Is It Time to Protect the Public Interest in Research?

In the world of research, journal publishers are occasionally compelled to “retract” a published article. It may contain errors that posting a “correction” won’t sufficiently address, may utilize falsified data, may have been published elsewhere, may have been plagiarized, or may have been otherwise compromised. Yet the retracted paper does not disappear. It retains its place in the journal, while being stamped “Retracted” on page after page, along with an explanation. This reflects how the act of publication, when it comes to research, constitutes the official record. Publication is “performative,” according to speech act theory, like naming a ship or pronouncing a couple married. Publication doesn’t report; it constitutes science and scholarship.

The retraction, then, is a healthy self-correcting means of maintaining the integrity of the scholarly record. Mistakes happen and peer reviewers miss them on occasion. Twenty-two Nobel Prize winners have retracted papers. It can be at the author’s request, but is more often through the diligence of careful readers. Honest errors account for a fifth of the retractions according to one study, while almost half are attributed to data manipulation and plagiarism.

Retractions exemplify the academic profession’s long-term policing and responsible maintenance of the scholarly record. Yet, I wish to raise a couple of recent turns that suggest it may be time to consider a measure of legal oversight around research misconduct that comes to light through retractions. I am already on record for advocating copyright reforms that support open access to research, given how that will promote the progress of science (to borrow the US constitutional phrasing “warranting copyright”). This would be a related initiative, also geared to digital-era pursuit of open science that would also begin with a legal recognition of “research publications” as a distinct category of work. In Canadian copyright law, for example, works in the “scientific domain” fall within the “literary, dramatic, musical and artistic work.” This does the academy and the public a disservice.

What first concerned me about the state of research integrity and retractions came last year when it became clear that in 2023, over 10,000 papers were retracted, far exceeding the total of any previous year. The biggest source of retractions was the publisher Hindawi. A good portion of those retractions involved the journals’ “special issues” handled by “guest editors,” that enabled the publisher to increase publication rates and profitability due to the author fees required for open access, leading to its acquisition by the giant publisher WIley.

The guest editors appear to have accepted papers without peer review from “paper mills” that sell authorship positions on fabricated papers, often with the help of AI. The publisher had its eyes on the wrong goals. It has now lost $35-40 million (USD) in revenue and will, as a result, ban “several hundred” of the offending guest editors from Wiley journals, with no consequences for the so-called “authors.” This, to me, speaks to the need to explore federal regulation and other legal measures designed to protect the scholarly record, as well as the public and professions, from being exposed to such flagrant abuse and inattention in the quality of research publications.

After all, public oversight is applied to other research-related areas, such as Canada Health’s drug approval process or the Canada’s Drug Agency which provides “Canada’s health system leaders with independent evidence and advice” based on research. And Canada’s Food and Drugs Act (1984) protects consumers by, for example, forbidding advertising of “any food, drug, cosmetic or device to the general public as a treatment, preventative or cure.” The digital era has brought about a level of public and professional access to research that now includes a majority of the recent literature. The public interest in research integrity may now warrant a new level of scrutiny and protection.

A second instance involves the infamous 1998 Lancet study (open to see a retracted paper) of 12 children, by Andrew Wakefield and colleagues, linking autism and childhood vaccines. It took ten years for the journal to retract this deeply flawed case study. Another decade and a half later, and Robert F. Kennedy Jr., in the process of being confirmed as Secretary of Health for the United States, held up a paper published a week earlier on January 23, 2025, that again attempts to affirm the autism-vaccine link. The study was funded by an anti-vax organization and appeared in a “journal” that the National Library of Medicine’s Medline and other respected indexes do not index. This is work that could well end up endangering childrens’ lives in its reinforcement of Kennedy’s policies.

This is neither a freedom of speech nor an academic freedom issue. The issue is using the scholarly record to knowingly publish – or profit from the publishing of – junk science. It places the state of knowledge and the human benefits derived from it at risk. It strikes me as time for the scientific community, policymakers, and public interest groups to consider how they might work together to develop model legislation that specifies reasonable legal and professional processes and consequences for protecting the scholarly record, as well as the public, from research malfeasance.