Planet Neuroscientists

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'Jumping genes’ help scientists resolve tree of life

in OIST Japan on 2025-12-15 12:00:00 UTC.

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Expanding the Professional and Career Development (PCD) Program at OIST — A New Chapter in PhD Talent Development, Made Possible with J-PEAKS Support

in OIST Japan on 2025-12-15 12:00:00 UTC.

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Frameshift: Shari Wiseman reflects on her pivot from science to publishing

in The Transmitter on 2025-12-15 05:00:55 UTC.

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How basic neuroscience has paved the path to new drugs

in The Transmitter on 2025-12-15 05:00:10 UTC.

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Trump Officials Keep Comparing the U.S.’s Vaccine Schedule to Denmark’s. They’re Missing the Point

The U.S.’s and Denmark’s health systems are starkly different, so it makes sense that their vaccination schedules would differ, too

in Scientific American on 2025-12-14 13:00:00 UTC.

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Episode 322 - Matthew Goodwin, PhD

On December 8, 2025 we spoke with Dr. Matthew Goodwin about the use of wearable biosensor technology and machine learning to improve behavioral evaluation of autism, to provide real time alerts for caregivers and more effective interventions before the onset of potentially dangerous behavioral situations.

Guest:

Matthew Goodwin, Professor and Associate Chair of Research at the Department of Public Health and Health Sciences and the Khouri College of Computer Sciences, at Northeastern University.

Participating:

Leslie Neeley, Director of the Child and Adolescent Policy Research Institute, and Associate Director of the Brain Health Consortium, UTSA

Host:

Charles Wilson, Department of Neuroscience, Developmental and Regenerative Biology, UTSA

Thanks to James Tepper for original music

in Neuroscientists talk shop on 2025-12-13 18:08:14 UTC.

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How Conifers and Christmas Trees Secretly Shaped U.S. History

Christmas trees—and conifers in general—have made some surprising cameos throughout U.S. history, author Trent Preszler reveals in his book Evergreen

in Scientific American on 2025-12-13 13:00:00 UTC.

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Why Humanoid Robots and Embodied AI Still Struggle in the Real World

General-purpose robots remain rare not for a lack of hardware but because we still can’t give machines the physical intuition humans learn through experience

in Scientific American on 2025-12-13 12:00:00 UTC.

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Weekend reads: Springer Nature retracts papers using ‘bonkers’ dataset; preprint server welcomes AI authors; ethics editors’ COI disclosures ‘insufficient’

Dear RW readers, we look forward to wrapping up the week with Weekend Reads. If you enjoy it too, please consider showing your support with a tax-deductible donation. 

The week at Retraction Watch featured:

• How to juice your Google Scholar h-index, preprint by preprint
• One of Kazakhstan’s top nuclear physicists also leads his nation in retractions
• COPE’s involvement leads to retraction of paper on homeopathy for lung cancer
• Journal removes funding statement from hormone therapy paper without issuing correction

Did you know that Retraction Watch and the Retraction Watch Database are  projects of The Center of Scientific Integrity?  Others include the Medical Evidence Project, the Hijacked Journal Checker, and the Sleuths in Residence Program. Help support this work.   

Here’s what was happening elsewhere (some of these items may be paywalled, metered access, or require free registration to read):

• “Springer Nature retracts, removes nearly 40 publications that trained neural networks on ‘bonkers’ dataset.”
• “A new preprint server welcomes papers written and reviewed by AI.”
• “Only 2%” of sampled ethics journals “disclosed potential COIs for their editors,” study finds. 
• “Artificial intelligence research has a slop problem, academics say: ‘It’s a mess.’”
• Removing papers for fraud or ethical flaws “runs against the grain of the library logic,” say researchers: “one does not burn a book for being questionable.”
• “One Retracted Study Doesn’t Cancel Climate Science.” A link to our coverage of the retraction.
• “Should Australia establish an independent body to investigate scientific misconduct?”
• “More A than I: Testing for Large Language Model Plagiarism in Political Science.”
• “The hidden ethics crisis in Australian health research funding”: “how researcher salaries are costed.”
• “Self-reflection enhances large language models towards substantial academic response” in peer review.
• American Economic Association imposes lifelong ban on Harvard’s Lawrence Summers for his associations with Jeffrey Epstein.
• “Academic Publishing Is Not Fit for the Future – If We Don’t Act Now, The Vital Role Research Plays in Society Is at Risk,” says a director of Cambridge University Press. 
• “This science sleuth revealed a retraction crisis at Indian universities.”
• “Global Ecosystems of Scholarship: The Chirality of Publishing Quality and the South African National Research Economy.”
• “AI reviewers are here — we are not ready.”
• For submissions to one AI conference, “ChatGPT Wrote One in Five Reviews (Maybe).”
• “Who Owns the Knowledge? Copyright, GenAI, and the Future of Academic Publishing.”
• “China’s scientific clout is growing as US influence wanes: the data show how.”
• “APC waivers and Ukraine’s publishing output: Evidence from 5 commercial publishers.”
• Researchers find that concerns raised during clinical practice inspections “almost never appear in the medical literature,” including some inspections that “casted doubts on data reliability.”
• “The inconsistent academic peer review process.”
• “Safeguarding the integrity of scientific literature in the 21st century,” an article by Ben Mol and colleagues. 
• “Retraction and Reflection: The Gunung Padang Controversy and the Challenges of Peer Review in Archaeological Prospection.” A link to our coverage on the controversial pyramid paper.
• “Issues arising in post-publication debate should be carried forward systematically and thoroughly to subsequent studies.” Hilda Bastian reflects on the process leading to two new Cochrane reviews on HPV vaccines.
• “Plain language summaries, and why we need them now more than ever.”
• “Conflict of Interest and financial disclosure policies of journals that publish weather and climate research.”
• “Open funder metadata is essential for true research transparency.”
• “Conditions of Academic Journal Censorship Complicity and Resistance in China: An Interview Study.”
• Researcher uses Lithuania as an example of “dismantling domestic journal publishing infrastructure” following a preprint’s call-to-action for re-communalization of academic publishing.
• “There’s no excuse for journals to require formatting.”

Upcoming Talk:

• “Scientific Integrity Challenged by New Editorial Practices,” featuring our Ivan Oransky (February 12, virtual)

Like Retraction Watch? You can make a tax-deductible contribution to support our work, follow us on X or Bluesky, like us on Facebook, follow us on LinkedIn, add us to your RSS reader, or subscribe to our daily digest. If you find a retraction that’s not in our database, you can let us know here. For comments or feedback, email us at team@retractionwatch.com.

in Retraction watch on 2025-12-13 11:00:00 UTC.

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New Cell Transplant Therapy Restores Insulin Production in Patient with Type 1 Diabetes

Scientists have successfully transplanted gene-edited insulin-producing cells into a man with type 1 diabetes—allowing him to make some of his own insulin without immunosuppressants.

in Scientific American on 2025-12-12 21:20:00 UTC.

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What Is 'Spoofing'? How a U.S.-Seized Oil Tanker Reportedly Tried to Evade Detection

An oil tanker seized by the U.S. this week reportedly used a technique that scrambled its location, but new advanced visual tracking can help expose such ships’ true coordinates

in Scientific American on 2025-12-12 18:15:00 UTC.

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Health Experts Slam Possible FDA ‘Black Box’ Warning for COVID Vaccines

The FDA is reportedly considering the addition of high-level warning labels to COVID vaccines, a move that some experts say may cause unfounded concerns over safety

in Scientific American on 2025-12-12 17:45:00 UTC.

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Journal removes funding statement from hormone therapy paper without issuing correction

A Cell Press journal quietly removed part of a funding statement from a paper related to gender-affirming hormone therapy that the authors say was included in error. Experts called the move “worrying.” 

The authors of the paper, which appeared in Cell Reports on September 23, gave estrogen therapy to male monkeys to better understand how hormone therapies used in gender clinics might affect the immune system. 

The research drew attention from several conservative news organizations, some of which called the project “disturbing” and alleged the work cost millions of dollars in National Institutes of Health funding. 

An archived version of the paper dated October 6 included a state-funded grant, which is no longer listed in the acknowledgement. The removed statement read: 

The study was further supported by a pilot award by the HIV/AIDS and Emerging Infectious Diseases Institute (HEIDI) at the University of Miami through the State of Florida Funding Initiative (M.A.M.) sponsored by the State of Florida, Department of Health (award contract #CODVD to M. Stevenson).

Corresponding author Mauricio Martins is a researcher at the Herbert Wertheim Scripps Institute for Biomedical Innovation and Technology at the University of Florida in Jupiter. Martins told Retraction Watch the statement was “inadvertently carried over from a different paper published around the same time” and that the Florida Department of Health grant supported another project unrelated to the Cell Reports paper.

When asked specifically whether the university or the state of Florida asked him to remove the statement, Martins replied they did not. “Once I realized that the HEIDI funding statement in the Cell Reports paper was incorrect, I asked the journal to correct it,” he said. 

Martins did not respond to our question asking which paper the funding statement originally belonged to. But another article he coauthored in August in Mary Ann Liebert’s AIDS Research and Human Retroviruses received a correction this month to add the HEIDI grant to the funding statement. The article, reporting on an HIV-related immunological experiment in monkeys, shares three other coauthors with the Cell Reports paper. 

The HEIDI award is a state-funded pilot grant given to research on HIV/AIDS at the University of Miami’s Miller School of Medicine. The award’s website no longer lists previous recipients of the grant, but according to an archived version of the website, Martins received the grant in the 2022-2023, 2021-2022 and 2017-2018 award cycles. 

HEIDI director Mario Stevenson, who was named in the now-removed text, did not respond to a request for comment on whether he was aware of the paper or asked that the funding statement be removed. (He is not a coauthor on the Cell Reports study.) The Florida Department of Health also did not respond to questions on whether they were aware of the study or the funding statement.

When we asked why Cell Reports, owned by Elsevier, did not issue a correction to the article to signal the change, Shawnna Buttery, the editor-in-chief, told us their policy “considers grant and funder details to be non-scientific content of great importance to authors and their funders but not of interest to our readers, and our policy is to make such changes without requiring a Correction notice.”

Mohammad Hosseini, who teaches research ethics at Northwestern University in Chicago, disagreed with that assessment. “If, as they say, the funding statement was only useful for the authors and funders, then there would be no reason to disclose funding information,” he told us. “I believe that the change warranted a correction and cannot really get my head around why the journal or the publisher decided against it.” 

Andrew Grey at the University of Auckland, who has previously written for Retraction Watch, called Buttery’s statement “worrying.” 

“The authors made an error, which has been corrected. Readers should be made aware of the correction. It’s a straightforward matter to do so,” Grey said.

Funding disclosures are “pretty central to research integrity in a publication,” Lisa Rasmussen, the editor-in-chief of Accountability in Research, told us. “If funding declarations can be made to disappear after publication with no record, it’s easy to imagine how this could go wrong given particular political or other pressures.” 

Journals have been called out before for making changes without noting them in a correction. Last year, a team of researchers found 131 articles with what they called “stealth corrections,” changes to author information, figures or data, editorial process records, or other alterations — including to funding statements.

Like Retraction Watch? You can make a tax-deductible contribution to support our work, follow us on X or Bluesky, like us on Facebook, follow us on LinkedIn, add us to your RSS reader, or subscribe to our daily digest. If you find a retraction that’s not in our database, you can let us know here. For comments or feedback, email us at team@retractionwatch.com.

in Retraction watch on 2025-12-12 14:46:31 UTC.

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‘Black Religion in the Madhouse’ examines psychiatry and race post-Civil War

in Science News: Health & Medicine on 2025-12-12 14:00:00 UTC.

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Photos Reveal Moths Sipping Tears from a Moose

Moths sometimes drink the tears of other animals, but the behavior has mostly been observed in the tropics. New photographs show only the second observation outside of that area

in Scientific American on 2025-12-12 12:00:00 UTC.

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What Time Is It on Mars?

Precisely calibrating clocks on Mars is harder than you’d think, because of some extremely esoteric physics

in Scientific American on 2025-12-12 11:45:00 UTC.

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AI as the New Empire? Karen Hao Explains the Hidden Costs of OpenAI’s Ambitions

Journalist Karen Hao unpacks the rise of AI “empires,” their ideological roots, and the hidden environmental and societal costs of OpenAI’s quest for artificial general intelligence.

in Scientific American on 2025-12-12 11:00:00 UTC.

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Dispute erupts over universal cortical brain-wave claim

in The Transmitter on 2025-12-12 10:00:12 UTC.

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Schneider Shorts 12.12.2025 – An independent analysis refuting allegations of inappropriate image editing

in For Better Science on 2025-12-12 06:00:00 UTC.

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Waves of calcium activity dictate eye structure in flies

in The Transmitter on 2025-12-12 05:00:22 UTC.

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COVID Vaccines Slashed Kids’ ER Visits by 76 Percent, Study Finds

A report published by the CDC reaffirms the effectiveness of COVID vaccines at preventing severe disease in children

in Scientific American on 2025-12-11 21:10:00 UTC.

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U.S. Approves First Device to Treat Depression with Brain Stimulation at Home

The FDA has approved a device that aims to treat depression by sending electric current into a part of the brain known to regulate mood

in Scientific American on 2025-12-11 19:45:00 UTC.

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Before Flowers Existed, Ancient Cycad Plants Lured Insects with Heat

New research on strange cycad plants offers a glimpse into the prehistoric origins of pollination

in Scientific American on 2025-12-11 19:00:00 UTC.

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U.S. Sunscreens Aren’t Great. The FDA Could Soon Change That

The U.S. is considering allowing bemotrizinol, a highly effective UV filter used throughout Europe and Asia, in its sunscreen products for the first time

in Scientific American on 2025-12-11 17:15:00 UTC.

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Measles Outbreaks Accelerate as U.S. Inches Closer to a Disease Tipping Point

More than 1,900 people, mostly children, have been sickened by measles in the U.S. in 2025. The outbreaks are moving the country toward losing its measles-free status by early next year

in Scientific American on 2025-12-11 16:40:00 UTC.

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Killer Whales and Dolphins May Team Up to Hunt Salmon

Tantalizing observations suggest marine mammals may be teaming up to hunt

in Scientific American on 2025-12-11 16:10:00 UTC.

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COPE’s involvement leads to retraction of paper on homeopathy for lung cancer

A journal that last year corrected a paper claiming to show a homeopathic intervention improved quality of life and survival for people with advanced lung cancer has now retracted the article after the Committee on Publication Ethics got involved in the case. 

The extensive correction and an accompanying editorial, published in September 2024 in The Oncologist, came two years after the Austrian Agency for Scientific Integrity asked the journal to retract the article due to concerns about manipulated data, we reported at the time. 

The retraction notice, published November 24, acknowledged the watchdog agency’s retraction request. It also noted the previous corrections and expression of concern for the article, which originally appeared in October 2020. 

“Subsequent to the two corrections, concerns have continued to be raised about the study,” the notice states. “In light of this continued uncertainty and the issues previously covered in the corrections, the journal no longer has confidence in the results and conclusions reported in the article and has decided to retract.”

Susan Bates, the journal’s editor-in-chief, told Retraction Watch she had no “further detail to provide” beyond what the retraction notice provides. As the journal changed publishers after the article first appeared, the version on the original publisher’s website remains unmarked. 

Concerns about the study go back to shortly after the article was published. Norbert Aust, a retired mechanical engineer who started the Homeopathy Information Network in Germany, and Viktor Weisshäupl, a retired anesthesiologist now working on the Initiative for Scientific Medicine in Austria, first raised concerns in 2021 about how the study was conducted and reported, which led to the official investigation. They told us a formal complaint to COPE — submitted last November and signed by Harald Sitte, a pharmacologist at the Medical University of Vienna — was “the turning point” in getting the journal to act. 

In February, COPE directed The Oncologist to engage with the Austrian Agency for Scientific Integrity and the Medical University of Vienna, where the lead author of the homeopathy study was affiliated. “This marked the first instance in which the journal demonstrated a willingness to participate in a professional dialogue with its critics,” Aust, Weisshäupl, and Sitte told us in a joint statement. Representatives of the journal, the university, and the watchdog agency held a video conference in June, the three critics said. 

Following that meeting, Bates emailed Michael Frass, the lead author of the paper, a homeopathic practitioner who was working at the Medical University of Vienna, at the time the work was published. In the email dated July 29, which Frass shared with us and described on his website, Bates said the meeting had raised three questions for her, which she asked Frass to respond to by August 1. If he did not respond in time or could not “provide satisfactory explanations,” she wrote, “I now feel I will need to retract the paper.” 

Bates asked Frass to address whether the randomized controlled trial included any participants who were originally enrolled in his single-arm study and to disclose the specific homeopathic compounds used in the study, along with their potencies and dosing regimens. Bates also wanted to know if Frass was recommending or prescribing the same compounds to patients in his private practice at the time the journal published the study. 

Frass told Bates the randomized controlled trial did not include any participants who were originally enrolled in the single-arm trial, but also told us he did not understand what she meant, “as I always compare 2 groups as a clinician.”

In his response, Frass directed Bates to two tables in the paper for the homeopathic products used and their potencies. He also wrote, “It would go beyond the scope of this article if I were to list all the compounds of the medicines used.” 

As for his private practice at the time the article was published, “of course” he was recommending and prescribing the same compounds to his patients, Frass wrote to Bates. 

Bates did not respond, Frass said. On October 24, he received an email informing him of the decision to retract the paper, with a draft notice.

The draft notice included two specific reasons for retracting the article that weren’t in the final notice. First, because the homeopathic regimens were tailored to each patient and the paper did not report changes in dosing or potency made throughout the trial, the study’s findings would be “difficult to reproduce.” Second, the draft notice stated, Frass should have disclosed his homeopathic practice as a conflict of interest, as “the same homeopathic medicinal products were being marketed and prescribed” in his clinic during the trial.  

In a response, Frass argued the trial, like others of homeopathy, was designed to assess “the technique itself, not efficacy of the individual medicines.” He maintained a trained homeopathic practitioner could replicate the study with the information provided. “Given that our study has replicated an existing prescribing technique, the argument that it could not be replicated again simply does not hold,” he wrote.

The point regarding his practice as an undisclosed conflict of interest was “unexpected” and “deeply confusing,” Frass wrote to the journal. “No marketing of medicines occurred and there was no conflict of interest of any kind.” Neither he nor any of his coauthors received any funding from the pharmacy that supplied the homeopathic preparations, he told us. 

In a statement of disagreement with the retraction he also submitted, Frass maintained “the study was conducted ethically and rigorously, and the data presented are valid and accurately reported as already confirmed before.” 

“We are surprised that a second attack was possible after the validity of the data had been confirmed” in the journal’s previous investigation, Frass told us. “In court proceedings, the following applies: if a defendant has been acquitted, the case cannot be reopened.” 

Frass and eight other authors disagreed with the retraction, according to the notice. One author agreed, and the remaining five did not comment, according to the notice. 

The retraction published in November “is a long-overdue and necessary step to uphold the integrity of scientific literature,” Aust, Weisshäupl, and Sitte said in their statement. Even still, they called the case “a textbook example of how journals should not deal with criticism from readers.” 

In May 2021, Aust, Weisshäupl, and clinical oncologist Jutta Hübner of Jena University Hospital in Germany submitted a letter to the editor of The Oncologist detailing “some serious concerns that the results are a product of strong biases arising from modifications of the study parameters.” The journal never published the letter or responded to the concerns in it, according to the critics’ statement. 

Last September, the journal invited Sitte to submit a commentary on the matter, which he did in January. The journal sent it out for review but never shared the reviews with Sitte, the critics said. On December 4, the journal rejected the commentary “since the paper has already been retracted,” Weisshäupl told us. He was “not surprised at all” by the journal’s decision, he said. 

Even the corrections didn’t really address the issues the Austrian Agency for Scientific Integrity or the critics raised, their statement to us said. “We got the impression that the journal simply published the lead author’s explanations uncritically.” 

The Oncologist, a publication of the Society for Translational Oncology, switched publishers from Wiley to Oxford University Press in January 2022, after Frass’ article and its first correction were published. The subsequent expression of concern, correction, linked editorial and retraction notices have not been added to Wiley’s original webpage for the article. 

When we previously asked Wiley if the publisher would update the page, a spokesperson for the publisher said their current policy for journals that had moved to another publisher was to “rely on the current publisher to carry any post-publication amendments,” but the company was planning to review the process. 

After the retraction, we again asked Wiley about updating the original page. A spokesperson said the company now follows best practices from the National Information Standards Organisation, which recommend a journal’s current publisher work with its previous publisher to clearly label the article’s status, “especially in instances where the content may be published on both the previous and new publisher sites.” (Disclosure: Our Ivan Oransky was on the working group for those guidelines.)

Wiley received an update about the article from Oxford University Press on December 1, the spokesperson said, and would take action. At the time of posting, Wiley’s version of the article did not include the retraction notice. 

Like Retraction Watch? You can make a tax-deductible contribution to support our work, follow us on X or Bluesky, like us on Facebook, follow us on LinkedIn, add us to your RSS reader, or subscribe to our daily digest. If you find a retraction that’s not in our database, you can let us know here. For comments or feedback, email us at team@retractionwatch.com.

in Retraction watch on 2025-12-11 15:50:00 UTC.

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Strategic Learning: Sustaining Motivation and Well-Being Through Exam Season

in Women in Neuroscience UK on 2025-12-11 15:00:31 UTC.

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J-PEAKS Site Visit: Showcasing OIST’s Innovation and Collaborative Future

in OIST Japan on 2025-12-11 12:00:00 UTC.

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Teen AI Chatbot Usage Sparks Mental Health and Regulation Concerns

A new survey offers the clearest national snapshot yet of how U.S. teens are using artificial intelligence

in Scientific American on 2025-12-11 12:00:00 UTC.

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People Are Using TikTok to Sell Endangered Animals to Eat

TikTok is rapidly growing in Africa and is being used to sell bushmeat, underscoring the role of social media in the global illegal wildlife trade

in Scientific American on 2025-12-11 11:30:00 UTC.

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Beeple’s Art Basel Robot Dogs Satirize Musk, Zuckerberg and Our AI Future

Billionaire-headed machines lampoon tech power and the way our images quietly become fuel for AI

in Scientific American on 2025-12-11 11:00:00 UTC.

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Among brain changes studied in autism, spotlight shifts to subcortex

in The Transmitter on 2025-12-11 05:00:45 UTC.

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Uterine Fibroids Significantly Raise Risk of Heart Disease

In a new study, women diagnosed with these common growths had a more than 80 percent higher risk of developing heart disease over a 10-year period than their peers did

in Scientific American on 2025-12-10 21:00:00 UTC.

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Scientists Explain How mRNA COVID Vaccines May Rarely Cause Myocarditis

A new study identifies a mechanism for how COVID vaccines may, in infrequent cases, drive heart inflammation, a condition that can be caused by the disease itself

in Scientific American on 2025-12-10 19:00:00 UTC.

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Bats might be the next bird flu wild card

in Science News: Health & Medicine on 2025-12-10 18:00:00 UTC.

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NASA Loses Signal from Critical Mars Orbiter

NASA’s MAVEN spacecraft didn’t phone home as expected on December 6

in Scientific American on 2025-12-10 17:00:00 UTC.

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MERS, a Deadly Coronavirus, Resurfaces in France for First Time in 12 Years

French health officials are trying to trace all the contacts of two men who contracted MERS, a potentially lethal disease that is typically confined to the Middle East

in Scientific American on 2025-12-10 16:20:00 UTC.

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Ancient Humans Were Making Fire 350,000 Years Earlier Than Scientists Realized

Making fire on demand was a milestone in the lives of our early ancestors. But the question of when that skill first arose has been difficult for scientists to pin down

in Scientific American on 2025-12-10 16:00:00 UTC.

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Attention Authors: updated endorsement policy for arXiv Mathematics

The arXiv Mathematics section has updated its endorsement policy. As of December 10th, 2025, the arXiv Mathematics section will no longer accept institutional email addresses (i.e., an email address associated with an academic or research institution) as the sole qualifier for an automatic endorsement for new authors. This policy update is being made to support the arXiv community (authors, readers, volunteer moderators, and staff) by stemming the flood of low-quality, non-scientific submissions to the arXiv Math section.

arXiv was built for scientists, by scientists. Our mission has always been to advance science by providing a place for the scientific community to freely and quickly share and discover valuable and relevant scientific research. arXiv authors are expected to be scientists with expertise in their field and endorsement has been required from the early days of arXiv. The arXiv endorsement process ensures a sustainable and fair way for scientists to help arXiv determine who is a member of good standing in the scientific community by vouching for the scientific work of first-time submitters.

In the past most arXiv sections, including Math, auto-endorsed first-time submitters with affiliation to an academic or research institute. arXiv felt this was a fair way to allow new researchers to submit to arXiv while still preserving the corpus and maintaining a standard of scientific integrity. However, over the past years, arXiv has received an unsustainable increase in the number of non-scientific submissions from automatically endorsed users, increasing the rejection rate and requiring excessive moderation and staff effort. Because of this, we have determined that email addresses associated with academic or research institutions are no longer a sufficient credential for determining minimum research competence. As a result, automatic endorsements will no longer be based solely on an author’s institutional email.

Automatic endorsement for new submitters in all Math categories will now require both 1) an email address from an academic/research institution, and 2) previous authorship on an existing paper which has been accepted to the arXiv Mathematics section (see paper ownership). New submitters who cannot meet these requirements will no longer be automatically endorsed, but can still obtain a personal endorsement directly from an established arXiv author in the same research area.

What does this update mean for authors in the arXiv Mathematics section?

“Auto-endorsement” is practically invisible to most arXiv authors, so this policy update may seem confusing. In the past, when an arXiv author with an institutional affiliation submitted a manuscript for the first time to the Mathematics section on arXiv, the system would allow them to pass through the submission process automatically, with no mention of endorsement.

Most arXiv authors submitting to arXiv Math categories will not notice a change at all. All authors who are already endorsed to submit to a Math category will continue to be endorsed as long as they remain in good standing and do not violate the arXiv code of conduct. This policy update will mostly affect new submitters— arXiv authors who are submitting for the first time to a category in arXiv’s Mathematics section.

New submitters to a Math category will need to pursue one of the following paths for endorsement before they can submit:

• New submitters who have an institutional email and are a co-author of a paper in an arXiv Math category and have already claimed ownership of that paper may be auto-endorsed and able to submit papers without further action.

• New submitters who have an institutional email and no claimed papers but are co-authors of other papers accepted to an arXiv Math category must claim ownership of their papers. After successfully claiming ownership on their previous papers, they may be auto-endorsed and able to submit papers without further action.

• New submitters who do not have an institutional email and no claimed papers, but are co-authors of other papers accepted to an arXiv Math category should claim ownership of all their papers. If still unable to submit, these users must pursue personal endorsement (see next bullet).

• New submitters who are not co-authors on any previous papers on arXiv Mathematics must be personally endorsed to submit to any arXiv Math category, whether they have an institutional email affiliation or not. Our help pages go into detail on how to get personally endorsed by an advisor, colleague, or arXiv author with endorsement privileges. arXiv staff are not able to personally endorse arXiv authors.

This policy update only applies to arXiv Mathematics, and all the Math categories contained in the section. Please note, Mathematical Physics (math-ph) is a sub-section of Physics and will follow endorsement rules for Physics. Each category of arXiv has different moderators, who are subject matter experts with a terminal degree in their particular subject, to best serve the scholarly pursuits, goals, and standards of their category. While this policy update is currently only being implemented for the arXiv Mathematics section, other arXiv sections may wish to update their endorsement policies in the future. We will make these updates public if and when they do occur.

Thank you to our scientific community for supporting us in this policy update. We rely on you to help us keep arXiv open and free, and to help us make sure submissions to arXiv are scientifically rigorous and of interest to the community.

Want to know how you can help by endorsing new authors in your field? Learn about endorsement, and how to find out if you have endorsement privileges.

This is a significant update of the  endorsement policy for the Mathematics section and we value your feedback. If you have questions, concerns, or comments about this update, please fill out our Feedback Form. We will be monitoring this form to help us understand how these updates to the endorsement policy affect all arXiv users, as well as to make adjustments to maintain transparency and fairness in the arXiv submission process. 

in arXiv.org blog on 2025-12-10 15:07:41 UTC.

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