Trusted journal lists come to OpenAlex

Open Alex Blog: “”Trust in science is under more pressure than it has been in a long time. Paper mills, hijacked journals, citation rings and a flood of machine-written manuscripts mean that “is this a real journal?” is now a question every reader, reviewer, funder and university has to ask. And the tools for answering it have not kept up. The traditional answer is a deny list. Something like the old Beall’s List: a roster of predatory journals, so you can filter them out of a search, an evaluation, a systematic review. We understand the appeal. Nobody wants to cite a paper mill by accident. But we’re not building a deny list, and we don’t think you want one either.

 Librarians have been making this case for a decade: deny lists are opaque, they go stale the moment they’re published, they’re a lawsuit magnet, and they land hardest on exactly the journals that can least absorb the hit… small, new, non-English, Global South. Beall’s List went dark in 2017. The advice since then has been consistent: don’t filter out the bad, filter in the good. Use allow lists.

 So that’s what we’ve done. Every source in OpenAlex now has a listed_in field: the external journal lists that source appears on. If you want to keep predatory journals out of a query, you filter in journals that somebody you trust has vetted…”

Trump Insider Alleges Donations To Kennedy Center Went Missing Under Ric Grenell’s Watch

19 hours ago

Former Trump attorney Alina Habba told the president that another one of his top advisers — former Kennedy Center leader Ric Grenell — failed to deposit a multimillion-dollar donation that her billionaire husband made to the center a year ago. - Axios

Large dog breeds die younger. Biologists think they finally know why.

AGING: Dementia cases are set to double by 2050 — as doctor calls it an ‘accelerating epidemic crisis.’

Researchers from UNSW Sydney’s Center for Healthy Brain Aging analyzed data from 22 studies and found that there were 11.4 million new dementia cases in 2023 — a number that’s projected to more than double to 24.7 million by 2050.

This means that every year, the equivalent of the population of Australia will develop dementia, according to geriatrician Dr. Liron Sinvani, the director of research and innovation for the Northwell Institute for Healthy Aging

“In terms of the scale, obviously, this number of new dementia cases is staggering,” Sinvani told The Post. “This is not a future problem. It’s an accelerating epidemic crisis that demands immediate attention.”

The new study focused on incidence — the rate at which people develop dementia or new cases per year — instead of prevalence, or the total number of people living with the condition at a given time.

The rapidly rising numbers are due to aging populations, with Sinvani noting that about 1 in 9 people have dementia after 65, “but after 85, it could be almost 1 in 3.”

Until there’s a treatment, we’ll need to invest heavily in android caretakers because there just won’t bet enough young people to go around.