During geopolitical, health, and environmental crises, digital spaces that promised to increase democratic dialogue and ease information sharing are now increasingly used to manipulate public perception and misinform. Open Science offers an important defence against this information environment by making the evidence behind research more visible, traceable and open to scrutiny. When data, methods and research outputs can be examined and reused, questionable claims are easier to challenge and sci...

Earlier this year, an international team of researchers published the BuyTheBy dataset, shedding light on the dark economy of academic fraud. The dataset lists 18,710 text-based advertisements from commercial "paper mills" operating across seven countries. More than 20,000 specific academic authorship positions were offered for sale in those ads across thousands of fake scientific products. "Paper mills" are fraudulent organisations that produce entirely fake scientific manuscripts and submit th...

Controlling its research intelligence is a critical pillar of European digital sovereignty. We explored this intersection at the European Economic and Social Committee's Civil Society Week 2026 during the Media and digital resilience as safeguards of democracy session. Despite the large amount of research generated by European academics, the infrastructure, analytics, and metadata that steer our scientific focus (research intelligence) are frequently controlled by foreign companies with their ow...