News Round-Up
15 April 2025
by Toby Young
Revealed: Why UK Electricity Costs So Much
15 April 2025
by Sallust
A U.S. Government scientist and leading authority on Alzheimer's and Parkinson's published faked images in papers on the diseases, a Government report has claimed.
Academic publishing has become a racket, says Dr. David Livermore. Authors pay thousands to get their articles in, editors and referees are practically slave-labour, but publishing houses like Elsevier are raking it in.
Scientific peer-review is failing science, says Peter Civan. After peer-reviewing papers for 10 years, Dr Civan says he is no longer willing to support a system that serves only the interests of publishing businesses.
In a new peer-reviewed study, Japanese researcher Dr. Yasusi Suzumura finds a massive safety signal for deaths associated with mRNA vaccines in the 10 days following inoculation.
A study claiming the 2014 Maidan massacre was a false-flag attack by the Ukrainian far-right was rejected from a journal after initially being accepted. According to both reviewers, the paper was "excellent".
Lancet Editor Richard Horton has said: "We know that the system of peer review is biased, unjust, unaccountable, usually ignorant and frequently wrong." And that was before Covid came along.
Norwegian social scientists were asked to evaluate a piece of research. When the research had a left-wing conclusion, the social scientists rated it as significantly higher quality and more important.
How much can we trust peer review? A new study finds that only 23% of reviewers say "reject" when a paper has a Nobel Prize winner on it, but 65% say "reject" when the same paper is authored by an unknown researcher.
Editors of scientific journals are already being duped into publishing fake research papers written by AIs. But with the rapid improvement in AIs, the problem is about to get much worse. What are they doing about it?
Once more, a 'peer-reviewed' journal has to retract a bunch of papers because they are literally nonsense – generated by a computer algorithm. Why aren't publishers getting on top of this discreditable problem?
© Skeptics Ltd.