The case of the fake references in an ethics journal; Retraction Watch, December 2, 2025

 Retraction Watch ; The case of the fake references in an ethics journal

"Many would-be whistleblowers write to us about papers with nonexistent references, possibly hallucinated by artificial intelligence. One reader recently alerted us to fake references in … an ethics journal. In an article about whistleblowing.

The paper, published in April in the Journal of Academic Ethics, explored “the whistleblowing experiences of individuals with disabilities in Ethiopian public educational institutions.” 

Erja Moore, an independent researcher based in Finland, came across the article while looking into a whistleblowing case in that country. “I started reading this article and found some interesting references that I decided to read as well,” Moore told Retraction Watch. “To my surprise, those articles didn’t exist.”...

The Journal of Academic Ethics is published by Springer Nature. Eleven of the fabricated references cite papers in the Journal of Business Ethics — another Springer Nature title.

“On one hand this is hilarious that an ethics journal publishes this, but on the other hand it seems that this is a much bigger problem in publishing and we can’t really trust scientific articles any more,” Moore said."

Major German Universities Cancel Elsevier Contracts; The Scientist, July 17, 2017

Diana Kwon, The Scientist; Major German Universities Cancel Elsevier Contracts

"In Germany, the fight for open access and favorable pricing for journals is getting heated. At the end of last month (June 30), four major academic institutions in Berlin announced that they would not renew their subscriptions with the Dutch publishing giant Elsevier once they end this December. Then on July 7, nine universities in Baden-Württemberg, another large German state, also declared their intention to cancel their contracts with the publisher at the end of 2017.

These institutions join around 60 others across the country that allowed their contracts to expire last year.

The decision to cancel subscriptions was made in order to put pressure on Elsevier during ongoing negotiations. “Nobody wants Elsevier to starve—they should be paid fairly for their good service,” says Ursula Flitner, the head of the medical library at Charité–Berlin University of Medicine. “The problem is, we no longer see what their good service is.”

Charité–Berlin University of Medicine is joined by Humboldt University of Berlin, Free University of Berlin, and Technical University of Berlin in letting its Elsevier subscriptions lapse.

“The general issue is that large parts of the research done is publicly funded, the type setting and quality control [peer review] is done by people who are paid by the public, [and] the purchase of the journals is also paid by the public,” says Christian Thomsen, the president of the Technical University of Berlin. “So it’s a bit too much payment.”

Project DEAL, an alliance of German institutions led by the Hochschulrektorenkonferenz (German Rectors’ Conference), has been working to establish a new nationwide licensing agreement with three major scientific publishers, Elsevier, Springer Nature, and Wiley, since 2016."