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University of Florida (UF) launched an investigation after an internal report detailed a culture of fear among faculty members claiming political influence on campus as well as instances of pressure to destroy and delay publication of COVID-19 research data. The report was the result of a three-week investigation into academic freedom at UF after three full-time professors were prevented from testifying as paid experts in a lawsuit brought against the state over voting rights.

A Statistics Canada study shows that one-third of women and nearly a quarter of men who teach and conduct research in Canadian university and college campuses face harassment. Data collected in late 2019 from 27,000 respondents about their experiences over the past year revealed five types of harassment: verbal abuse, humiliating behaviour, threats such as blackmail, threats to career or reputation, physical threats, physical violence, and unwanted sexual attention or sexual harassment.

A prominent Antarctic geologist has been accused of sexual harassment by two of his former students during research expeditions. In the online survey published in PLOS ONE and covered by Science in 2014, 71% of 512 female respondents reported being sexually harassed during fieldwork; 84% of them were trainees.

Scientists from the University of Ottawa, The Ottawa Hospital and other top-tier institutions across Canada keep publishing their results in fake science journals, tainting the work despite years of warnings. One veteran science publisher warns all the work that produced these studies “is just thrown away.” Until recently, the scope of the problem of “predatory” journals has been hard to measure. Now, one giant in the fake publishing field, OMICS International of India, has improved the search engine for 700 journals. Hundreds of Canadian scientists were found to have published recently with the Indian firm — the same company that accepted this newspaper’s analysis of how pigs fly.

Months after an academic librarian deleted lists of “predatory” journals and publishers from his blog, a website with derogatory comments about his academic qualifications and mental health remains online. A communications librarian at the University of Colorado at Denver, for years maintained lists of scholarly journals and publishers he deemed “predatory. The lists, while controversial, were a resource for many scholars wondering if the invitation to publish a paper or present at a conference sitting in their inbox was legitimate.

One of the most prolific scientists in an emerging area of cancer research involving what is sometimes called the “dark matter” of the human genome has parlayed his decades-long pursuit of cancer remedies into a research empire: He has received more than $86 million in federal grants as a principal investigator and, by his own count, more than 60 awards. However, over the last several years a tide of allegations have been made concerning data falsification and other scientific misconduct. Concerns about falsified data in the scientific literature run far deeper as cases of fraud can reverberate through whole fields of research.

In October 2015, a New York district court ruled in favor of the academic publisher Elsevier, which had accused Sci-Hub, a website that offers pirated versions of academic papers, of copyright violation. That decision allowed authorities to take down the site’s domain name, sci-hub.org. Suspending a domain name does not delete a website forever, though, it just prevents visitors from knowing where exactly to find it. It’s trivial enough to relaunch the same site under another domain, as Sci-Hub did.

Cases of scientific malpractice in Brazil increased significantly between 2009 and 2012, according to a study looking at article retraction in scientific journals. The paper looked at retracted research articles in two major Latin American and Caribbean databases. Out of 2,000 articles from around the world published in the databases between 2009 and 2014, 31 were later pulled back, including 25 articles from Brazil. The study, published in Science and Engineering Ethics, says that this could threaten the country’s growing popularity as a research partner.

More Canadian institutions will face controversy over the influence of donors on programmes if they do not rethink their relationship with private funders, warn academics who have studied the relationship between donations and educational institutions. This is following a string of cases over the past decade that have led academics across the country to criticize postsecondary institutions that appear to be willing to share control over their research agenda with private donors.