Journals examines academic publishing itself: peer review, editorial practice, open access and the economics of getting research into print.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Universities now bundle journal subscriptions and open-access fees into single contracts, and by 2025 Europe had signed several hundred of them.
Open access moved publishing costs from library subscriptions to author-side fees, and the average APC now runs from a few hundred dollars to well over ten thousand.
The registered-reports format moves the acceptance decision to before data collection, locking in methods and analysis plans to keep negative results publishable.
Anonymizing authors from reviewers is meant to strip bias from publishing, but leaks, statistical guessing, and the sheer scale of modern papers limit what blinding can do.