Science Integrity Alliance asks Ivan Oransky, Executive Director of the Center for Scientific Integrity (CSI) and co-founder of Retraction Watch.

[SIA] Retraction Watch began in 2010 and is now one of several projects of CSI. For readers meeting you for the first time, how would you describe what each does, and how the blog’s informal tone has helped the work reach beyond academia?

[IO] Our main goal when we launched remains the same today: to bring transparency to the largely opaque processes around correcting the scientific record. We do so by looking at, obviously, retractions, but also at the incentive systems around academic research and scholarly publishing.

We launched The Center in 2014 as the nonprofit home for Retraction Watch and to build the Retraction Watch Database, which now includes more than 65,000 retractions. The organization has grown in recent years to include several other projects united by the theme of research accountability.

We took an informal tone in the early days of Retraction Watch, and we still enjoy having some fun with the stories we tell. Most of our posts these days are written by journalists who bring the kind of rigor to reporting we think should be present in research, investigations and publishing.

Explore the Retraction Watch Database

[SIA] Fabricated papers and paper mills are a growing part of what shows up in your reporting. What worries you most right now, and where does work like the Medical Evidence Project fit in?

[IO] Scholarly publishing has never been able to guarantee quality at the scale it claimed to, and that’s only getting worse thanks to paper mills and now AI. But the main problem is the incentive system. The Medical Evidence Project is focusing our theory of change — find the problems, make people aware of them, drive correction — on an area where it can have the most impact.

Read the reports from the Medical Evidence Project

[SIA] In 2025 you launched the Sleuths in Residence Program and brought on your first two sleuths. Sleuths often do this work unpaid and at real personal risk. What are you looking for in the people you bring on, and what are you striving to protect or build?

[IO] Our goal with this program was to emphasize the value of compensating and legally protecting the critical work of sleuths. Their work allowed us to report on a World Bank report with several fake references, a review article in a specialty journal with a surprising number of citations, and a group of researchers with unusually high h-indexes. We learned a lot from the first year of the program. Going forward we’re moving to project-based work and are looking for people who want to learn how their efforts can translate into high-impact journalism.

[SIA] The Ctrl-Z award celebrates scientists who take meaningful steps to correct their own mistakes within the scientific record. What kind of response has the first round drawn, and have you run into resistance from institutions that still treat a correction as a black mark?

[IO] We were gratified by the response we received to the award, including a mention in a Nature news article and a write-up in one of Science’s newsletters. We have some thoughtful nominations for our first cycle and are looking forward to seeing whom our judging panel selects as the inaugural winners.

We haven’t had any pushback to the award, but of course aren’t privy to what institutions might say behind the scenes. The goal of the award is to highlight specific cases of researchers as active participants in correcting the record and to encourage good practice — not to change institutional culture overnight.