Replies

• 

  Sylvia Wenmackers 🦉🍀SylviaFysica@scholar.social

  Aug 16, 2026, 4:38 PM

  There was also this piece in the Conversation in Jan: https://theconversation.com/when-science-discourages-correction-how-publishers-profit-from-mistakes-272657

  And one of the authors of yet another Matters Arising
  https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-023-05865-4 (that took 'merely' 10mo) wrote elseweb https://bsky.app/profile/mattrich.bsky.social/post/3mt2trgb36s2k:
  "In my experience, Nature wants to make Matters Arising as frustrating as possible to publish to cover their own asses. They limit scope, give the original authors excessive leeway for response, etc."
  "TBH, they were likely successful in convincing me to never do it again"
  😩

  💬 1🔄 3⭐ 2
• 

  James Hawley, PhDjrhawley@scholar.social

  Aug 17, 2026, 3:31 AM

  @SylviaFysica My PhD lab had an impossible hard time making a minor correction for one of their own papers (an accession number for a data repository was wrong). It never got fixed in the 5 years I was there.

  I wanted to write a Matters Arising a couple years ago for a paper that was clearly incorrect, but found the process was going to be way too hard. So I just wrote a blog post and posted the criticism on @PubPeer.

  I even emailed the authors several times and never heard back

  💬 2🔄 1⭐ 0
• 

  James Hawley, PhDjrhawley@scholar.social

  Aug 17, 2026, 3:33 AM

  @SylviaFysica I can't help but agree with you that the end result of the criticism-and-rebuttal system many big publishers have essentially discourages publishing criticism at all

  💬 1🔄 0⭐ 0
• 

  Sylvia Wenmackers 🦉🍀SylviaFysica@scholar.social

  Aug 17, 2026, 9:17 AM

  @jrhawley I'm glad we didn't fully realize this when we submitted it, or we probably wouldn't have either.
  So, I'm a bit in two minds about sharing our story: I don't want to discourage others who might be willing to call out errors in papers with big publishers, but it does require more attention to change these procedures...

  💬 0🔄 0⭐ 0
• 

  Sylvia Wenmackers 🦉🍀SylviaFysica@scholar.social

  Aug 17, 2026, 9:13 AM

  @jrhawley I remember a time when I wanted to flag a mistake in my own first paper and my supervisors didn't agree. They claimed that literature moved forward by ignoring (not citing) mistaken stuff. I was disappointed but wanted to believe them, it did make sense.
  Only much later (after moving to philosophy of science) I learned that even retracted papers still gather citations!
  I made clear in a few later papers what the issue might have been in the first one, so at least it's "on the record".

  💬 1🔄 0⭐ 0
• 

  James Hawley, PhDjrhawley@scholar.social

  Aug 17, 2026, 11:27 AM

  @SylviaFysica I've heard this reasoning about citations, too, but that never sat well with me. I've seen people cite (or not cite) other papers for all kinds of reasons, and yeah, people cite retracted papers without realizing it.

  I feel that relying on a lack of citations instead of issuing corrections is misleading. You can't tell if a paper isn't cited because it's fine but no one liked it, or it was misunderstood at the time, or just not in a widely read journal, etc.

  💬 1🔄 0⭐ 0
• 

  James Hawley, PhDjrhawley@scholar.social

  Aug 17, 2026, 11:31 AM

  @SylviaFysica To me, it leaves too much inferred. A non-expert like a journalist, new graduate student, or general member of the public, isn't going to know these "signals". They can easily misinterpret what's in a paper or how others feel about it. The only people who will know these signals are the academics who've been around for a while, and even they'll get it wrong.

  I guess it feels like invisible gate keeping to me, instead of actually working constructively with your colleagues

  💬 1🔄 0⭐ 0
• 

  James Hawley, PhDjrhawley@scholar.social

  Aug 17, 2026, 11:36 AM

  @SylviaFysica I don't want to blame professors in particular, since they're overloaded enough as is. But it feels like for-profit publishers don't want to spend the money fixing old stuff when they could be making money publishing new stuff people will read. So, intentionally or not, they make it hard to issue corrections.

  And then academics reverse engineer a logic that's convincing enough to not require themselves to do anything about it, instead of confronting the publishers' bad behaviour

  💬 1🔄 0⭐ 0
• 

  James Hawley, PhDjrhawley@scholar.social

  Aug 17, 2026, 11:40 AM

  @SylviaFysica It's good that you tried to publish something, referring to your old work. There's at least something to point to, if anyone were to ever question it or read your other papers

  💬 1🔄 0⭐ 0
• 

  Sylvia Wenmackers 🦉🍀SylviaFysica@scholar.social

  Aug 17, 2026, 11:41 AM

  @jrhawley At the time, I also mentioned it at talks etc. And that paper is effectively 'dead wood' now (not being cited anymore).

  💬 0🔄 0⭐ 0