Diagram of exosome formation. Author: Maximus155; source: Wikimedia Commons; license: CC BY-SA 3.0.

On October 21, 2026, Retraction Watch published an investigation: PRS Global Open, an open-access journal founded by plastic surgeon Rod Rohrich, published a review and a hair-growth trial that he coauthored with the founder of the exosome company Rion. The review received the journal’s 2025 Best Research Paper award, while the trial paper did not disclose his advisory relationship with Rion. Another exosome study that the journal’s social media account had promoted has been retracted.

The Journal, Its Founder and Rion

PRS Global Open, in full Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery–Global Open, is published by Wolters Kluwer on behalf of the American Society of Plastic Surgeons (ASPS). In 2004 Rohrich became president of ASPS and editor of the society’s flagship journal, Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery. In April 2013 he founded this open-access journal, and after stepping down in December 2020 he kept the title of editor emeritus. According to Retraction Watch, he has also served as president of the World Association of Medical Editors, and in February 2018 he wrote an editorial criticizing predatory journals for damaging the reputation of legitimate open-access journals.

He now practices at the Dallas Plastic Surgery Institute and hosts a podcast. The report says he has served as an adviser to Rion. Rion is a Mayo Clinic spin-off whose founder, Atta Behfar, is a Mayo Clinic cardiologist who researches regenerative medicine. The company is testing platelet-derived exosomes in clinical trials and already sells cosmetic skincare products under the “plated” brand. In 2022, while interviewing Behfar on his podcast, Rohrich said: “In Dallas, we’re going to be the first clinic to use exosomes in skincare.”

Exosomes are nanoscale extracellular vesicles secreted by cells. In recent years they have often been promoted for skincare, hair-loss prevention and wound healing, but clinical evidence is limited. The 2024 review that Rohrich coauthored states this itself: at the time of writing, the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) had not approved any exosome product, and most of the 130 papers the review included were animal-model studies. Paul Knoepfler, a cell biologist at the University of California, Davis, told Retraction Watch that it is a “heavily hyped” field. The Retraction Watch database already lists 181 retracted papers related to exosomes, for reasons including image duplication, unreliable data, compromised peer review and links to paper mills.

Timeline of events related to exosome papers in PRS Global Open, compiled from the journal articles, the retraction notice and Retraction Watch’s reporting, and drawn with code. The month in which the review received its award has not been made public, so the figure shows only the year.

The Award-Winning Review and the Hair-Growth Trial

The first paper is a review published in August 2024, “Evolving Role of Exosomes in Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery and Dermatology,” whose authors include Behfar, Rion employee Christopher Paradise and Rohrich. Retraction Watch points out that the review describes Rion’s platelet exosomes as a “room-temperature-stable final drug product,” while saying that exosomes derived from mesenchymal stem cells carry “pro-tumorigenic” risks and batch-to-batch variability. The review states that the authors’ experience shows the antioxidant enzymes and pro-angiogenic factors in platelet exosomes are critical to efficacy, but the source it cites is a Rion-funded study in which the only relevant sentence is marked “data not shown.” Rohrich replied that this citation “could have been more precise,” but said he considers the review balanced overall and that it repeatedly emphasized the field’s limitations.

The review received the journal’s 2025 “Best Research Paper” award. The journal responded that Rohrich has not been involved in editorial work since his term ended in December 2020, and that the award is based on readership and citation data. According to Web of Science, the paper has been cited 12 times. The review’s disclosure section lists Rohrich’s relationships with companies such as Allergan and Galderma, and states that Behfar founded Rion and Paradise is employed by Rion, but it does not list Rohrich’s relationship with Rion. Neither the report nor the papers say exactly when he began advising Rion.

The second paper is a clinical trial of a hair serum. The journal’s page lists it in volume 13, issue 3, March 2025 (Retraction Watch’s article says “last March”). This single-center, double-blind trial enrolled 39 adults who felt their hair was thinning. Of these, 31 used Rion’s plated hair serum for 9 months, while 8 used a placebo for 6 months and were then unblinded and switched to the serum. The paper concludes that the serum “significantly improved hair and scalp health.” The study was partly funded by Rion Aesthetics. Its disclosure section states that Behfar and Mayo Clinic hold interests in Rion and that several other authors are Rion consultants, while the remaining authors “have no relevant financial interests.” Rohrich is listed among those remaining authors. In an Instagram video for plated, he called the results “absolutely amazing.” He told Retraction Watch that leaving out his relationship with Rion was an “oversight” and that it would be corrected.

The controversy centers on how participants were split between the groups. Frank Harrell Jr., a biostatistician at Vanderbilt University Medical Center, considers an allocation ratio so far from 1:1 a “serious design error,” and says the authors also set aside the original design in favor of “ad hoc and misleading analyses.” The reasoning is easy to follow: the same average improvement is more likely to come out as “statistically significant” against baseline in a group of 31 than in a group of 8. Retraction Watch says the placebo group actually showed slightly larger average gains in follicle count, hair strength and hair quality, yet only the serum group was reported as significantly improved relative to baseline. The paper also reports between-group differences from blinded assessments at months 3 and 6. However, “one group is significant and the other is not” does not by itself show that the two groups differ. Rohrich responded that the 80:20 ratio was intended to expose more participants to the active formulation and to make a preliminary assessment of efficacy and safety, and that the study was not misleading. He agreed, however, that a larger trial with more balanced groups is needed. The paper itself also calls the work a “preliminary pilot study.”

Group allocation in the hair serum trial: 31 people used the serum and 8 used the placebo, with the numbers taken from the trial paper. Schematic drawn with code; it contains no efficacy data.

The trial’s conclusions then found their way into commercial marketing. The product page on the health e-commerce site The Swell Score says it is “not a quick shine serum, but a treatment.” The Mayo Clinic store uses more cautious wording, saying the product “supports follicle proliferation and a healthy growth cycle.” Knoepfler notes that topical exosome products sit in a gray zone of FDA regulation and give companies a faster route to market than injectables. Behfar, Rion and the Mayo Clinic media office did not respond to Retraction Watch’s repeated requests for comment.

The Retracted Wound Case Study

The third paper has nothing to do with Rohrich. On October 3, 2025, PRS Global Open published a case series online. In it, 4 patients with chronic lower-extremity ulcers were treated once a month with topical Exo-HL, a product of the South Korean company Primoris that the paper described as adipose stem cell–derived exosomes, and the paper reported complete healing of 3 wounds. One author, Hee Jin Ahn, was listed as affiliated with Primoris, and Retraction Watch describes Ahn as the company’s head, yet the paper’s disclosure section says the authors “have no relevant financial interests.” The journal’s social media editor, plastic surgeon Roy Kim, then promoted the study in a video on the journal’s Instagram account, saying the patients had “remarkable wound healing.”

In November 2025, anonymous comments on PubPeer pointed out several problems. The patient ages in the table did not match those in the text, the paper lacked financial disclosures, the study had no control group, and chronic wounds can heal on their own. According to Retraction Watch, the authors requested a retraction the following month. The retraction notice states that the authors requested the retraction and that the editors and publisher carried it out. The reason it gives is that the material actually used was exosomes derived from edelweiss callus, not the adipose stem cell exosomes described in the paper, and “this discrepancy undermines the validity of the findings and conclusions.” The notice does not mention the age inconsistencies or the disclosure problem.

When the report was published, the Instagram video had not been updated. The journal responded that it chooses which articles to promote based on reader interest, clinical relevance and the availability of engaging images, and that its posts direct readers to the official version, which is marked as retracted. The revised study was published on April 11, 2026, in JPRAS Open, an Elsevier journal. Its new title refers to exosomes extracted from edelweiss callus culture, and the authors call it a “small, uncontrolled” case series. Retraction Watch notes that the new version drops the quantitative blood-flow results and states that the results are “hypothesis-generating rather than confirmatory.”

Conflict-of-Interest Disclosure and the Risks of a Founder’s Own Journal

Once the report is broken down, three facts can be confirmed from the original documents. First, the hair-growth trial’s disclosure section does not list Rohrich’s relationship with Rion, and he himself has acknowledged this was an oversight. Second, the trial split its participants 31:8. Third, the wound study was retracted because its material source was misreported. Harrell’s criticism of “misleading analyses” and Knoepfler’s concern about authors who also hold journal positions are expert opinions, and Rohrich disputes the former. The report presents no evidence that he intervened in peer review or in the award, and the journal says he has not been involved in editorial work since stepping down. The available material supports the conclusion that “disclosure of financial ties was incomplete and the journal’s channels amplified preliminary evidence,” but it is not enough to support the claim that “editorial decisions were influenced by him.”

The recommendations of the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE) treat complete disclosure as a prerequisite for readers to judge for themselves. They say that financial relationships such as employment, consultancies and stock ownership are the ones most often identified as potential conflicts of interest, that “perceived conflicts” damage trust as much as actual ones, and that deliberately failing to report relationships required by a journal’s disclosure form is misconduct. For editors, ICMJE requires recusal from decisions on manuscripts where they have a conflict of interest, and recommends that journals set explicit review policies for submissions from people involved in editorial decisions. Strictly speaking, Rohrich is no longer among the “people involved in editorial decisions” now that he has stepped down. But Knoepfler’s concern shows that readers may not be able to tell an honorary title apart from actual duties, and this is exactly what a “perceived conflict” refers to.

The risks of a journal run by its own founder go beyond a single disclosure form. When papers financially tied to the founder are published in the journal, then promoted through journal awards and social media accounts, and finally show up on product pages, the journal lends its credibility to products that have not yet been validated. A retraction notice is attached only to the official version of a paper; it cannot recall videos and product copy that have already gone out. When reading research like this, readers can first check a few things: whether the authors’ affiliations and disclosure sections match up with the company behind the product, whether the groups are balanced and the conclusions come from between-group comparisons, and whether the paper has already been corrected or retracted.

References

1. Borrell B. Journal founded by plastic surgeon touts studies of products he’s tied to – including one that has been retracted. Retraction Watch, 2026-10-21.

2. McGraw IT, Wilson EE, Behfar A, Paradise CR, Rohrich RJ, Wyles SP. Evolving Role of Exosomes in Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery and Dermatology. Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery – Global Open, 2024, 12(8): e6061.

3. Weir D, Wyles S, Behfar A, et al. Human Platelet Extract (Plated) Hair Serum for Hair Health Improvement: A Double-blind, Placebo-controlled Clinical Study. Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery – Global Open, 2025, 13(3): e6562.

4. Basamage L, Ahn HJ, Choi HS, et al. Exosome Therapy for Chronic Wound Healing (retracted). Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery – Global Open, 2025, 13: e7200.

5. Exosome Therapy for Chronic Wound Healing – Retraction. Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery – Global Open.

6. Edelweiss callus culture extracted exosome for chronic wound healing. JPRAS Open, 2026-04-11.

7. ICMJE. Disclosure of Financial and Non-Financial Relationships and Activities, and Conflicts of Interest. Recommendations for the Conduct, Reporting, Editing, and Publication of Scholarly Work in Medical Journals.

8. This information was compiled and published by Scholay, the one-stop academic platform. If it infringes any rights, please let us know and it will be taken down.

9. This information is also published on EnterScholar, a community for scholars in the age of intelligence.

The papers behind the three studies in this issue were published between June and September 2026, and ScienceDaily republished coverage of all three on October 22. A two-year trial at the University of Southern California got DHA into cerebrospinal fluid but did not improve cognition; the German Primate Center used brain organoids to explain why the marmoset brain is nearly smooth; and the University of Oxford weighed virus-like particles one at a time to record their assembly steps. Each of the three conclusions has clearly defined limits.

Common marmoset (Callithrix jacchus), photographed in Sugarloaf Mountain Park, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Unlike most primates, it has a small, nearly smooth cerebral cortex. Photo: Wilfredor. Source: Wikimedia Commons. License: CC0 1.0.

High-Dose DHA Reaches Cerebrospinal Fluid but Does Not Improve Cognition

The trial, called PreventE4 (registration number NCT03613844), was carried out by Hussein N. Yassine's team at the Keck School of Medicine of the University of Southern California. The paper was published online in eBioMedicine on June 18, 2026. The University of Southern California issued a press release the same day, and ScienceDaily republished it on October 22. The trial was a single-center, phase IIa, randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled study conducted from September 2018 to May 2024. The 365 participants were aged 55 to 80 and did not have dementia. They normally consumed less than 200 milligrams of DHA a day and had at least one risk factor for dementia. Of these, 173 (47%) carried APOE ε4, the strongest known genetic risk factor for late-onset Alzheimer's disease. Participants were first split into two groups according to whether they were willing to undergo a lumbar puncture. Within each group, they were then randomized 1:1 to take 2 grams of DHA or a placebo every day for 24 months.

An example photo of omega-3 fish oil softgels. This is not the product used in the PreventE4 trial. Photo: Oddman47. Source: Wikimedia Commons. License: CC0 1.0.

The trial's primary outcome was the change in the ratio of DHA to arachidonic acid (AA) in cerebrospinal fluid at 6 months. The ratio rose by 0.17 in the DHA group and fell by 0.02 in the placebo group, a between-group difference of 0.19 (95% confidence interval 0.16–0.21), regardless of APOE ε4 carrier status. The paper also reports that supplementation raised cerebrospinal fluid DHA by an average of 17% and raised the red blood cell omega-3 index from 4.9% to 11.0%. This indicates that the supplemental DHA did reach the central nervous system. At 24 months, however, the two groups did not differ in hippocampal volume, cortical thickness or cognitive test scores. Adverse events were comparable between the two groups, and no serious adverse event was judged to be related to DHA.

Several points matter when interpreting this result. Hippocampal volume and cortical thickness were secondary outcomes, and the cognitive tests were exploratory outcomes. The paper reports only estimates and confidence intervals, not P values. The dropout rate at 24 months was 38%, mainly because of the COVID-19 pandemic. Those who withdrew were more often Hispanic and had lower educational attainment, baseline cognitive scores and plasma DHA. The authors believe this may have biased the results and weakened the trial's ability to test clinical outcomes. Participants were 66 years old on average and highly educated. Hippocampal atrophy in both groups was less than 0.5% per year, and cognitive scores rose in both groups, so a difference from the intervention would have been hard to detect within two years in any case. What the trial can show is this: among these cognitively normal people who ate little fish, two years of high-dose DHA supplements produced no measurable benefit for cognition or brain structure. The trial did not test the effects of eating fish or following a Mediterranean diet, and its results cannot be directly extended to people who already have cognitive impairment. The authors suggest that future research should focus on how the brain metabolizes DHA rather than on more supplement trials of the same kind.

Marmoset Neural Progenitor Cells and Cortical Downscaling

This study was carried out by the junior research group led by Michael Heide at the German Primate Center (DPZ, Leibniz Institute for Primate Research). The paper was published online in volume 12, issue 39 of Science Advances on September 23, 2026. The DPZ issued a German-language press release the same day, and ScienceDaily republished the English version on October 22. Most primates have a large, highly folded cerebral cortex, but the common marmoset (Callithrix jacchus), a small South American monkey, has a small, nearly smooth one. Comparative studies suggest that the common ancestor of primates already had a medium-sized, folded cortex, so the marmoset's smooth cortex is regarded as the result of evolutionary downscaling. Early in fetal development, the marmoset brain has cell types and layers similar to those of primates with highly folded brains. The study set out to explain why the marmoset later produces fewer neurons.

The researchers grew cerebral organoids from three induced pluripotent stem cell lines each from humans and marmosets. Some experiments also included rhesus macaque organoids as a comparison, and the results were checked against marmoset fetal brain tissue and previously published tissue images. The researchers found several concurrent differences in the neural progenitor cells that produce neurons. First, marmoset apical radial glial cells divide more slowly. At day 30 of culture, their cell cycle lasted about 68.5 hours, compared with about 57.2 hours in humans. In addition, a substantial proportion of marmoset progenitor cells did not enter the DNA replication phase during the 84-hour labeling period and may have paused division. Second, progenitor cells shift from being concentrated in the ventricular zone to being found mostly in the subventricular zone later and more abruptly. This leaves a shorter window for further expansion and neuron production. Third, basal radial glial cells are considered the main drivers of cortical expansion. In marmosets, these cells show lower expression of the PALMD gene, and most extend only a single basal process. This makes them morphologically simpler than the same cells in humans, rhesus macaques and ferrets, and the morphological complexity of these cells is associated with their ability to proliferate. The researchers also found that the transcriptional profiles of marmoset organoids cultured for 50 days most closely matched marmoset fetal brains at gestational day 90. This match provides a timing reference for comparing organoids with actual development.

The authors note in the paper that the differences between human and marmoset organoids may stem partly from how well the culture conditions suit each species or from differences in developmental speed. It therefore cannot be fully ruled out that some differences reflect how mature the organoids are rather than each species' intrinsic developmental program. The developmental trajectories of cell lineages were inferred from single-cell data, and the analysis of basal progenitor cell shapes reanalyzed images of 4 previously published marmoset fetal brain sections. The study focused on one factor, reduced neuron output. Other factors that might affect folding, such as the extracellular matrix and tissue mechanics, have not yet been tested. ScienceDaily's English headline says the study found a “secret behind the human brain's wrinkles,” but the paper examines why the marmoset cortex became smaller and flatter. As for helping us understand disorders of human brain development, the DPZ press release says only that this may be possible in the future.

Weighing Virus-Like Particles One by One to Record Their Assembly

This paper is by Roi Asor, Dan Loewenthal, Philipp Kukura and colleagues at the Department of Chemistry and the Kavli Institute for Nanoscience Discovery at the University of Oxford. It was published online in Nature on September 16, 2026, and is open access. The University of Oxford issued a press release the same day, and ScienceDaily republished it on October 22. A virus's protein shell, or capsid, assembles itself from dozens to thousands of protein subunits without guidance from external machinery. The intermediate structures that form during assembly are brief and rare. Traditional methods can mostly capture only the starting materials and the finished particles, so the intermediate steps have mainly been inferred from theoretical models.

The team did not study a natural virus but an engineered virus-like particle called mi3-VLP. In this particle, 60 identical protein monomers first form 20 trimers, which then assemble into a dodecahedron with 12 pentagonal faces. Particles of this kind are also being evaluated as a platform for multivalent vaccines. The researchers used mass photometry, a method that measures the mass of an individual molecule from the light it scatters. They first anchored tagged trimers on an artificial lipid membrane to form pentagonal rings as starting points. They then used circular lipid-membrane “traps” 5 micrometres in diameter to keep single growing particles in view and “weigh” them continuously. The results show that a single binding event between trimers has a dissociation constant of about 2 micromolar. This is a weak interaction, so mismatched combinations quickly separate and try again. Once several subunits close a face, the multiple contacts stabilize the structure. The first stable intermediate is a pentagonal ring of five trimers. Forming it requires several weak bonds to hold at the same time, which makes it the slowest step in the whole process. After that, closing the next face requires only three more trimers and then two more to bind in sequence, so growth speeds up. In 25 single-particle assembly trajectories, the researchers did not see any closed structure fall apart again. These results explain why this kind of assembly is slow to start but fast afterward. They also explain why it reliably reaches the same final structure despite thousands of possible intermediate states.

Figure 1 of the paper: a schematic of how the engineered mi3 virus-like particle (not a natural virus) assembles in stages from monomers to trimers to a dodecahedral particle, along with the mass distribution of each component measured by mass photometry. The image has not been cropped. Source: Asor R. et al., Nature, 2026. License: CC BY 4.0.

The study's scope is also clearly limited. mi3-VLP is a dodecahedron, whereas most viral capsids are icosahedral. The authors expect the basic physical principles to be the same, but the specific intermediate structures and assembly pathways will vary with the geometry of the capsid. The experiments used empty shells without a genome. The single-particle experiments started from a pentagonal ring that had already been formed on the lipid membrane, and assembly took place close to equilibrium with a small driving force. Factors such as conformational regulation and shell elasticity still need to be studied. The press release mentions antiviral drugs and vaccine design as possible applications, but the paper itself did not test any drug or vaccine.

How Far the Evidence Goes in the Three Studies

Each of the three studies first obtained solid measurements at an intermediate level and then extended its conclusions to larger questions. The fish oil trial confirmed that DHA reached the cerebrospinal fluid but found no difference in cognition or brain structure. This shows that a drug reaching its target is not the same as a drug producing clinical benefit. The marmoset study found cellular differences in organoids that reduce neuron output and calibrated the timing against fetal brain tissue, but organoids are still not fully developed brains. The Oxford team clearly observed the assembly pathway of an engineered particle, but whether natural viruses assemble in the same way still needs to be tested on real capsids. When reading reports like these, first check what level the study actually measured: molecules, cell models or outcomes in people. Then consider how many steps separate the headline's conclusion from that level.

References

1. Yassine HN, Pour SG, Juarez M, et al. CNS target engagement of high-dose DHA supplementation in older adults at risk for dementia: a randomised, double-blind, placebo-controlled trial. eBioMedicine, 2026, 129: 106316. Published online 2026-06-18. doi:10.1016/j.ebiom.2026.106316

2. Keck Medicine of USC. Fish oil supplements may not prevent Alzheimer’s-related decline. 2026-06-18. Link

3. University of Southern California - Health Sciences. Millions take fish oil for brain health. A two-year study found no benefit. ScienceDaily, 2026-10-22. Link

4. Tynianskaia L, Bastidas-Betancourt CM, Grewe EM, et al. Coordinated neural progenitor adaptations contribute to primate neocortical downscaling. Science Advances, 2026, 12(39): eaeg5563. Published online 2026-09-23. doi:10.1126/sciadv.aeg5563

5. Deutsches Primatenzentrum. Glatt statt gefaltet – Hirnentwicklung bei Primaten. idw, 2026-09-23. Link

6. Deutsches Primatenzentrum (DPZ)/German Primate Center. Scientists discover a surprising secret behind the human brain’s wrinkles. ScienceDaily, 2026-10-22. Link

7. Asor R, Loewenthal D, Melnyk D, Tan TK, Kukura P. Molecular-level observation of the self-assembly of a virus-like particle. Nature, 2026, 657(8132): 653. Published online 2026-09-16. doi:10.1038/s41586-026-10948-z

8. University of Oxford. New method reveals how virus particles can build themselves, molecule by molecule. 2026-09-16. Link

9. University of Oxford. Oxford scientists discover how viruses build themselves without a blueprint. ScienceDaily, 2026-10-22. Link

10. This information was compiled and published by Scholay, the all-in-one academic platform. If you believe it infringes your rights, please let us know and we will take it down.

11. This information is also published on EnterScholar, a community for scholars in the age of AI.

The theme of Open Access Week 2026 is “the cost of knowledge.” On October 21, academic book editor Jen McCall published a post on the LSE Impact Blog reviewing how the costs of academic monographs have changed from print to e-books to open access: a title often sells only one or two hundred copies, so publishers put out more titles and raise unit prices. This article checks the two studies she cites and adds material on library e-book licensing and open access monographs.

Cost Estimates and Sales Data

McCall has more than 30 years of experience in academic publishing. She has worked at Cambridge University Press, Wiley and Palgrave Macmillan, and now commissions books for Amsterdam University Press (AUP) and Central European University Press (CEU Press). In this post she writes in the voice of LSE Press, using “we” to introduce this digital-first university press that publishes only open access books. The piece is therefore both an industry overview and a press's account of itself: the cost and sales figures come from external research, while the benefits of print-on-demand and open access are mostly the publisher's own judgments.

The article's statement that “a book can cost as much as $130,000” comes from the Ithaka S+R report The Costs of Publishing Monographs, released in February 2016. The research team examined 382 monographs published in fiscal year 2014 by 20 American university presses, estimating staff time, direct expenses and press-level overhead across stages such as acquisitions, editing, design, production and marketing. Per-title costs ranged from $15,140 to $129,909; the average across the whole sample was $28,747 (direct costs only) or $39,892 (including overhead). The $130,000 figure is the highest value in the sample, not a typical cost. The study also counts only the cost of producing the “first digital file,” excluding the printing, binding and distribution of print copies, as well as author advances and royalties.

The sales and pricing data come from a survey report released in October 2021 by the Oxford International Centre for Publishing at Oxford Brookes University. In February–March 2021 the centre sent a questionnaire to English-language academic publishers and received responses from 25 commercial and university presses, which together published about 32,600 humanities and social sciences monographs in 2020, roughly three-quarters of all English-language monographs. Larger commercial publishers said a monograph sold on average fewer than 200 copies in its first three years, and larger university presses 200 to 400; by comparison, sociologist John Thompson's 2005 analysis showed that total monograph sales were often only 400 to 500 copies. Average hardback prices were £87.43 or $120.50 at commercial publishers and £74.80 or $88.14 at university presses. McCall's figures of “£50—100 at university presses and £70—120 at commercial publishers” are exactly the response ranges listed in this report.

On output, the report shows that 8 of 9 commercial publishers were publishing more titles than in 2015, with the largest all choosing “significantly more”; 11 of 15 university presses had increased output, with growth coming mainly from small university presses with annual turnover below £1 million, while larger university presses held steady or declined. McCall's summary that “all commercial publishers are publishing more” puts it slightly more strongly than the raw data. Her explanation is that at the start of this century publishers reported average sales per title in the thousands, but now only one or two hundred, so publishers sustain revenue through more titles and higher unit prices. She also cites Thompson's 2005 warning that too many titles can bury important books and add to the pressure on scholars to publish. Note that the report's data are all self-reported by publishers, and the report states that its pricing section offers only qualitative observations.

Licensing and Prices of Library E-books

The main buyers of monographs are libraries. The Oxford survey estimates that roughly half to three-quarters of print monograph sales go to institutional libraries. Electronic editions are nearly universal: 21 of the 25 publishers issue all new books in electronic form, distributed mainly through aggregator platforms such as EBSCO and ProQuest and through publishers' own book packages. As for single-copy e-book pricing, 42% of respondents said it matches print: most university presses use the paperback price as the benchmark, while among commercial publishers 3 price e-books the same as print, 2 price them lower, 3 at 80% of print and 1 at 90%. By the publishers' account, an e-book costs no more than a print book.

Librarians see a different set of numbers. In 2020, a group of UK academic librarians, researchers and students launched the #ebookSOS campaign, writing to the chair of the UK Parliament's Education Select Committee to request an investigation into academic publishers' e-book pricing and licensing. The open letter stated that under UK copyright law, university libraries cannot buy e-books the way individuals do and must purchase licensed versions for institutions. These versions are “almost always more expensive,” and single-user licenses often cost ten times as much as the same print book. That year, the letter said, two well-known publishers raised single-user e-book prices by more than 200% without notice, and publishers also withdraw licenses that have already been purchased or switch them to annual renewals. A guide the campaign released in 2021 gave two examples: a book whose Kindle edition sold for £33.49 cost £650 for a 3-user institutional license, and a book priced at £51.99 in print cost £1,050 for a 3-user license. These examples were crowdsourced by librarians and reflect an advocacy position; the Education Select Committee ultimately did not open an inquiry.

The price gap stems mainly from how licenses are priced. A 2020 explainer from the York St John University library listed the common options. DRM-free licenses that allow unlimited simultaneous readers and full downloads are usually the most expensive, at many times the print price. Usage-based licenses buy 200 to 400 logins per year in a single purchase. Licenses that limit concurrent users (commonly 1 or 3) charge roughly the print price multiplied by the number of users. In other words, institutional licenses are priced by “how many people can read at once, and for how long,” not by the physical copy. A print book belongs to the library once bought and cannot be taken back by the publisher; copyright law also does not allow institutions to scan entire print books for remote reading, so libraries that need an electronic version have almost no alternative. The two sets of figures do not necessarily contradict each other: the publisher survey asked about list prices for single-copy e-books, whereas the librarians' examples mostly concern multi-user institutional licenses. But the open letter also says single-user licenses often reach ten times the print price, which does not match the publishers' self-reported pricing, and the available material cannot determine which side is more representative.

These costs ultimately fall on readers and authors. The open letter said that during the pandemic libraries could only acquire e-books, and many teachers had to build course reading lists around “which books have e-versions and are affordable.” The #ebookSOS guide advises authors to ask publishers before signing whether libraries can buy the e-book separately, whether the license is single-user or multi-user, and whether it is a one-off purchase or an annual subscription. If the terms are unsatisfactory, authors can switch publishers or choose open access. McCall's post does not discuss library e-book prices; this section draws on materials from the library side.

Print-on-Demand and Print

Print did not disappear once e-books became widespread. In the Oxford survey, all publishers but one planned to issue print editions of all new books; most commercial and university presses said more than 75% of print sales came from print-on-demand or ultra-short-run digital printing. With print-on-demand, publishers do not have to estimate first print runs or hold stock, so books need never go out of print, which matters especially for humanities and social sciences books with very long sales cycles. McCall says LSE Press can print books one order at a time, without large print runs or warehousing, and so reduces its carbon footprint. She gives no emissions data; this is the publisher's description of its own practice.

The survey also recorded reservations. One commercial publisher felt that print-on-demand quality still falls short of traditional printing, that it is unsuitable for image-dependent disciplines, and that authors generally dislike it. One university press said that print revenue was declining and that, although e-book revenue was growing, it was far from enough to make up the difference.

Payment Models and Controversies in Open Access Monographs

McCall argues that publicly funded research should be freely available, for books as well as for journal articles. She writes, however, that open access mandates for books in the UK and Europe, along with the supporting infrastructure, remain “up in the air.” For UK Research and Innovation (UKRI), the rules are already in force: monographs, book chapters and edited collections published on or after January 1, 2024 that must acknowledge UKRI funding have to be made freely available within 12 months of publication via a publishing platform, publisher website or institutional repository, under a Creative Commons license (CC BY preferred). Exemptions apply in cases such as contracts signed before 2024, the only suitable publisher being unable to offer a compliant option, support solely from training grants, or third-party material for which permission cannot be obtained.

The most direct payment method is the book processing charge (BPC), paid by the author or their funder. Springer Nature, for example, lists on its website open access monograph BPCs starting at €12,905, $14,875 or £10,938, excluding VAT. McCall points out that BPCs are far higher than journal article processing charges and that it is a serious problem where the money will come from. The greatest pressure falls on scholars at underfunded institutions, scholars in low- and middle-income countries, and humanities and social sciences scholars.

The past decade has seen approaches that do not charge authors. One type is the library-based open access press; McCall cites LSE Press, UCL Press and University of Huddersfield Press, where libraries redirect part of their budgets to support open publishing. Another type is collective library funding. Under CEU Press's Opening the Future program, libraries pay an annual membership fee in exchange for DRM-free, unlimited-user access to a collection of backlist books, which they keep permanently after three years. The fees are used only to publish new books open access, so authors do not need to raise BPCs, and a new book is published each time enough money has accumulated to cover one. McCall herself commissions for CEU Press, but this post does not mention the program.

Knowledge Unlatched (KU) is the best-known and also the most controversial example of the collective library funding model. Founded by Frances Pinter in 2012, it had libraries in many countries jointly fund the conversion of scholarly books and journals to open access. In 2018, Marcel Knöchelmann, a former KU employee, published a critique on the LSE Impact Blog. He wrote that KU had changed from a UK community interest company into a German limited company wholly owned by the consultancy fullstopp, a change that was barely explained in public. He also argued that there was a conflict of interest, because fullstopp had at the same time been hired to collect and analyze data for UK open access policy. After Wiley acquired KU in 2021, the open book project COPIM issued a statement arguing that the acquisition of open access infrastructure by large commercial companies threatens the principle that such infrastructure should be owned and governed by the research community. On June 26, 2025, the nonprofit publisher Annual Reviews announced an agreement with Wiley to take over KU, describing it as a “return to nonprofit,” with the team and programs unchanged.

OAPEN takes a different path: it does not fund publication but provides nonprofit hosting and dissemination infrastructure. OAPEN operates the OAPEN Library of open books and, in partnership with OpenEdition, runs DOAB, the Directory of Open Access Books. According to the fee schedule on its website, publishers pay a one-off €10 for each new current-year title uploaded and €2 per title per year for backlist titles, with a minimum annual fee of €175. Fees are waived if the publisher's affiliated library or institution is funding OAPEN, or if the title is already covered by a funder agreement. DOAB is free for publishers but requires external peer review, open licenses and at least 3 open access books. In the Oxford survey, some publishers also mentioned distributing open access monographs through OAPEN.

McCall's conclusion leans optimistic: print-on-demand reduces the environmental cost of print books, open access makes the cost to readers “disappear entirely,” and models that do not charge authors are emerging. She therefore asks whether academic book publishing is moving toward greater inclusivity and equality. The price for readers can indeed fall to zero, but publishing costs remain; they are simply shifted to authors, funders or libraries. Whether BPCs are affordable and who governs collective funding platforms are exactly the questions still being debated around open access monographs.

References

1. McCall, J. (2026, October 21). From print to digital and back again – Why the cost of academic books keeps changing. LSE Impact Blog.

2. Amsterdam University Press. Jen McCall.

3. Maron, N. L., Mulhern, C., Rossman, D., & Schmelzinger, K. (2016, February 5). The Costs of Publishing Monographs: Toward a Transparent Methodology. Ithaka S+R.

4. Shaw, P., Phillips, A., & Bajo Gutiérrez, M. (2021, October). Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences Monographs: A Report on Publishing Trends. Oxford International Centre for Publishing, Oxford Brookes University.

5. Shaw, P., Phillips, A., & Bajo Gutiérrez, M. (2022). The Death of the Monograph?. Publishing Research Quarterly, 38(2), 382–395.

6. #ebookSOS. (2020). Original Open Letter. Campaign to investigate the academic ebook market.

7. #ebookSOS. (2021, May 20). Can my students read my books? Guidance for academics on negotiating contracts with publishers.

8. York St John University. (2020, May 12). Lobbying for fairer ebook access. Information in the Curriculum.

9. UK Research and Innovation. UK Research and Innovation open access policy.

10. UK Research and Innovation. Making your monograph, book chapter or edited collection open access.

11. Springer Nature. Open access books pricing.

12. CEU Press. Opening the Future: About.

13. Knöchelmann, M. (2018, October 3). Knowledge Unlatched, failed transparency, and the commercialisation of open access book publishing. LSE Impact Blog.

14. COPIM. (2021, December 15). Copim statement on the corporate acquisition of OA infrastructure.

15. Annual Reviews. (2025, June 26). Knowledge Unlatched Finds a New Home with Annual Reviews.

16. OAPEN. Join the OAPEN Library.

17. DOAB. Join DOAB: Requirements and Application.

18. Compiled and published by Scholay, the one-stop academic platform. If this content infringes your rights, please let us know and it will be taken down.

19. Also published on EnterScholar, a community for scholars in the age of AI.

The three studies in this issue were formally published between October 14 and 15, 2026, and coverage of them clustered on October 21. The US National Cancer Institute used a cohort of 460,000 people to test the association between ultra-processed foods and colorectal cancer; the University of Warwick inferred from spectra the colours white dwarfs would show to the human eye; and a team from Microsoft Research and other institutions used machine learning to correct weather forecasts 3 to 4 weeks ahead. All three results have clearly defined limits of applicability.

An artist’s impression of Sirius A and its white dwarf companion Sirius B (the small bright dot on the right), not an actual photograph. Sirius B is very hot and blue-white; the green and pink white dwarfs mentioned in the text are a small number of cooler cases with unusual atmospheric compositions. Image: NASA, ESA and G. Bacon (STScI), public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

Total ultra-processed food intake shows no association with colorectal cancer

The study was carried out by Erikka Loftfield’s team at the US National Cancer Institute (NCI) and published in PLOS Medicine on October 15, 2026. The data come from the NIH-AARP Diet and Health Study: 461,682 US adults who enrolled in 1995—1996, were then aged 50 to 71 and free of cancer, and completed a 124-item food frequency questionnaire at enrolment. The researchers used the Nova classification system to assign the foods in the questionnaire to categories such as ultra-processed foods, and followed participants up to 2018, with a median follow-up of 18.8 years, during which a total of 10,075 cases of colorectal adenocarcinoma were diagnosed.

Participants were divided into five groups by ultra-processed food intake (grams per 1000 kcal of diet). The hazard ratio for colorectal cancer in the highest group relative to the lowest was 0.97 (95% confidence interval 0.91–1.03), so no association was observed overall. Broken down by specific foods, the directions were not consistent: higher intakes of bread, frozen desserts and dairy-based drinks, and breakfast cereals were associated with lower incidence, whereas higher intakes of reconstituted meat and fish products were associated with higher incidence (hazard ratio 1.10). In this population, 82.8% of whole grains and 74.3% of processed meat came from ultra-processed foods. The authors consider that, viewed in terms of nutrient content, the results are consistent with current colorectal cancer prevention advice: higher intakes of whole grains, dietary fibre, dairy products and calcium, and lower intake of meat, correspond to lower incidence. The model also estimated that replacing 10% by weight of ultra-processed foods with minimally processed foods was associated with a 2% lower colorectal cancer incidence (hazard ratio 0.98).

This is an observational cohort study. It can show only associations; it cannot prove that any type of food causes or prevents colorectal cancer, nor can it be taken to mean that ultra-processed foods as a whole are harmless. It analysed only colorectal cancer and does not address other diseases. Diet was surveyed only once, at enrolment, yet over the following twenty-plus years both participants’ eating habits and the ultra-processed foods on the market changed. The questionnaire was originally designed to estimate nutrient intake and cannot distinguish differences in degree of processing, such as between sweetened and plain yoghurt. Participants were mainly older white Americans, so the conclusions may not apply to younger or more ethnically diverse populations.

A few white dwarfs appear green or pink to the human eye

The paper by Mark Hollands, Boris Gänsicke and Pier-Emmanuel Tremblay of the University of Warwick and Detlev Koester of Kiel University was published in the Royal Astronomical Society journal RAS Techniques and Instruments; the University of Warwick issued a press release on October 15, 2026, and Nature ran a research highlight on October 21. White dwarfs are the dense remnants left at the end of the evolution of Sun-like stars. The colour of an ordinary star is determined essentially by its temperature, ranging from orange through white to pale blue. But the atmospheres of the coolest white dwarfs can reach densities of about 1 gram per cubic centimetre, and if they contain elements such as carbon, calcium and sodium, the absorption lines are extremely broadened, the spectrum departs markedly from a black body, and the colour changes accordingly.

No white dwarf is close enough for anyone to see the colour of its disc directly, so the team fed existing spectra and atmospheric models into a model of human colour vision to calculate “what colour the human eye would see if it were close enough”. The results show that carbon-rich white dwarfs are mostly pink or purple, those that have accreted debris from asteroids and comets are yellowish, and cooler mixed hydrogen–helium atmospheres lean towards cyan. WD J1330+6435, at about 4000 degrees Celsius, has accreted rocky material and has calcium, lithium and sodium in its atmosphere; in the model it appears yellow-green, and the authors state that, to their knowledge, no star has previously been credibly reported as green. WD J1011+2845, 48 light-years from Earth, has had carbon from its core brought to the surface by convection; almost all of its light falls at wavelengths beyond 600 nanometres, and it appears a deep salmon pink.

Unusual colours are not common. Of the 151 white dwarfs within 20 parsecs (about 65 light-years) of Earth, 5 have unusual colours (2 yellowish, 3 pinkish), roughly one in thirty; the remaining 146 have a median correlated colour temperature of about 6800 K and simply look white to the human eye. The authors point out that the common impression that “white dwarfs are bluish” comes from an observational selection effect: hotter, bluer white dwarfs are brighter and are over-represented in surveys selected by brightness. Note that these colours are perceived colours calculated from spectra and models, not photographs taken directly, and the “one in thirty” figure comes only from the nearby sample of 151 stars. The paper appears in a journal focused on methods and instrumentation, and its core contribution is a method for deriving the visible colours of stars from their spectra.

Machine learning corrects weather forecasts three to four weeks ahead

Subseasonal forecasting refers to weather forecasts made 2 to 6 weeks in advance. Such forecasts are useful for agriculture, water resources, energy dispatch and disaster prevention, but model errors accumulate over time and forecast skill drops sharply beyond two weeks. On October 14, 2026, Hannah Guan, Soukayna Mouatadid, Lester Mackey and colleagues published an open-access paper in Nature proposing a “probabilistic bias correction” (PBC) framework; Nature ran a research briefing on the study on October 21.

Aerial view of the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) campus in Bologna, Italy. The forecasts the paper corrects with PBC are precisely ECMWF’s dynamical ensemble forecasts and its AI forecasting system. Photo: Reddalo, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

PBC is not a new weather model but a post-processing method: it takes ensemble forecasts from any dynamical or AI model and, drawing on that model’s historical forecasts, past observations and climatology, learns to correct systematic biases in the forecast probability distribution. Specifically, the work is done by two lightweight models in parallel: Debias++ corrects biases by location, date and quantile, while Persistence++ incorporates recent observations and seasonal effects, and the two outputs are then combined. The evaluation targets are land 2-metre temperature, land precipitation and mean sea-level pressure in week 3 (days 19–25) and week 4 (days 26–32), with ERA5 reanalysis data used as ground truth and the ranked probability skill score (RPSS) used to measure improvement relative to the climatological average.

In hindcast tests over 2016—2024, using PBC to correct the dynamical ensemble forecasts of the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) improved skill, relative to the debiasing method the centre uses operationally, for 91% of pressure, 92% of temperature and 98% of precipitation forecast targets; applied to ECMWF’s AI forecasting system AIFS-SUBS, it doubled average skill in 2025. Under the name “MicroDuet”, the team entered AI Weather Quest, ECMWF’s 2025 real-time competition, and achieved the highest scores across all variables and lead times in the September–November season, outperforming the dynamical models of six operational forecasting centres, their multi-model ensemble, ECMWF’s AI model and 34 teams worldwide.

These gains must be understood against a very low starting point. An RPSS of 1 represents a perfect forecast, while 0 is equivalent to guessing from past-year averages; most of the baseline skill scores reported in the paper lie between 0.03 and 0.19, and the average skill of AIFS-SUBS before doubling was only 0.03. In other words, the corrected forecasts beat the climatological average more often, but are still a long way from accurately foreseeing the weather three to four weeks ahead. PBC depends on the input model’s historical forecasts and on ERA5 data; the real-time competition results come from the 2025 season, and the advance forecast of the December 2025 cold wave in the eastern United States mentioned in the paper is only a single case.

References

1. Abar L, O’Connell CP, Hong HG, et al. Associations of food processing and dietary risk factors with colorectal cancer incidence in the NIH-AARP Diet and Health Study: A cohort study. PLOS Medicine, 2026, 23(10): e1005251. Published 2026-10-15. doi:10.1371/journal.pmed.1005251

2. PLOS. Massive study of 460,000 people challenges ultra-processed food cancer fears. ScienceDaily, 2026-10-21. Link

3. Hollands MA, Gänsicke BT, Tremblay P-E, Koester D. Any colour you like: the diverse chromaticities of white dwarfs. RAS Techniques and Instruments, 2026, 5: rzag069. doi:10.1093/rasti/rzag069

4. University of Warwick. Green, pink and purple: astronomers reveal the surprising true colours of white dwarf stars. 2026-10-15. Link

5. Surprise! White dwarf stars come in a rainbow of colours. Nature Research Highlight, 2026-10-21. Link

6. Guan H, Mouatadid S, Orenstein P, et al. Advancing subseasonal forecasting with machine learning. Nature, 2026, 658: 951–957. Published 2026-10-14. doi:10.1038/s41586-026-11126-x

7. An AI tool improves weather forecasts up to a month ahead. Nature Research Briefing, 2026-10-21. Link

8. Associations of food processing and dietary risk factors with colorectal cancer incidence in the NIH-AARP Diet and Health Study: A cohort study

9. Advancing subseasonal forecasting with machine learning

10. Compiled and published by Scholay, the one-stop academic platform. If any content infringes your rights, please let us know and it will be taken down.

11. Also published on EnterScholar, a community for scholars in the intelligent era.

On October 20, 2026, the metascience organization Research on Research Institute (RoRI) released a working paper evaluating the Volkswagen Foundation's two-year “distributed peer review” pilot in Germany. In the pilot, applicants reviewed one another's proposals in the same round while an expert panel reviewed them independently at the same time. The evaluation shows fairly high acceptance among applicants and a lighter burden for each reviewer. However, the two tracks selected very few of the same projects, and reviewer expertise and strategic scoring remain contested.

Parallel tracks: applicant peer review and expert review

The rules of distributed peer review (hereafter DPR) are simple. Submitting an application to a funding round also commits the applicant to scoring and commenting on other applications in the same round, and the funder then ranks the applications by their aggregated scores. Instead of relying on a small number of experts to read every application, DPR spreads the review work across all applicants.

The Volkswagen Foundation (VolkswagenStiftung) is a private German funding body. Since 2024 it has trialed DPR in its humanities and cultural studies funding program “Open Up – New Research Spaces for the Humanities and Cultural Studies” (German name: Aufbruch), while keeping its existing expert panel review, so the two tracks run in parallel. According to the process the foundation has published, applicants submit anonymous short proposals and commit to reviewing about 5 other applications. After formal checks and conflict-of-interest screening, applicants use a quick assessment form to score and comment on the applications assigned to them, and about 10 funding recommendations are produced from the scores. On the other track, foundation staff first screen applications internally against the funding criteria, then pass them to an interdisciplinary expert panel for written review and discussion at a meeting, which likewise yields about 10 recommendations. Both sets of recommendations go to the foundation's Executive Board and its 14-member Board of Trustees (Kuratorium) for a decision. Regardless of the outcome, all applicants receive written DPR feedback.

Details of the first round (2024) are in a published paper. All 140 applications went through both tracks simultaneously, and 323 applicants and co-applicants each reviewed 4 to 5 applications. The allocation algorithm avoided pairing reviewers with applications from their own institution and prioritized matches in related disciplines. Each application received an average of 9.92 reviews, and the ranking used a trimmed mean. On the expert track, staff first screened out about half of the applications in each discipline, after which 8 panel members reviewed the rest. The foundation committed to funding the projects selected by either track. RoRI's latest press release says that 301 applications took part across the two rounds in 2024 and 2025, that each project received 9 to 10 independent reviews, and that the highest and lowest scores were dropped before averaging.

Main findings of the two-year evaluation

The new working paper is titled “Distributed Peer Review at the Volkswagen Foundation.” Its authors are Anna Butters, Melanie Benson Marshall, Stephen Pinfield, Tom Stafford, Alexander Bondarenko, Robert Nuske, Pierre Schwidlinski and Hanna Denecke. It is part of AFIRE (an accelerator for research funding experiments), a collaboration between RoRI and the Volkswagen Foundation, and the last four authors are from the foundation. The combined figures for both years are currently cited from RoRI's October 20 press release. The evaluation of the first round was released earlier, in August 2025, as RoRI Working Paper No. 17, and was published on September 12, 2026 in the journal Research Integrity and Peer Review. The first-round study used mixed methods: it analyzed all review scores, surveyed applicants on their expectations before reviewing and their feedback after the decision, interviewed 20 applicants, panel members and foundation staff, tested the stability of funding decisions with the bootstrap, and analyzed agreement among reviewers with mixed-effects models.

The finding that has drawn the most attention is how little the two tracks overlapped. In 2024 the two tracks funded 18 projects in total, and only 3 were selected by both; in 2025 only 1 overlapped (the press release does not give that year's total number of funded projects). The first-round paper also offers another side of the picture: of the 10 projects selected by DPR, 9 made the expert track's shortlist and 8 were discussed at the panel meeting. This suggests that the two tracks largely agreed on which applications deserved to be in contention, and that they diverged mainly in the final choices. On stability, the research team estimated through simulation that if the DPR process were run again, about 56% of the selected projects would be selected again; in the first round, 500 bootstrap samples retained on average 5.49 of the 10. The paper attributes this to large differences between reviewers: the share of score variance attributable to differences between reviewers (20.0%) was larger than the share attributable to differences between applications (8.9%).

On workload, the press release says that DPR reviewers spent on average less than half as much time on each assigned application as expert panel members did. The first-round paper breaks this down further. DPR involved more total review time, but it was shared among 323 people; each of the 8 panel members spent about 2.5 times as much time on reviewing as an applicant reviewer. The median cumulative review time an application received under DPR was 12.33 hours, compared with 45 minutes to 4 hours on the expert track, depending on how far the application progressed.

There is no single measure of review quality. The press release says that whether a reviewer's discipline matched the application's, and whether the reviewer had prior reviewing experience, had almost no association with scores; in the first round, reviewers from outside the discipline even gave slightly higher scores. On review criteria, DPR reviewers weighted “originality” most heavily in both years, while the expert panel's emphasis across criteria changed considerably between the two rounds. Applicants' views of the reviews they received were mixed: in the first-round feedback survey, only 51% considered the reviewers' expertise good; 63.4% of reviews were judged constructive and 22.3% not constructive.

Overall, applicants were willing to take part again. According to the optional survey cited in the press release, the share willing to participate in future DPR funding rounds was 82.8% (2024) and 94.5% (2025) among funded applicants, and 59.6% and 71.7% among unfunded applicants. The survey was voluntary, and in the first round funded applicants responded more positively. Attitudes also differed by career stage: early-career researchers appreciated getting reviewing opportunities usually reserved for senior scholars, but also complained about the heavy workload and worried that their own and others' expertise was insufficient. All parties mentioned concerns about reviewer expertise, applicant workload and strategic scoring. In the first round, a small number of applicants consistently gave scores far below the average; most of these were removed by trimming, but the paper acknowledges that other forms of strategic behavior cannot be ruled out. Because the application topics varied widely, the pilot did not use a safeguard design that assigns reviewers to different groups from their competitors.

Practices and controversies at observatories and UK funders

DPR was first used to allocate telescope observing time, based on a scheme proposed by Merrifield and Saari in 2009. The European Southern Observatory (ESO) ran a voluntary experiment in Period 103 in 2018: 172 principal investigators took part, 167 completed their reviews on time, and each proposal was reviewed by 8 peers, with the results not affecting actual time allocation. A paper published in Nature Astronomy on April 6, 2020 reported that DPR's internal consistency was statistically the same as that of traditional review committees' pre-meeting assessments; when machine learning was used to match reviewers, it succeeded in excluding reviewers “with no knowledge of the topic” about 80% of the time.

ESO formally adopted DPR starting with Period 110: proposals requesting less than 16 hours in total go through DPR, accounting for about half of proposals but only 15.6% of requested time; larger programs are still reviewed by review committees and expert panels. Each principal investigator must review 10 peer proposals, and if the reviews are not submitted on time, their own proposal is automatically rejected. ESO's explanation says that the existing panels were small and heavily burdened, and that about 30% of users were dissatisfied with review feedback, which was one of the reasons for introducing DPR.

In the UK, the approach has been driven by the Metascience Unit set up jointly by the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT) and UKRI. In 2025 the unit reported an experiment in an early-career researcher funding scheme for AI metascience: about 100 applications competed for about 18 awards totaling £4 million, and each applicant reviewed 8 to 10 applications; applicants who did not submit their reviews were eliminated. Assessment and decision took 2.2 months on average, 53%–65% faster than standard UKRI funding; 84% of applicants surveyed said the process broadened their understanding of the field. When the number of reviewers increased from 3 to 9, the score agreement measure (the intraclass correlation coefficient) rose from 0.4 to 0.7. Since then, BBSRC has trialed DPR in its 2025/26 Pioneer Awards while keeping an expert panel in parallel, and UKRI's AIRR innovator track assigns reviewers to an application pool different from their own so that they do not score direct competitors.

The controversy centers on a few points. The most frequently mentioned is “gaming”: reviewers might mark down competitors to raise their own relative ranking, or collude with others to give each other high scores. The UK Metascience Unit acknowledges that most past experiments relied on “soft constraints” such as guidelines, anonymity and the threat of exclusion, and designed pool-based allocation for this reason. It also lists other limitations: a heavier burden on applicants; applicants may not match the level of experts selected by funders; averaging many scores may disadvantage controversial but excellent applications; the approach is hard to run with fewer than about 20 applications; and having only applicants review excludes international experts who are ineligible to apply, as well as reviewers from industry or policy. Some applicants have also reported that repeated emphasis on preventing gaming actually made them reluctant to give low scores to very weak applications. An earlier experiment by the US National Science Foundation (NSF) used a bonus-point mechanism, which raised concerns that reviews would drift toward consensus.

The report's conclusions and how different parties read them

The report's own conclusions are fairly restrained. The first-round paper finds that DPR is feasible for interdisciplinary funding, can shorten decision times, gives applicants more feedback, and helps “democratize” review; but funders must accept trade-offs, and the results DPR selects may not match those of existing systems. The press release for the two-year evaluation likewise sets high satisfaction and a lighter individual burden side by side with low overlap in decisions and moderate stability.

The funder's framing is more positive. When the Volkswagen Foundation presented the first-round results on August 28, 2025, it used phrases such as “comparable quality” and “high consistency,” based on the fact that 8 of the 10 projects recommended by DPR reached the final discussion stage of the expert track. It also said individual review time fell by about 60%, and by as much as 87% when panel meetings were included. These figures do not contradict the paper; they simply use a different basis of comparison: looking at the final funding lists, the two tracks overlapped on only 3 projects.

Two further points are worth keeping in mind when reading this research. First, the study was commissioned by the Volkswagen Foundation, four of the authors are foundation employees, and the foundation is also one of the funders of RoRI's second phase. The first-round paper states that the interview material was coded by researchers unaffiliated with the foundation and that the foundation authors had no access to the raw interview transcripts, but this only partly addresses the question of independence. Second, the low overlap between the two tracks shows that the two methods selected different projects, not that either one is more “correct”: funding applications have no answer key that can be checked afterward. For other funding bodies, this pilot provides real operational data on costs and benefits, not yet evidence that DPR can directly replace expert review.

References

1. Research on Research Institute. New RoRI study evaluates two-year trial of Distributed Peer Review (DPR) at the Volkswagen Foundation. 2026-10-20.

2. Butters A, Benson Marshall M, Pinfield S, et al. Applicants as reviewers: a mixed methods evaluation of the risks, benefits, and potential of distributed peer review for grant funding allocations. Research Integrity and Peer Review, 2026-09-12.

3. Research on Research Institute. Applicants as Reviewers: Evaluating the Risks, Benefits, and Potential of Distributed Peer Review for Grant Funding Allocations (RoRI Working Paper No. 17). Figshare, 2025-08-27.

4. VolkswagenStiftung. Distributed Peer Review (DPR): Study Shows Potential for Faster and More Democratic Review. 2025-08-28.

5. VolkswagenStiftung. Distributed Peer Review (DPR) – so macht es die VolkswagenStiftung.

6. Kerzendorf WE, Patat F, Bordelon D, et al. Distributed peer review enhanced with natural language processing and machine learning. Nature Astronomy, 2020-04-06.

7. European Southern Observatory. DPR Rules and Guidelines.

8. European Southern Observatory. ESO Period 110 Proposal Submission Statistics.

9. UK Metascience Unit. A Year in Metascience (2025). 2025.

10. Pearson H. How to speed up peer review: make applicants mark one another. Nature, 2025-07-01.

11. BBSRC. Pioneer Awards 2025/26: DPR guidance. 2025.

12. UKRI. Additional Information Distributed Peer Review - rules and guidelines (AIRR). 2025.

13. Compiled and published by Scholay, the one-stop academic platform. If any content infringes your rights, please let us know and we will take it down.

14. Also published on EnterScholar, a community for scholars in the age of intelligence.

This week ScienceDaily ran a cluster of three university press releases: why statins can harm muscle, how much helium formed in the first few minutes after the birth of the Universe, and an unusually stout belemnite from Jurassic seas. Checking the original papers shows that all three studies were published before the press releases, the earliest in November 2025. Below, each item explains what was measured, what was found, and where the conclusions stop.

Belemnite fossils commonly found in Jurassic strata in Wyoming, with slender bullet-shaped guards. The guard of Wyoteuthis linsterorum, described in this article, is much thicker, and the image does not show the new species. Image: Wilson44691, Wikimedia Commons, public domain.

How statins open a muscle calcium channel

Statins lower cholesterol by inhibiting HMG-CoA reductase, and more than 2 hundred million people worldwide use them. Their most common adverse effects centre on skeletal muscle. Mild cases involve aches and fatigue, while severe cases involve rhabdomyolysis, which can lead to kidney failure. According to figures cited in the paper, severe muscle symptoms occur in 0.1%–0.5% of users. Observational studies report general muscle pain in as many as 10%–25% of users, though this figure is highly contested. Earlier studies had found that genetic variants in RyR1, the calcium release channel of skeletal muscle, are associated with statin intolerance. However, it had remained unresolved whether statins act on RyR1 directly or influence it indirectly through other proteins or signalling pathways.

A team from the University of British Columbia (UBC) and the University of Wisconsin–Madison used cryo-electron microscopy to solve the structure of rabbit skeletal-muscle RyR1 with and without atorvastatin. The paper was published in Nature Communications on 20 November 2025, and ScienceDaily carried UBC's press release on 20 October 2026. In the control samples, all channels were closed. After atorvastatin was added, about 64% of channel particles adopted an open conformation. The structures show that each RyR1 subunit can bind three atorvastatin molecules, which crowd into a cleft formed by the pseudo-voltage-sensor domain and also interact with one another. Binding happens in sequence. While the channel is closed, each subunit first binds one molecule, causing a slight conformational change that makes the channel easier to open. The other two molecules then enter, prying this domain apart and driving the pore open. In a muscle cell, this would mean a continual leak of calcium ions from the sarcoplasmic reticulum.

The authors also compared this binding mode with the way atorvastatin binds its intended target. In HMG-CoA reductase, the key hydrophilic groups are buried deep in the active site, whereas binding to RyR1 relies mainly on the molecule's hydrophobic portion. On this basis, they propose a direction for designing new statins: modifying the hydrophobic groups to reduce binding to RyR1 while preserving the lipid-lowering effect.

The limits of this study are also clear. It is an in vitro structural experiment that tested only atorvastatin, and to obtain clear structures it used saturating concentrations far above clinical levels. The paper states that the concentration achievable inside muscle cells is currently unknown, and that the plasma concentration at a high dose of 80 mg per day is about 334 nM. Based on half-maximal effective concentrations of 300–400 nM measured in earlier binding experiments, the authors consider the mechanism clinically relevant, but this remains an inference. The hydrophobic portions of simvastatin and pravastatin differ considerably in structure, and it is unclear whether they bind in the same way. Modified statins are for now only a design idea, with no new drug or clinical data. Nor can this study say how much of what people commonly call “statin muscle pain” is actually caused by the drugs.

A new measurement of primordial helium abundance

In the first few minutes after the Big Bang, protons and neutrons fused into helium and other light elements. The primordial helium mass fraction, Yp, depends on the baryon density at that time and on how many kinds of light particles took part in the early Universe's expansion. It can therefore be used to test standard cosmology and the Standard Model of particle physics. The difficulty is that stars have been making helium ever since, so the helium observed today includes later additions. The usual approach is to observe H II regions in a set of galaxies and then use the relation between helium and oxygen abundance to extrapolate by regression to zero metallicity.

The Large Binocular Telescope (LBT) primordial helium project published a series of five papers in volume 1008 of The Astrophysical Journal, which went online on 9 September 2026. The preprints had been submitted to arXiv on 29 January of the same year, and the University of Minnesota's press release appeared on 20 October. The team used the LBT's MODS spectrograph to observe 54 metal-poor H II regions. According to the press release, the team analysed more than ten helium lines and 15 hydrogen lines simultaneously for each target to identify small systematic errors. After screening, 41 reliable targets remained. Of these, 15 extremely low-metallicity targets have high signal-to-noise ratios and oxygen-to-hydrogen ratios no greater than 4×10⁻⁵. They are already close to primordial conditions, so they can be combined directly in a weighted average without relying on extrapolation. The result is Yp = 0.2458 ± 0.0013, an uncertainty of about 0.5%. For comparison, the value the team obtained by regression in 2015 was 0.2449 ± 0.0040, with an error about three times as large. The new value agrees with the standard nucleosynthesis prediction of 0.2467 ± 0.0002, calculated from the baryon density measured by the Planck satellite.

The Large Binocular Telescope (LBT) on Mount Graham, Arizona, USA, with its two 8.4 m primary mirrors mounted side by side. The spectra for the LBT primordial helium project were obtained with its MODS spectrograph. Image: NASA, Wikimedia Commons, public domain.

The fifth paper combines the new helium value with deuterium abundance and cosmic microwave background data. If the number of neutrino species is allowed to vary freely, the result is Nν = 2.925 ± 0.082, consistent with the three neutrino species of the Standard Model. If the number of species is assumed to be no fewer than three, the upper limit on additional species is 0.125 (95% confidence level).

The “15 primordial galaxies” mentioned in the press release refers to the number of targets in the final average. The full observed sample has 54. The “threefold improvement in precision” is relative to the team's own previous result. The paper also acknowledges that residual systematic errors remain from the contribution of stellar nucleosynthesis to helium. These results tighten constraints on the early Universe and confirm that it is compatible with existing theory. They do not amount to the discovery of new particles beyond the Standard Model.

Wyoming's chunky Jurassic belemnite

Belemnites are extinct cephalopods related to today's squid and octopuses. The part most often found as a fossil is the bullet-shaped internal skeleton, known as the “guard”. The Sundance Formation in Wyoming preserves deposits from a Late Jurassic inland sea, and these fossils are so abundant there that they accumulate in layers. On 9 September 2026, researchers from the United States, the United Kingdom and New Zealand described two unusual belemnite guards in Papers in Palaeontology. The guards come from the upper Redwater Shale Member of the formation and are Oxfordian in age (about 1.6 hundred million years ago). The researchers named them as a new genus and species, Wyoteuthis linsterorum. The University of Manchester's press release appeared on 20 October.

The guards of the two specimens are about 60 mm in diameter at the anterior end, making them the thickest belemnite guards known. According to the press release, the belemnites common in the same strata are generally 5–10 cm long and only 1–2 cm wide. The researchers combined CT scans with morphological details, including the shape of the guard, the position and angle of the internal cavity and the grooves at the tip, to assign it to the family Megateuthididae. This family flourished from the late Early Jurassic to the Middle Jurassic, and most of its members had disappeared by the Bathonian, with only sporadic records afterwards. The authors therefore regard Wyoteuthis as a relict lineage of the family, possibly derived from Brevibelus of the North American Bajocian. On this basis, they propose that the northeastern Pacific once held a previously unrecognized refugium. The paper also notes that similar-looking specimens from the same basin reported in the literature actually belong to another family.

Burkhard Pohl collected the first specimen in the late 1990s, and it then sat in a collection drawer for many years. Cliff Linster found the second specimen and donated it to the Wyoming Dinosaur Center in 2019, and it has now been designated the holotype. The evidence therefore consists of just two specimens, and the anterior ends of both are crushed or missing. The press release gives the guard length as about 10 cm. The paper describes a preserved length of more than 130 mm and an estimated complete length of about 160–175 mm, and this article follows the paper. Using the reconstruction proportions of Klug et al. from 2024, the authors roughly estimate a total length including the arms of about 55–60 cm and a mantle length of 30–35 cm. They also note that the reference samples include no guards of this short, stout type and lack key parameters, so the estimate is only approximate. To explain why the animal is so rare, the paper lists several possibilities, such as highly specialized prey or habitat, or living mainly on the outer shelf. The press release's claim that it “preyed on smaller belemnites living alongside it” is likewise the authors' speculation.

References

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10. The LBT Yp Project. I. An Improved Determination of the Primordial Helium Abundance—Project Description, Sample Selection, Observations, and Methodology

11. The LBT Yp Project. IV. A New Value of the Primordial Helium Abundance

12. The LBT Yp Project. V. Cosmological Implications of a New Determination of Primordial 4He

13. ‘The big chunky belemnite’: a new relict megateuthidid from the Oxfordian (Late Jurassic) of Wyoming, USA, and its place in the evolutionary history of the group

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