Subject file

Journals: Studies and Scholarship

Journals examines academic publishing itself: peer review, editorial practice, open access and the economics of getting research into print.

Journals

The Peer Review System, Explained From Both Sides

Who picks the reviewers, what the anonymity models hide, and how an editor turns three reports into one decision.

By Clara Bennett • September 29, 2026

Journals

Retraction Watch: Why Papers Get Pulled and What It Teaches

A retraction is not a erasure. It is a public record of where the checking failed — and reading it closely teaches more about how science works than most clean results do.

By Clara Bennett • September 25, 2026

Journals

What 71 Families Told Researchers About Choosing a Free Preschool

A qualitative study of Multnomah County's Preschool for All finds that free tuition solves one problem and creates a harder one: the compromise.

By Clara Bennett • September 22, 2026

Journals

Special Issues: How Guest-Edited Volumes Work, and How They Get Hijacked

Guest-edited special issues concentrate a journal's authority in one scholar's network — which makes them efficient science and efficient fraud when the wrong guest editor arrives.

By Clara Bennett • August 1, 2026

Journals

Can Reviewers Use AI? What Journals Actually Allow Now

Most major publishers permit large language models to polish a reviewer's prose but forbid feeding confidential manuscripts into chatbots — and detection of secret AI use remains unreliable.

By Clara Bennett • July 9, 2026

Journals

How a Scientific Paper Gets Retracted, and Why It Takes So Long

More than 10,000 papers were retracted in 2023 alone, a record year, yet the median case still takes months or years to move from suspicion to formal withdrawal.

By Clara Bennett • June 16, 2026

Journals

Preprints Changed Who Controls Scientific Priority

arXiv passed 2.5 million papers, bioRxiv and medRxiv add tens of thousands more each quarter, and journal review now trails public exposure by months.

By Clara Bennett • May 25, 2026

Journals

Why the Journal Impact Factor Lost Its Scientific Defenders

The San Francisco Declaration now carries more than 25,000 signatures, and the EU-backed COARA coalition has made metric reform official policy across European research.

By Clara Bennett • May 2, 2026

Journals

Predatory Journals: Nine Red Flags Before You Submit a Paper

Publishing frauds now outnumber legitimate checks, with tens of thousands of suspect articles a year; a consistent checklist catches most of them before any fee is paid.

By Clara Bennett • April 9, 2026

Journals

Transformative Agreements: One Contract for Reading and Publishing

Universities now bundle journal subscriptions and open-access fees into single contracts, and by 2025 Europe had signed several hundred of them.

By Clara Bennett • March 17, 2026