The new journal itself is devoted to metascience, sometimes called metaresearch or "research on research," a field that treats the scholarly enterprise itself as an object of study. Rather than investigating questions within a particular discipline, metascientists examine how research is conducted, reviewed, published, communicated, and used, with the aim of raising the quality and efficiency of science and strengthening the transparency and integrity of the scholarly publishing ecosystem. The field has gained considerable traction over the past decade, with high-profile replication projects, systematic examinations of statistical practice, and studies of peer review reliability demonstrating that the processes underpinning published knowledge can themselves be measured, audited, and improved. JMIR Metascience and Research Integrity frames its mission around ethical challenges, best practices, and evidence-based research standards, positioning the new section on misinformation as a natural extension of that agenda: if metascience can diagnose weaknesses in research practice, it can equally be applied to the corruption of the communication channels through which research travels.

The rationale for the section rests on a growing concern: the integrity of the scientific record depends not only on rigorous research practices but also on the trustworthiness of the channels through which knowledge is communicated and disseminated. According to the announcement, misinformation, disinformation, and malinformation in scholarly publishing now represent a growing threat to the credibility of science. The publisher draws a deliberate distinction between these phenomena and the more familiar category of public health misinformation, which typically circulates among lay audiences. Scholarly misinformation, in this framing, arises from within the academic ecosystem itself, generated through compromised peer review, manipulated data, misleading abstracts, predatory publishing, citation manipulation, paper mills, and the irresponsible or outright fraudulent use of artificial intelligence tools across the research life cycle. The distinction matters because scholarly misinformation can carry the implicit imprimatur of peer review and institutional affiliation, lending it an authority that public misinformation lacks and making it harder for readers—including experienced clinicians and researchers—to detect.

The consequences, the announcement warns, extend well beyond academic debates. Erosion of public trust in science is one downstream effect, but the risks are more concrete: misleading content in the literature could inform harmful real-world decisions in clinical practice or health policy. A clinician who acts on a fabricated or manipulated study, or a policy maker who cites a compromised systematic review, may cause direct harm to patients or populations. This clinical and policy dimension is especially salient for JMIR Publications, whose portfolio is anchored by digital health research, including the well-known Journal of Medical Internet Research. In fields where published findings are quickly translated into apps, clinical protocols, telehealth interventions, and guideline recommendations, the lag between publication of a flawed or fabricated paper and its practical application can be vanishingly short, magnifying the stakes of every integrity failure.

The publisher also emphasizes how changes in the speed and scale of scholarly production have amplified these vulnerabilities. Evolving publishing models, such as preprints and open peer review, together with modern dissemination tools and culture—including social media and journalistic media—may serve as new avenues for an influx of unvalidated AI-generated material. The result, according to the call, is an increased risk of accelerating the spread of information that has not been adequately vetted. Even when such content is harmless, its rapid circulation is problematic; when it is intentionally misleading, it shades into disinformation and malinformation. The concern reflects broader anxieties in the publishing world, where generative tools have made it cheaper and faster than ever to produce fluent, plausible-sounding manuscripts at industrial scale, straining the capacity of editors and volunteer reviewers to distinguish legitimate submissions from manufactured ones. At the same time, the announcement notes a countervailing trend: the scholarly publishing community is actively developing governance models, detection tools, educational frameworks, and policy interventions to counter these threats, and it is precisely this emerging body of work that the new section hopes to capture.

The call for papers outlines a broad set of topics that prospective authors might address. One cluster focuses on mechanisms: how inaccurate or misleading content enters and persists in the scientific literature in the first place. Understanding these pathways—whether through fraudulent manuscripts produced by commercial paper mills, peer review rings, image and data manipulation, or abstracts that overstate findings—underpins any serious effort at mitigation. Paper mills in particular have moved to the forefront of publishing-sector concern in recent years, with major publishers retracting thousands of articles linked to coordinated manuscript production operations, and with industry bodies convening cross-publisher working groups to share intelligence on suspicious submissions. The announcement treats this mechanistic understanding as a first-order research question, not merely background for policy discussion, implying that empirical studies of how corruption operates are as welcome as proposals for stopping it.

A second cluster concerns response and remediation. The journal invites work on the accurate detection, investigation, correction, and retraction of misinformation in published literature, including through postpublication review and other existing or novel policies and approaches. This encompasses some of the most contested terrain in contemporary publishing: the slow pace of retractions, the reluctance of journals to correct high-profile papers, the burden placed on volunteer sleuths who flag suspicious work, and the design of institutional processes that can investigate concerns fairly and efficiently. The explicit inclusion of "novel" approaches suggests openness to proposals for new infrastructures, not just evaluations of current practice—potentially encompassing automated screening tools, standardized investigation protocols, or rethinking how responsibility for postpublication correction is distributed among journals, institutions, and independent watchdogs.

The announcement also directs attention to scholarly content that falls outside formal peer review. Preprints have become an increasingly prominent part of the publishing landscape, particularly since their rapid adoption during public health emergencies, and the call specifically solicits work on misinformation in non–peer-reviewed scholarly content and its implications for public understanding of science. Because preprints are often indexed, covered by journalists, and shared widely on social media before any expert vetting occurs, they occupy a contested middle ground: valuable for speed and openness, but vulnerable to the amplification of claims that later prove wrong or were never properly qualified. Relatedly, the call invites examination of publishing practices themselves—predatory publishing, research assessment incentives, and other system and industry influences—as vectors for misinformation, recognizing that the pressures of "publish or perish" and metrics-driven evaluation can create demand for fraudulent or low-quality output. Studies linking assessment reform, such as moves away from journal-based metrics toward narrative CVs and research quality frameworks, could find a natural home here.

Governance and infrastructure form a third thematic pillar. The journal seeks submissions on policy and infrastructure-based solutions to mitigate misinformation in scholarly publishing, including the roles of publishers, editors, funders, and institutions. This framing acknowledges that no single actor controls the publishing ecosystem: funders shape research incentives, institutions oversee researchers, editors and publishers control venues and review processes, and infrastructure providers underpin the databases and platforms through which papers circulate. Effective responses, the call implies, will require coordinated action across these stakeholders rather than isolated interventions—an approach consistent with recent industry efforts to coordinate responses to paper mills and peer review manipulation across competing publishers who might otherwise have little incentive to share sensitive information.

The call additionally reaches beyond the present system toward speculative and evaluative futures. It welcomes well-argued, evidence-based thought pieces that imagine a future scholarly publishing ecosystem capable of mitigating misinformation in the published literature. And it broadens the lens beyond the scholarly record itself, inviting research on the impact of social media, science communication, and the amplification of misleading scientific claims beyond academia. Notably, the announcement highlights the potential impact of zero-click search—search interfaces that answer queries directly on results pages—on access to scientific material, an example of how changes in information infrastructure can alter how, and how accurately, the public encounters science. As search behavior shifts away from clicking through to original sources, the contextual cues that help readers evaluate a claim's provenance—journal identity, study limitations, corrections—may be stripped away, a dynamic the section appears eager to see studied empirically.

In terms of submission formats, the journal is casting a wide net. Original research, systematic reviews, scoping reviews, policy analyses, balanced viewpoints, research letters, and tutorials are all welcome. The publisher states particular interest in work that proposes, evaluates, or critically examines solutions and mitigation strategies developed by stakeholders across the publishing ecosystem, signaling that the section is intended to be solution-oriented rather than purely diagnostic. This orientation toward evidence-based remedies distinguishes the call from more purely aspirational integrity statements, and suggests the editors want submissions that test interventions rather than merely describe problems. Full details of the call for papers are available on the journal's website.

JMIR Publications, headquartered at 130 Queens Quay East in Toronto, describes itself as a leading open access publisher of digital health research and a champion of open science, with a focus on author advocacy and research amplification. It positions itself as a technology organization with publishing at its core, offering tools and resources that support researchers throughout the dissemination process. Its portfolio spans a range of peer-reviewed journals beyond JMIR Metascience and Research Integrity, and it maintains a presence on platforms including X, LinkedIn, YouTube, Facebook, Bluesky, and Instagram. Media inquiries can be directed to the publisher's communications team.

The launch of this section reflects a broader moment in scholarly publishing, in which concerns about paper mills, manipulated peer review, and AI-generated text have moved from the margins to the center of discussions about research integrity. Publishers, funders, and researcher communities have increasingly treated these issues not as isolated scandals but as systemic challenges requiring systemic evidence—a shift that metascience, with its emphasis on empirical study of the research enterprise, is well positioned to serve.

Competing-interests statements are a formal part of research publishing because scientific evaluation depends not only on the evidence presented but also on the circumstances surrounding its review and dissemination. A competing interest can arise when an author has a relationship, responsibility or financial, professional or institutional connection that could be perceived as influencing judgment. The presence of such a relationship does not by itself demonstrate misconduct or invalidate a study. Disclosure instead makes the relevant circumstance visible, allowing editors, reviewers and readers to understand the setting in which decisions were made. In a journal, an editorial-board appointment or leadership role is especially important when an officeholder is also listed as an author. The correction explains that these roles should have been declared in the affected articles. It also records that the identified editors were not involved in the editorial review or the decisions to publish the papers, a procedural detail intended to distinguish authorship from participation in peer-review and publication decisions.

For the first article identified in the notice, the corrected statement concerns Christian Spielmann, who is described as an editorial-board member of Vicinagearth. The article, “Multi-wavelength ghost imaging: a review,” was published in volume 2 in 2025. The updated declaration says that Spielmann was not involved in the article’s editorial review or in the decision to publish it, while all authors declare that they have no competing interests. The wording separates the existence of an institutional relationship from the conduct of the editorial process. That distinction is technically significant: a review article may synthesize findings across a field rather than present a new experimental data set, but it remains subject to editorial evaluation, and readers still need to know whether an author has a formal connection to the journal. By stating the role and the recusal explicitly, the correction supplies information that was missing from the original version without asserting that the relationship altered the article’s content or assessment.

The other four corrections concern articles that listed Xuelong Li as an author. The notice identifies Li as the editor-in-chief of Vicinagearth and states that Li was not involved in the editorial review or the publication decision for those papers. Their corrected declarations add that all authors have no other competing interests. The affected titles are “Enhanced tool invocation method through multi-model collaboration,” published in volume 2 in 2025; “AI flow: perspectives, scenarios, and approaches,” published in volume 3 in 2026; “Generative video compression: towards 0.01% compression rate for video transmission,” published in volume 3 in 2026; and “SyncDIT: audio-visual aligned video generation with audio synchronization feature,” also published in volume 3 in 2026. The correction gives no indication that the articles’ technical claims have been withdrawn, amended or re-evaluated. Its purpose is to update the declarations that accompany them and to make the journal’s editorial safeguards more transparent.

The notice illustrates why disclosure language often contains two separate components: identification and management. Identification tells readers what connection exists, such as membership on an editorial board or service as editor-in-chief. Management explains how the connection was handled in the publication process, including whether the person participated in peer review or the final decision. Without the first component, readers may not know that a relationship exists. Without the second, they may not know whether the relationship affected the route by which the manuscript was assessed. In this case, the journal’s correction supplies both elements for the named editors. The wording does not ask readers to infer independence from the editors’ titles or from the authors’ general declaration. Instead, it records a specific non-participation statement for each role. Such precision is useful because editorial conflicts are procedural: the central question is not simply who wrote a paper, but who handled its review, who made the publication decision and whether those responsibilities were separated.

Corrections of this kind are distinct from retractions, expressions of concern and amendments to scientific results. A retraction generally signals that a publication should no longer be relied on as part of the research record, while an expression of concern alerts readers to an unresolved issue. A correction to competing-interests information addresses the publication record’s accompanying disclosures. The source notice does not describe errors in measurements, computational analyses, literature interpretation or experimental design. It does not state that any author violated a policy or that any article’s conclusions are unsupported. Instead, it says that the editors should have been declared as authors’ competing interests after the original articles were published. This limited scope matters for readers who encounter the correction through indexing services or citation databases: the papers remain identifiable by their original titles and publication details, but the declarations associated with them should be read in their updated form. The correction therefore adds context without changing the scientific claims reported in the articles.

The five affected publications span several areas of contemporary science and engineering, but the correction itself is about a shared infrastructure of scholarly communication. Ghost imaging, for example, is named in a review article focused on using correlations between measurements to reconstruct information about an object, while the other cited papers concern artificial-intelligence systems and media technologies. Those technical subjects differ in their instruments, algorithms and evaluation criteria. Yet every paper also passes through an editorial system in which authorship, review and decision-making must be documented. A journal’s integrity mechanisms operate across disciplines because readers need comparable information whether a paper discusses optical imaging, collaborative AI tool use, generative compression or synchronized audio-visual generation. The correction shows that transparency requirements apply even when the underlying research topics are technically unrelated. It also demonstrates that a disclosure can be updated independently of the scientific text, preserving the distinction between a paper’s intellectual contribution and the governance information attached to its publication.

Vicinagearth lists the correction as open access and provides a record linking it to the five original articles. The correction’s bibliographic record identifies the editorial office of Vicinagearth in Shanghai, China, as the authoring entity and assigns the notice the digital object identifier 10.1007/s44336-026-00039-y. Readers consulting any of the affected papers should consider the corrected competing-interests statements part of the current publication record. The broader lesson is not that an editorial appointment automatically compromises a study, but that readers should be told when such an appointment exists and how the journal managed it. Clear disclosure allows independent assessment while avoiding unsupported assumptions about influence. By documenting the roles of Spielmann and Li, and by stating that neither participated in review or publication decisions for the relevant articles, the notice brings the five papers’ declarations into alignment with the journal’s stated need to identify editorial relationships. It is a procedural correction, but one that strengthens the transparency surrounding the research record.

The correction also clarifies how amendments to the scholarly record are tracked. It is identified as the version of record dated 3 June 2026 and carries its own article number and DOI, rather than replacing the identifiers of the five original publications. This arrangement allows databases, libraries and readers to connect the updated disclosure with the papers to which it applies while preserving the chronology of publication. The notice therefore functions as a linked record in the journal’s literature, documenting when the disclosure issue was recognized and how the statements were revised.

That linkage is particularly useful because the affected articles appeared across different issues and publication years. The correction cites each paper individually, enabling readers to move from the notice to the relevant article instead of treating the five papers as a single study or research program. It also distinguishes the correction from an update to a manuscript’s technical text. In practical terms, someone evaluating one of the papers should inspect both the article and its associated correction, since the original article may still contain the earlier declaration while the later notice supplies the updated wording.

The source record further shows that the correction is openly accessible under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. That licensing information concerns reuse of the correction’s content and is separate from the editorial disclosure issue, but it supports broad circulation of the updated record. Repositories, educators and researchers can share or adapt the notice subject to attribution and any applicable conditions for third-party material. Open availability can be important for corrections because disclosure changes are relevant not only to readers of the journal’s website, but also to people locating papers through citation databases, institutional archives or systematic literature searches. In this case, the correction’s concise scope makes the administrative change discoverable without implying that the underlying research articles have undergone a new scientific investigation.

Subject of Research: Correction of competing-interests disclosures in Vicinagearth articles

Article Title: Correction: Competing interests

Article References: Vicinagearth (2026). Correction: Competing interests. Vicinagearth, 3(1), Article 10. https://doi.org/10.1007/s44336-026-00039-y

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s44336-026-00039-y

Keywords: research publishing, competing interests, editorial ethics, peer review, Vicinagearth, publication corrections, research transparency, scientific integrity, Correction, Competing, interests, scientific research

The underlying topic is important because returning to paid employment after a stroke is not determined solely by whether a person can walk, speak or perform a standard clinical task. Stroke can affect attention, information processing, movement, communication, mood and the ability to sustain effort over time. Fatigue adds another layer of difficulty. Post-stroke fatigue is commonly understood as a persistent or disproportionate feeling of exhaustion that can reduce physical, cognitive or emotional capacity, sometimes without an obvious increase in workload. It may fluctuate during the day and can become more apparent when a survivor resumes activities that require prolonged concentration or multitasking. In a workplace, that distinction matters. A person may appear able to complete a task briefly yet struggle to maintain the same performance across a full shift, recover between shifts or manage unexpected demands. The article’s title frames this return not as a simple recovery milestone but as an occupational adaptation process, in which people and workplaces must adjust activities, routines and expectations to accommodate changing capacity.

Occupational adaptation is a technical concept used in rehabilitation and occupational therapy to describe how people respond to demands in their everyday environments. “Occupation” in this context does not mean only a job; it includes meaningful activities and roles, such as household responsibilities, social participation and employment. After a stroke, adaptation can involve changing how a task is performed, modifying the environment, redistributing responsibilities or developing strategies that reduce the impact of impaired stamina. At work, examples might include taking planned recovery periods, reducing interruptions, simplifying sequences of actions, using written prompts or gradually increasing hours. These examples are general rehabilitation approaches, not results reported by the correction itself. The central point is that work capacity is relational: it emerges from the interaction between an individual’s abilities and the demands, pace, predictability and supportiveness of a particular job. Two people with similar clinical impairments may therefore experience very different barriers when attempting to return to employment.

Fatigue is especially difficult to assess because it is partly subjective and does not always correspond neatly to visible impairment. Conventional neurological examinations can document strength, coordination or language, but they may not capture the effort required to maintain attention, suppress distractions or switch between tasks. A worker may compensate effectively during a brief assessment while using substantial mental energy to do so. Later, that hidden cost can appear as slowed performance, mistakes, reduced communication or a need for extended recovery. Fatigue can also interact with sleep disturbance, pain, depression, anxiety, medication effects and the neurological consequences of the stroke. These factors can reinforce one another, making it challenging to identify a single cause or a universal remedy. For occupational rehabilitation, the practical implication is that assessment should consider patterns over time and in real activities, not only performance at one moment. A return-to-work plan may need to account for both what a worker can do and how long that ability can be sustained safely and consistently.

The corrected publication does not provide a new set of clinical recommendations, and it does not report a new analysis of stroke-related fatigue. Its purpose is narrower but still consequential: to repair the public research record. Funding disclosures are part of that record because they allow readers to understand how a study was supported and whether sponsors had a role in decisions that could influence the work. In this case, the corrected statement explicitly separates financial support from scientific control. The listed organizations provided funding, while the notice says they had no involvement in design, data collection, analysis, publication decisions or writing. That distinction does not prove that a study is correct, nor does a funding declaration replace independent scrutiny. It does, however, give readers a clearer basis for assessing the article alongside its methods, evidence and limitations. Corrections of this kind are therefore not merely administrative updates; they help preserve the accuracy and transparency on which cumulative science depends.

The article was authored by Jessica Vollertsen, Mathilda Björk, Anna-Karin Norlin and Elin Ekbladh, with affiliations at Linköping University in Sweden. Vollertsen is associated with the university’s Department of Rehabilitation and Department of Health, Medicine and Caring Sciences in Motala. Björk and Norlin are affiliated with the Pain and Rehabilitation Center and the Department of Health, Medicine and Caring Sciences in Linköping, while Ekbladh is affiliated with the Department of Health, Medicine and Caring Sciences. The study’s placement in an occupational therapy journal reflects the need to connect neurological recovery with the practical realities of daily work. Clinical rehabilitation can improve movement, communication or cognitive function, but employment also depends on workplace schedules, task design, social expectations and the availability of adjustments. A person may need coordination among stroke specialists, occupational therapists, employers, human-resources staff and the worker themselves. Such coordination is most effective when fatigue is treated as a legitimate functional issue rather than as a lack of motivation or evidence that recovery has failed.

For employers, the subject raises questions about how work is organized and how performance is evaluated. A gradual return may involve fewer hours, lighter workloads or a staged increase in complexity, but the appropriate arrangement depends on the job and the person’s recovery. Flexibility can be particularly important when fatigue varies unpredictably or when cognitive tasks are more demanding than physical ones. A quiet workspace, reduced multitasking, predictable scheduling or additional time for complex instructions may change the energy cost of work without removing the essential role. These adjustments should be developed collaboratively and reviewed as circumstances change. They should also be distinguished from assumptions that every stroke survivor has the same limitations. Some people return to their previous work, some change roles, and some cannot return to paid employment. The corrected study record cannot establish how common any particular outcome is, because the correction reports no new outcome data. What it does is keep attention on a problem that can be overlooked when recovery is judged only by visible physical function.

The correction also points to a broader lesson for research on long-term disability: accurate scientific communication includes both substantive findings and the administrative details surrounding them. The original article remains identified by its own publication DOI, 10.1080/11038128.2026.2613621, while the correction has a separate canonical DOI, 10.1007/s44474-026-00005-3. The notice makes clear that the funding statement was the element that required amendment. Readers consulting the article should therefore distinguish the correction from a new investigation and avoid treating the updated notice as evidence of a newly discovered medical effect. The research question remains focused on fatigue and the complex process of adapting work after stroke. By correcting the disclosure, the journal provides a more complete account of the study’s provenance while leaving interpretation to the evidence reported in the original article. For survivors and clinicians, the enduring message is that a successful return to work may require attention to invisible fatigue, task demands and workplace adaptation alongside conventional measures of neurological recovery.

Publication corrections serve an important role in maintaining a reliable scientific record because they distinguish an error in the published article from a change in the underlying research. In this case, the journal’s notice identifies the funding statement as the specific element requiring amendment. That narrow scope matters when readers interpret the correction: the notice should be read as an update to the article’s disclosure information, not as a report of additional participants, revised measurements or a new clinical conclusion. The corrected record also preserves the connection between the notice and the earlier study by naming the original article and its authors.

The funding information places the work within a Swedish rehabilitation and occupational-health research setting. Support came from organizations with interests spanning insurance, regional health services, stroke advocacy and occupational or social concerns, while the statement explicitly records that the funders did not participate in the scientific or editorial stages listed by the authors. Such disclosures help readers separate a study’s financial provenance from its operational independence. They are also useful for indexing and archiving: future readers who encounter the original publication can identify why a later notice exists and which portion of the record has been amended.

The correction is openly accessible under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International licence. This permits non-commercial reuse with appropriate credit, but it does not authorize distribution of adapted material derived from the article. The notice also cautions that some images or other third-party material may have separate rights if they are excluded from the article’s licence. These conditions are relevant when research findings are shared in educational, clinical or public settings, where reproducing the text or figures may involve permissions beyond simply linking to the publication.

The author affiliations further show the interdisciplinary setting in which the work was produced, combining rehabilitation, health and caring sciences with a pain and rehabilitation centre at Linköping University. That institutional context is consistent with a research focus on how health changes affect participation in everyday roles. It also underscores why a correction about funding, although administrative in form, belongs alongside the scholarly record: transparent reporting helps readers evaluate the provenance of research that may inform rehabilitation practice, workplace discussions and future studies of employment after stroke.

Subject of Research: Workplace adaptation and fatigue after stroke

Article Title: Correction to: Return to Work with Fatigue After Stroke: A Complex Occupational Adaptation Process

Article References: Vollertsen, J., Björk, M., Norlin, A.-K., & Ekbladh, E. (2026). Correction to: Return to Work with Fatigue After Stroke: A Complex Occupational Adaptation Process. Scandinavian Journal of Occupational Therapy, 33(1), Article 4. https://doi.org/10.1007/s44474-026-00005-3

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s44474-026-00005-3

Keywords: stroke recovery, post-stroke fatigue, return to work, occupational therapy, occupational adaptation, rehabilitation, workplace accommodations, research transparency, Correction, Return, Work, Fatigue