The 217-year-old publisher of numerous scientific journals, Wiley, is dealing with an existential crisis. It recently shuttered 19 journals and retracted more than 11,300 papers upon discovering large-scale research fraud afflicting them.
The fraud wasn’t limited to the usual suspects: the academically dubious social-science “grievance studies” fields (e.g., gender studies, race studies, and fat studies). Nearly 900 fraudulent papers were from the physical-sciences publisher IOP Publishing.
“That really crystallized for us, everybody internally, everybody involved with the business,” Kim Eggleton, head of peer review and research integrity at the publisher, told the Wall Street Journal. “This is a real threat.”