"Big Government and Big Money has captured science and strangled it."

Major scientific publisher in mass retraction of over 11,300 journal articles.

A week ago or so I restacked the below piece by Carl Heneghan and Tom Jefferson with the introduction:

Thank you to Tom and Carl for this astonishing story I hadn't heard about before.

In brief: One of the largest scientific publishers (Wiley) bought another publisher (Hindawi) for $300m.

Once it had opened the bonnet it suspended publication "due to the presence in certain special issues of compromised articles".

Ultimately, it withdrew more than 8,000¹ papers having "identified hundreds of bad actors present in our portfolio", before canning the brand.

As Tom and Carl point out, scientific / medical articles like these are highly influential in terms of treatment choices made by doctors and patients.

I would also imagine that they have potential to heavily influence regulators too - especially since they seem to have given up looking at source data these days.

A Pandemic of Retractions

To read more on this, I’d recommend this post by an Australian blogger known as JoNova:

As the blogger notes, the scientific publishing market is worth around $30b. No industry of that size is immune to corruption, and it appears this is no exception.

1. That was an earlier estimate. It’s now 11,300 articles. 19 journals have been shut down.