, MDPI described annualised publication growth of 20.4%. They stated that they have over 295,693 academic editors on editorial boards, and a median lag of 17 days from receipt of a paper to the first editorial decision and 6 weeks from submission to publication. It's not clear whether the 17 day figure includes desk rejections, but even if it does, this is remarkably fast. Of course, you could argue (and I'm sure the publishers will argue) that if you are publishing a lot more and doing it faster, you are just being efficient. However, an alternative view, and one that is apparently held by JUFO, is that this speedy processing goes hand in hand with poor editorial quality control.

The problem here is that anyone who has worked as a journal editor knows that, while a 17 day turnaround might be a good goal to aim for, it is generally not feasible. There is a limited pool of experts who can do a thorough peer review, and often one has to ask as many as 20 people to do a review in order to achieve 2 or 3 reviews. So it can take at least a couple of weeks to secure reviewers, and then it is likely to be another couple of weeks before all reviewers have completed a comprehensive review. Given these constraints, most editors would be happy if they could achieve a median time to first decision of 34 days - i.e. double that reported by MDPI. So the sheer speed of decision making - regarded by MDPI as a selling point for authors - is a red flag.

It seems that speed is achieved by adopting a rather unorthodox process of assigning peer reviewers, where the involvement of an academic editor is optional: "At least two review reports are collected for each submitted article. The academic editor can suggest reviewers during pre-check. Alternatively, MDPI editorial staff will use qualified Editorial Board members, qualified reviewers from our database, or new reviewers identified by web searches for related articles." The impression is that, in order to meet targets, editorial staff will select peer reviewers who can be relied upon to respond immediately to requests to review.

A guest post on this blog by René Aquarius supported these suspicions and further suggested that reviewers who are critical may be sidelined. After writing an initial negative review, René had promptly agreed to review a revision of a paper, but was then told his review was not needed - this is quite remarkable, given that most editors would be delighted if a competent reviewer agreed to do a timely re-review. It's worth looking not just at René's blogpost but also the comments from others, which indicate his experience is not unique.

A further issue concerns the fate of papers receiving negative reviews. René found that the paper he had rejected popped up as a new submission in another MDPI journal, and after negative reviews there, it was published in a third journal. This raises questions about MDPI's reported rejection rate of around 50%. If each of these resubmissions was counted as a new submission, the rejection rate would appear to be 66%, but given that the same paper was recycled from journal to journal before eventual acceptance, the actual rate was 0%. 

One good thing about MDPI is that it gives authors the option of making peer review open. However, analysis of published peer reviews further dents confidence in the rigour of the peer review process. A commentary in Science covering the work of Maria Ángeles Oviedo García noted how some MDPI peer reviews contained repetitive phrases that suggested they were generated by a template. They were superficial and did not engage seriously with the content of the article. In some cases the reviewer freely admitted a lack of expertise in the topic of the article, and in others, there was evidence of coercive citation (i.e., authors being told to cite the work of a specific individual, sometimes the editor).

Comments on Reddit cannot, of course, be treated as hard evidence, but they raise further questions about the peer review process at MDPI. Several commenters described having recommended rejection as a peer reviewer only to find that the paper was published without their comments. If negative peer review comments are selectively suppressed in the public record, this would be a serious breach of ethical standards by the publisher.

Lack of competent peer review and/or editorial malpractice is also suggested by the publication of papers in MDPI that fall well below the threshold of acceptable science. Of course, quality judgements are subjective, and it's common for researchers to complain "How did this get past peer review?" But in the case of MDPI journals, one finds articles that are so poor that they suggest the editor was either corrupt or asleep on the job. I have covered some examples in previous blogposts, here, and here.

The Finns are not alone in being concerned about research quality in MDPI journals. The Swiss National Science Foundation did not mention specific publishers by name, but in November 2023 they withdrew funding for articles published in special issues. Since 2023, the Directory of Open Access Journals has withdrawn 19 MDPI journals from its index for "Not adhering to best practice". Details are not provided, but these tend to be journals where guest editors have used special issues to publish a high volume of articles by themselves and close collaborators - another red flag for scientific quality. Yet another issue is citation manipulation, where editors or peer reviewers demand inclusion of specific references in a revision of an article in order to boost their own citation count. In February 2024, China released its latest Early Warning List of journals that are deemed to be "untrustworthy, predatory or not serving the Chinese research community’s interests". This included four MDPI journals listed for citation manipulation.

A final red flag about MDPI is that it seems remarkably averse to retracting articles. Hindawi publishing, which was bought by Wiley in 2021, was heavily criticised for allowing a flood of paper-milled articles to be published, but it did subsequently retract over 13,000 of them (just under 5% of 267K articles), before the closure of the brand. A search on Web of Science for documents classified as "retracted publication" or "retraction" and published by "MDPI or MDPI Ag" turned up a mere 582 retractions since 2010, which amounts to 0.04% of the 1.4 million articles listed on the database.

I've heard various arguments against JUFO's action, such as: many papers published in MDPI journals are fine; you should judge an article by its content, not where it is published; authors should be free to prefer speed over scrutiny if they wish. The reason why I support JUFO, and think ZB Med is rash to sign an agreement, is because if the peer review process is not managed by experienced and respected academic editors with specialist subject knowledge, then we need to consider the impact, not just on individual authors, but on the scientific literature as a whole. If we allow trivia, fatally flawed studies or pseudoscience to be represented as "peer-reviewed" this contaminates the research literature, with adverse consequences for everyone.

Why I have resigned from the Royal Society

The Royal Society is a venerable institution founded in 1660, whose original members included such eminent men as Christopher Wren, Robert Hooke, Robert Boyle and Isaac Newton. It promotes science in many ways: administering grants, advising government, holding meetings and lectures, and publishing expert reports on scientific matters of public importance.  

There are currently around 1,800 Fellows and Foreign Members of the Royal Society, all elected through a stringent and highly competitive process which includes nomination by two Fellows of the Royal Society (FRS), detailed scrutiny of the candidate's achievements and publications, reports by referees, and consideration by a committee of experts in their broad area of research.  Although most Fellows are elected on the basis of their scientific contributions, others are nominated on the basis of "wider contributions to science, engineering or medicine through leadership, organisation, scholarship or communication".

For many scientists, election to the Royal Society is the pinnacle of their scientific career. It establishes that their achievements are recognised as exceptional, and the title FRS brings immediate respect from colleagues. Of course, things do not always work out as they should. Some Fellows may turn out to have published fraudulent work, or go insane and start promoting crackpot ideas. Although there are procedures that allow a fellow to be expelled from the Royal Society, I have been told this has not happened for over 150 years. It seems that election as a Fellow of the Royal Society, like loss of virginity, is something that can't readily be reversed.

This brings us, then, to the case of Elon Musk, who was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society in 2018 on the basis of his technological achievements, notably in space travel and electrical vehicle development. Unfortunately, since that time, his interests have extended to using social media for political propaganda, while at the same time battling what he sees as "woke mind virus" and attacks on free speech. Whereas previously he seemed to agree with mainstream scientific opinion on issues such as climate change and medicine, over the past year or two, he's started promoting alternative ideas.   

In summer of 2024, a number of FRSs became concerned at how Musk was using his social media platform (previously Twitter, now termed X) to stir up racial unrest and anti-government sentiment in the UK. Notable tweets by him from this period included incendiary comments and frank misinformation, as documented in this Guardian article. 

This led to a number of Fellows expressing dismay that Musk had been elected. There was no formal consultation of the Fellowship but via informal email contacts, a group of 74 Fellows formulated a letter of concern that was sent in early August to the President of the Royal Society, raising doubts as to whether he was "a fit and proper person to hold the considerable honour of being a Fellow of the Royal Society". The letter specifically mentioned the way Musk had used his platform on X to make unjustified and divisive statements that served to inflame right-wing thuggery and racist violence in the UK. 

Somebody (not me!) leaked the letter to the Guardian, who ran a story about it on 23rd August.

I gather that at this point the Royal Society Council opted to consult a top lawyer to determine whether Musk's behaviour breached their Code of Conduct. The problem with this course of action is that if you are uncertain about doing something that seems morally right but may have consequences, then it is easy to find a lawyer who will advise against doing it. That's just how lawyers work. They're paid to rescue people from ethical impulses that may get them into trouble. And, sure enough, the lawyer determined that Musk hadn't breached the Code of Conduct. If you want to see if you agree, you can find the Code of Conduct here.

Many of the signatories of the letter, including me, were unhappy with this response. We set about assembling further evidence of behaviours incompatible with the Code of Conduct. There is a lot of material, which can be broadly divided into two categories, depending on whether it relates to "Scientific conduct" or "Principles".  

On Scientific conduct, the most relevant points from the Code of Conduct are:

2.6. Fellows and Foreign Members shall carry out their scientific research with regard to the Society's statement on research integrity and to the highest standards. 

2.10. Fellows and Foreign Members shall treat all individuals in the scientific enterprise collegially and with courtesy, including supervisors, colleagues, other Society Fellows and Foreign Members, Society staff, students and other early‐career colleagues, technical and clerical staff, and interested members of the public. 

2.11. Fellows and Foreign Members shall not engage in any form of discrimination, harassment, or bullying.

Most of those I've spoken to agree that a serious breach of these principles was in 2022, when Musk tweeted: "My pronouns are Prosecute/Fauci", thereby managing to simultaneously offend the LGBTQ community, express an antivaxx sentiment, and put Fauci, already under attack from antivaxxers, at further risk. Fauci was not a Fellow at the time these comments were made, but that should not matter given the scope of the statement is "individuals in the scientific community". This incident was covered by CBS News.

Now that the US election is over, Musk seems emboldened to ramp up his attacks. On 19th November 2024, he retweeted this to his millions of followers, followed by a compilation of attacks on Fauci on 21st November,

Neuralink

There are also questions about the management of Musk's research project, Neuralink, which involves developing a brain-computer interface to help people who are paralysed. While this is clearly a worthy goal, his approach to conducting research is characterised by refusal to let anyone interfere with how he does things. This has led to accusations of failure to adhere to regulatory procedures for Good Laboratory Practice. For instance, consider these quotes from this article: 

'I think what concerns people is that Neuralink could be cutting corners, and so far nobody has stopped them,' says Nick Ramsey, a clinical neuroscientist at University Medical Center Utrecht, in the Netherlands.  There’s an incredible push by Neuralink to bypass the conventional research world, and there’s little interaction with academics, as if they think that we’re on the wrong track—that we’re inching forward while they want to leap years forward.

In response to Musk's claim that no monkey had died because of Neuralink, the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine wrote to the SEC, claiming Musk’s comments were false. The group said it had obtained veterinary records from Neuralink’s experiments showing that at least 12 young, healthy monkeys were euthanized as a result of problems with Neuralink’s implant. The group alleged that Musk’s comments are misleading investors, and urged SEC regulators to investigate Musk and Neuralink for securities fraud.

The problems with Neuralink do not stop with the ethics of the animals and the secrecy surrounding them. In a piece in Nature, various scientists were interviewed about the first human trial that was conducted earlier this year. The main concern was lack of transparency. Human trials are usually recorded in clinical.trials.gov, which was set up precisely to make it easier to track if studies had followed a protocol. Musk did not do this. His approach to the human trials again reflects his distaste for any regulations. But the regulations are there for a purpose, and one would expect a Fellow of the Royal Society to abide by them; otherwise we end up with scandals such as Theranos or the stem cell experiments by Macchiarini and Birchall. The ethics of this kind of trial also needs careful handling, especially in terms of the patient's understanding of possible adverse effects, their expectations of benefits, and the undertaking of researchers to provide long-term support for the prosthesis.

If we turn to the more general issues that come under Principles, then the Code of Conduct states: 

Fellows and Foreign Members shall not act or fail to act in any way which would undermine the Society's mission or bring the Society into disrepute.

 Here are some examples that I would regard as contrary to the Society's mission.

Promoting vaccine hesitation

The Royal Society has done good work promoting public understanding of vaccines, as with this blogpost by Charles Bangham FRS. In contrast, as described here, Musk has promoted vaccine conspiracy theories and anti-vaccine views on his platform. This Tweet had 85 million views:

Downplaying the climate emergency

In 2023 Musk played down the seriousness of climate change, and 2024 participated in a bizarre interview with Donald Trump, which dismayed climate experts. Among the commenters was Michael Mann, who said “It is sad that Elon Musk has become a climate change denier, but that’s what he is. He’s literally denying what the science has to say here.” Mann was elected as a Foreign Member of the Royal Society in 2024.

Spreading deep fakes and misinformation on X

As recently as 2022, the Royal Society published a report in which Frank Kelly (FRS) noted the high priority that the Royal Society gives to accurate scientific communication:

The Royal Society’s mission since it was established in 1660 has been to promote science for the benefit of humanity, and a major strand of that is to communicate accurately. But false information is interfering with that goal. It is accused of fuelling mistrust in vaccines, confusing discussions about tackling the climate crisis and influencing the debate about genetically modified crops. 

Earlier this month, Martin McKee wrote in the British Medical Journal:

 Musk’s reason for buying Twitter was to influence the social discourse. And influence he did—by using his enormous platform (203 million followers) to endorse Trump, spread disinformation about voter fraud and deep fakes of Kamala Harris, and amplify conspiracy theories about everything from vaccines to race replacement theory to misogyny.

The most recent development is the announcement that Musk is to be co-director of the new Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE, an allusion to the cryptocurrency Dogecoin) in the Trump Administration, with a brief to cut waste and bureaucracy. The future for US science is starting to look bleak, with Musk being given unfettered powers to cut budgets to NIH and NASA, among others.  This tweet, which he endorsed, indicates that rather than using objective evidence, the cuts will fall on those who have criticized Trump, who will find bowdlerized summaries of their work used to generate public outrage. The tweet reads:  "Here’s what the U.S. Government wasted $900 Billion of your tax dollars on in 2023. The Department of Government Efficiency (@DOGE) will fix this. America deserves leaders that prioritize sensible spending" before presenting a chart listing items for cuts, with unsourced descriptions of expenditure, including:

• Dr Fauci's monkey business on NIH's "monkey island":   $33,200,000 
• NIH's meth-head monkeys:  portion of $12,000,000 
• Dr Fauci's transgender monkey study: $477,121

I'm sad to say I agree with Alex Wild, Curator of Entomology at University of Texas Austin, who wrote a few days ago: "I hope federally funded scientists are preparing for large scale, bad faith attacks by Musk and his troll army.  It’s pretty clear the DOGE operation is going to take snippets of grant proposals and papers, present them out of context, and direct weaponized harassment of individual people."

What next?  

I've been told that in the light of the evolving situation, the Royal Society Council will look again at the case of Elon Musk. In conversations I have had with them, they emphasise that they must adhere to their own procedures, which are specified in the Statutes, and which involve a whole series of stages of legal scrutiny, committee evaluation, discussion with the Fellow in question, and ultimately a vote from the Fellowship, before a Fellow or Foreign Member could be expelled. While I agree that if you have a set of rules you should stick to them, I find the fact that nobody has been expelled for over 150 years telling. It does suggest that the Statutes are worded so that it is virtually impossible to do anything about Fellows who breach the Code of Conduct. In effect the Statutes serve a purpose of protecting the Royal Society from ever having to take action against one of its Fellows.

In the course of investigating this blogpost, I've become intimately familiar with the Code of Conduct, which requires me to "treat all individuals in the scientific enterprise collegially and with courtesy, including ... foreign Members". I'm not willing to treat Elon Musk "collegially and with courtesy". Any pleasure I may take in the distinction of the honour of an FRS is diminished by the fact it is shared with someone who appears to be modeling himself on a Bond villain, a man who has immeasurable wealth and power which he will use to threaten scientists who disagree with him. Accordingly, last week I resigned my FRS. I don't do this in the expectation of having any impact: in the context of over 350 years of Royal Society history, this is just a blip. I just feel far more comfortable to be dissociated from an institution that continues to honour this disreputable man.

Note: Comments will be accepted if they are by a named individual, civil, and on topic. They are moderated and there may be a delay before they appear online. 

 

PS. 1st Dec 2024. It seems many people did not read this far and I have deleted a lot of anonymous comments.  I will close this post to comments now, as I think nobody has anything new to say and I don't think anything will be gained by more to and fro.  Thanks for all the support - which outnumbers criticism by about 20:1.

I don't care about journal impact factors but I do care about visibility

There's been a fair bit of discussion about Clarivate's decision to pause inclusion of eLife publications on the Science Citation Index (e.g. on Research Professional).  What I find exasperating is that most of the discussion focuses on a single consequence - loss of eLife's impact factor.  For authors, there are graver consequences.   

I've reviewed for eLife but never published there; however, I have published a lot in Wellcome Open Research, which is another journal that aimed to disrupt the traditional publishing model, and has some similarities with eLife.  Wellcome Open Research has never been included in Science Citation Index, despite the fact that it uses peer review.  Wellcome Open Research has an unconventional model whereby submitted papers are immediately published, as a kind of pre-print prior to peer review, and then updated after peer review.  It is true that some papers don't get sufficient approval to proceed to the peer-reviewed stage; the distinction between those that do and do not pass peer review is clearly flagged on the article.  In addition to peer review, Wellcome Open Research maintains some quality control by limiting eligibility to researchers funded by Wellcome.  

 

When Wellcome Open Research started up, all Wellcome-funded researchers were encouraged to publish there.  As someone committed to Open Research, this seemed a great idea.  There were no publication charges, and everything was open: access to the publication, data, and peer review. Peer reviewers even get DOIs for their reviews, some of which are worth citing in their own right.  I was increasingly adopting open practices, and I think some of my best peer-reviewed work is published there. 

 

I was shocked when I discovered that the journal wasn't included in Web of Science. I remember preparing a progress report for Wellcome and using Web of Science to check I hadn't omitted any publications.  I was puzzled that I seemed to have published far less than I remembered. Then it became clear: everything in Wellcome Open Research was missing. 

 

I was on the Advisory Board for Wellcome Open Research at the time, and raised this with them. They were shocked that I was upset.  "We thought you of all people didn't care about impact factors", they said. This, of course, was true. But I did care a lot about my work being visible.  I was also aware that any WOS-based H-index would exclude all the papers listed below: not a big deal for me, but potentially harmful to junior authors.  

 

The reply I got was similar to the argument being made by eLife  - well, the articles are indexed in Google Scholar and PubMed.  That was really little consolation to me, given that I had relied heavily on Web of Science in my own literature searches, believing that it screened out dodgy journals. (This belief turns out to be false - there are many journals featured in WoS that are very low quality, which just rubs salt into the wound).  

 

I have some criticisms of eLife's publishing model, but I would like them to succeed. We urgently need alternatives to the traditional journal model operated by the big commercial publishers.  Their response to the open access movement has been to monetise it, with catastrophic consequences for science, as an unlimited supply of shoddy and fake work gets published - often in journals that are indexed in Web of Science.

 

I agree that we need an index of published academic work that has some quality control.  Whether alternatives like OpenAlex will do the job remains to be seen. 

 

Papers that aren't indexed on Web of Science

Bishop, D. V. M., & Bates, T. C. (2020). Heritability of language laterality assessed by functional transcranial Doppler ultrasound: A twin study. Wellcome Open Research, 4, 161. https://doi.org/10.12688/wellcomeopenres.15524.3

Bishop, D. V. M., Brookman-Byrne, A., Gratton, N., Gray, E., Holt, G., Morgan, L., Morris, S., Paine, E., Thornton, H., & Thompson, P. A. (2019). Language phenotypes in children with sex chromosome trisomies. Wellcome Open Research, 3, 143. https://doi.org/10.12688/wellcomeopenres.14904.2

Bishop, D. V. M., Grabitz, C. R., Harte, S. C., Watkins, K. E., Sasaki, M., Gutierrez-Sigut, E., MacSweeney, M., Woodhead, Z. V. J., & Payne, H. (2021). Cerebral lateralisation of first and second languages in bilinguals assessed using functional transcranial Doppler ultrasound. Wellcome Open Research, 1, 15. https://doi.org/10.12688/wellcomeopenres.9869.2

Frizelle, P., Thompson, P. A., Duta, M., & Bishop, D. V. M. (2019). The understanding of complex syntax in children with Down syndrome. Wellcome Open Research, 3, 140. https://doi.org/10.12688/wellcomeopenres.14861.2

Newbury, D. F., Simpson, N. H., Thompson, P. A., & Bishop, D. V. M. (2018). Stage 1 Registered Report: Variation in neurodevelopmental outcomes in children with sex chromosome trisomies: protocol for a test of the double hit hypothesis. Wellcome Open Research, 3, 10. https://doi.org/10.12688/wellcomeopenres.13828.2

Newbury, D. F., Simpson, N. H., Thompson, P. A., & Bishop, D. V. M. (2021). Stage 2 Registered Report: Variation in neurodevelopmental outcomes in children with sex chromosome trisomies: testing the double hit hypothesis. Wellcome Open Research, 3, 85. 

https://doi.org/10.12688/wellcomeopenres.14677.4

Pritchard, V. E., Malone, S. A., Burgoyne, K., Heron-Delaney, M., Bishop, D. V. M., & Hulme, C. (2019). Stage 2 Registered Report: There is no appreciable relationship between strength of hand preference and language ability in 6- to 7-year-old children. Wellcome Open Research, 4, 81. https://doi.org/10.12688/wellcomeopenres.15254.1

Thompson, P. A., Bishop, D. V. M., Eising, E., Fisher, S. E., & Newbury, D. F. (2020). Generalized Structured Component Analysis in candidate gene association studies: Applications and limitations. Wellcome Open Research, 4, 142. https://doi.org/10.12688/wellcomeopenres.15396.2

Wilson, A. C., & Bishop, D. V. M. (2019). ‘If you catch my drift...’: Ability to infer implied meaning is distinct from vocabulary and grammar skills. Wellcome Open Research, 4, 68. https://doi.org/10.12688/wellcomeopenres.15210.3

Wilson, A. C., King, J., & Bishop, D. V. M. (2019). Autism and social anxiety in children with sex chromosome trisomies: An observational study. Wellcome Open Research, 4, 32. https://doi.org/10.12688/wellcomeopenres.15095.2

Woodhead, Z. V. J., Rutherford, H. A., & Bishop, D. V. M. (2020). Measurement of language laterality using functional transcranial Doppler ultrasound: A comparison of different tasks. Wellcome Open Research, 3, 104. https://doi.org/10.12688/wellcomeopenres.14720.3

 

 

 

What is going on at the Journal of Psycholinguistic Research?

Last week this blog focussed on problems affecting Scientific Reports, a mega-journal published by Springer Nature. This week I look at a journal at the opposite end of the spectrum, the Journal of Psycholinguistic Research (JPR), a small, specialist journal which has published just 2187 papers since it was founded in 1971. This is fewer than Scientific Reports publishes in one year. It was brought to my attention by Anna Abalkina because it shows every sign of having been targeted by one or more Eastern European paper mills.

Now, this was really surprising to me. JPR was founded in 1971 by Robert Rieber, whose obituaries in the New York Times  and the American Psychologist confirm he had a distinguished career (though both misnamed JPR!). The Advisory and Editorial boards of the journal are peppered with names of famous linguists and psychologists, starting with Noam Chomsky. So there is a sense that if this can happen to JPR, no journal is safe.

Coincidentally, last week Anna and I submitted revisions for a commentary on paper mills coauthored with Pawel Matusz. (You can read the preprint here). Pawel is editor of the journal Mind, Brain & Education (MBE), which experienced an attack by the Tanu.pro paper mill involving papers published in 2022-3. In the commentary, we discussed characteristics of the paper mill, which are rather distinctive and quite different from what is seen in basic biomedical or physical sciences. A striking feature is that the IMRaD structure (Introduction, Methods, Results and Discussion) is used, but in a clueless fashion, with these headings being inserted in what is otherwise a rambling and discursive piece of text, that typically has little or no empirical content. Insofar as there are any methods described, they don't occur in the methods section, and they are too vague for the research to be replicable.

Reading these papers rapidly turns my brain to mush, but in the interest of public service I did wade through five of them and left comments on Pubpeer:  

Yeleussizkyzy, M., Zhiyenbayeva, N., Ushatikova, I. et al. E-Learning and Flipped Classroom in Inclusive Education: The Case of Students with the Psychopathology of Language and Cognition. J Psycholinguist Res 52, 2721–2742 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10936-023-10015-y  

https://pubpeer.com/publications/7C9B4538A07EE8777082D63B2944B9 

Snezhko, Z., Yersultanova, G., Spichak, V. et al. Effects of Bilingualism on Students’ Linguistic Education: Specifics of Teaching Phonetics and Lexicology. J Psycholinguist Res 52, 2693–2720 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10936-023-10016-x

https://pubpeer.com/publications/09F57870A7D20BF5F77C53F414449F 

Nurakenova, A., Nagymzhanova, K. A Study of Psychological Features Related to Creative Thinking Styles of University Students. J Psycholinguist Res 53, 1 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10936-024-10042-3

https://pubpeer.com/publications/A1FB870AD77F1D07D34B9BF9AEEFF3 

Auganbayeva, M., Turguntayeva, G., Anafinova, M. et al.Linguacultural and Cognitive Peculiarities of Linguistic Universals. J Psycholinguist Res 53, 3 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10936-024-10050-3

https://pubpeer.com/publications/06DD63C96B4D7C74DAC8AB72F18A34 

Shalkarbek, A., Kalybayeva, K., Shaharman, G. et al. Cognitive Linguistic Analysis of Hyperbole-based Phraseological Expressions in Kazakh and English Languages. J Psycholinguist Res 53, 4 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10936-024-10052-1

https://pubpeer.com/publications/D52E26EE9DE5F83EA07B6B9917A645#1

My experience with the current batch of papers suggests that a relatively quick way of screening a submitted paper would be to look at the Methods section. This should contain an account of methods that would indicate what was done and how, at a level of detail sufficient for others to replicate the work. Obviously, this is not appropriate for theoretical papers, but for those purporting to report empirical work, it would work well, at least for the papers I looked at in JPR.   

All of these papers have authors from Kazakhstan, sometimes with co-authors from the Russian Federation. This led me to look at the geographic distribution of authors in the journal over time. The top countries represented by JPR authors in 2020 onwards are China (113), United States (68), Iran (52), Germany (28), Saudi Arabia (22) and Kazakhstan (19). However, these composite numbers mask striking trends. All the Kazakhstan authored papers are in 2023-2024. There's also a notable fall-off in papers authored by USA-based authors in the same time period, with only 11 cases in total. This is quite remarkable for a journal that had a striking USA dominance in authors up until around 2015, as shown in the attached figure (screenshot from Dimensions.ai).

 

Number of papers in JPR from five top countries: 2005-2024

Exported: October 20, 2024

Criteria: Source Title is Journal of Psycholinguistic Research.

© 2024 Digital Science and Research Solutions Inc. All rights reserved. 

Non-commercial redistribution / external re-use of this work is permitted subject to appropriate acknowledgement. 

This work is sourced from Dimensions® at www.dimensions.ai.

Whenever a paper mill infestation is discovered, it raises the question of how it happened. Surely the whole purpose of peer review is to prevent low quality or fraudulent material entering the literature? In other journals where this has happened it has been found that the peer review process was compromised, with fake peer reviewers being used. Even so, one would have hoped that an editor would scrutinize papers and realise something was amiss. As mentioned in the previous blogpost, it would be much easier to track down the ways in which fraudulent papers get into mainstream journals if the journal reported information about the editor who handled the paper, and published open peer review.

Whatever the explanation, it is saddening to see a fine journal brought so low. In 2021, at the 50th anniversary of the founding of the journal, the current editor, Rafael Art. Javier, wrote a tribute to his predecessor, Robert Rieber:

"His expectation, as stated in that first issue, was that manuscripts accepted 'must add to knowledge in some way, whether they are in the form of experimental reports, review papers, or theoretical papers...and studies with negative results,' provided that they are of sufficiently high quality to make an original contribution."

Let us hope that the scourge of paper mills can be banished from the journal to allow it to be restored to the status it once had, and for Robert Rieber's words to once more be applicable.