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Recent Comments
Springer Nature often demands strict compliance from authors — on AI use, authorship, and transparency — and emphasizes its commitment to integrity.
Yet in the case of Dutry et al. (2025) (https://www.jonaslang.info/userdata/comment-dutry_et-al-2025.pdf), Springer Nature itself failed to follow the STM Ethical Principles for Scholarly Publication, which it co-authored and publicly endorses.
The paper — conceptualized by Prof. Eva Derous — includes serious authorship issues and clear data misrepresentation, such as concealed group differences and misleading analyses designed to reverse or hide effects. My detailed retraction request documents these extensively, and Springer has never disputed this evidence.
Despite this, Springer Nature’s head of ethics refused to act and deferred entirely to a slow and opaque university process. Even worse, Springer systematically rejects misconduct reports, ignores detailed evidence, and refuses to publish direct commentaries or retraction requests — even though it is ethically bound to defend the integrity of the scientific record.
Modern Springer Nature seems a shadow of its former self: in the 1920s, major journals would publish misconduct reports and debates directly, fostering open scientific correction. Today, it appears these principles are abandoned in favor of institutional self-protection.
I discuss these systemic failures in more detail in my paper Science Eroded (https://tinyurl.com/scienceeroded or https://www.jonaslang.info/userdata/manuscript-v4-osf-rendered.pdf), which examines how institutions publicly champion ethics while privately enabling misconduct and silencing critics (including me as a whistleblower who has lost two faculty positions and has been the target of multiple retaliatory complaints now).
How can researchers trust Springer Nature’s policies when it demands rigor from authors but fails to uphold its own basic ethical responsibilities?
Demanding compliance from researchers while ignoring foundational principles internally sends a dangerous signal: that accountability is only for others, not for those in power.
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