XSci, a preprint platform founded by Oxford economist Shumiao Ouyang, now pays reviewers $200 for feedback delivered within five days of accepting an assignment, or $100 within five to ten days. Authors fund the payments by paying $399 for a review round, or $249 if they make the report public, and can also pay up to $19 for AI-generated reviews. The Delaware-incorporated startup has raised roughly $500,000 from private investors and is seeking additional funding.
nature.com
· 2026-11-06
Diogo Machado of consultancy Technopolis tested OpenAI's GPT-4o on 139 real grant proposals submitted to Austria's Science Fund in 2021, asking it to pick the better of each pair. The model matched human reviewers' funding decisions 60% of the time, but was notably less likely than humans to back proposals rated high for novelty, according to the study published in Scientometrics.
nature.com
· 2026-11-03
Freelance writer Benjamin Skuse tested IEEE's peer-review defenses by submitting AI-generated scientific papers, in one case simply running an automated 'run experiment' and 'write paper' process with no edits before submission. According to IEEE features editor Eliza Strickland, the combination of human reviewers and research-integrity software currently managed to catch these machine-made submissions.
spectrum.ieee.org
· 2026-11-01
The co-founder of the UK Metascience Unit, a joint initiative of the UK's science department and UK Research and Innovation launched in 2024, describes experiments run on live funding processes. Tests included appeals to social obligation in reviewer recruitment e-mails (no effect), distributed peer review among applicants (which sped up assessment by expanding the reviewer pool), and ongoing trials of staff desk rejection to screen out non-competitive applications before peer review.
nature.com
· 2026-10-30
The European Research Council received 7,710 Starting Grant proposals for 2027 funding by its October 14 deadline, up from 4,807 the previous year, while the number of available grants fell to 373 from 421 due to funding constraints. ERC president Maria Leptin said the surge is straining staff and reviewers, and the resulting success rate is expected to drop below 5%, down from 8.8% in the 2026 round.
nature.com
· 2026-10-28
The European Commission will launch an expanded version of its Open Research Europe platform by early November, adding funders from 11 countries including Germany's DFG and the Swiss National Science Foundation, plus research organizations such as France's CNRS. The platform, which publishes preprints alongside open peer reviews before flagging them as reviewed, will now offer free editorial services to more than 2.5 million researchers and has published around 1,500 articles since its 2021 launch.
nature.com
· 2026-10-28
A journalist used large language models to 'vibe-research' a fabricated scientific paper, generating hypotheses, code and text with minimal human input, then worked with Jenny Mahoney, managing editor of IEEE Access, to test whether the fake submission could slip past the journal's review defenses. The experiment follows data showing a sharp rise in detectable AI involvement in academic papers, from about 12 percent in 2023 to an estimated 57 percent in 2025, alongside reports that over 12 percent of Nature Communications reviews in 2025 were entirely AI-generated.
spectrum.ieee.org
· 2026-10-27
A Nature commentary argues that peer review should be taught explicitly as a core research skill rather than learned informally by osmosis. It proposes preprint journal clubs as a scalable method to give students and early-career researchers structured practice in evaluating scientific work before they review for journals.
nature.com
· 2026-10-20
A Show HN post introduces rStation, a platform where independent AI agents can discuss research problems and publish reviewed papers together. The site invites users to 'send your agent' to participate and choose a problem to work on, with human observers welcome but not required to participate.
rstation.ai
· 2026-10-16
Former neuroscientist Michał Wójcik is documenting peer-reviewed academic works, including book chapters sold by major publishers like Springer Nature and Elsevier, that contain AI-generated images, fabricated references, and nonsensical content. He shares these findings publicly on LinkedIn and Bluesky, including a widely mocked Cell Press paper by a self-described 'Professor for Exorcism' claiming evidence of an afterlife.
forbetterscience.com
· 2026-10-13
A group of mathematicians published recommendations for how AI labs should responsibly share mathematical results generated by their models, after collecting over 600 responses from the mathematical community. The recommendations call on labs to stop testing advanced mathematical problems on proprietary models that remain inaccessible to outside researchers.
agmai.org
· 2026-09-30
A Nature investigation has uncovered a network of bogus academic societies, including a fake 'National Academy of Artificial Intelligence,' that tricked computer scientist Moshe Vardi and other researchers into believing they'd won prestigious honors. One of the sham group's websites reportedly used a digitally altered image of a University of Gothenburg building to appear legitimate. Vardi had to retract a press release from his institution after realizing the award was not genuine.
nature.com
· 2026-09-29
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