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Authored by Dustin Bass via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

When Secretary of State Marco Rubio stood before reporters on Jan. 7 to discuss the military operation that took place in Venezuela four days prior, he added another element of intrigue. He planned to meet with Danish officials this week to discuss purchasing the world’s largest non-continental island: Greenland.

Such discussions will be new for Rubio, though it is not the first time the Trump administration has broached the subject. President Donald Trump’s brief statement to reporters on Jan. 4 aboard Air Force One was succinct: “We need Greenland from the standpoint of national security.” It was a reiteration of his March 2025 congressional address.

Additionally, Trump first mentioned purchasing Greenland in August 2019, a suggestion rebuffed by Danish officials, which led to a brief kerfuffle between the two states.

When Rubio sits with Danish leaders for those first discussions, he will have entered upon diplomatic deliberations that stretch back to the Andrew Johnson administration. The first inquiry to purchase Greenland from the Danes came in 1868 from Secretary of State William Seward. America had recently purchased a tundra to its northwest: Alaska. That purchase in 1867 was initially mocked as “Seward’s Folly” by the press, but of course, after the discovery of gold and oil, Seward’s decision was more than justified. Nonetheless, Congress proved disinterested in the icy territory to its northwest.

Seeking the ‘Small Gibraltar’

While negotiating the Alaska purchase from Russia, Seward was negotiating the purchase of the Danish West Indies from Denmark. The small islands of ??St. Thomas, St. John, and St. Croix—specifically the “small Gibraltar,” St. Thomas—were considered vital to national security. The Civil War had highlighted American vulnerabilities in the Caribbean, as the major European powers held possessions in the region, but the United States did not. And it was the European powers that concerned the United States.

“The West India Islands, in the possession of Denmark, are of not much danger to us,” wrote U.S. consul to Denmark, George P. Hansen, in 1864, “but it seems to me we cannot very well afford to let a powerful European nation get possession of them. If they ever change ownership, the ownership should be in the [United] States.”

The American and Danish officials had reached an agreement to purchase St. Thomas and St. John for $7.5 million in gold coins. A plebiscite on the islands overwhelmingly approved the sale. Danish King Christian IX announced the sale. But American politics ended the purchasing process. The Republican-led Senate, furious over President Johnson’s policies and Seward’s support of the president, refused to ratify the agreement. The United States’ Atlantic seaboard would remain vulnerable.

A Second Attempt

Early into the momentous year of 1898, Sen. Henry Cabot Lodge expressed his concerns about the islands in a report to the Foreign Relations Committee, stating, “So long as these islands are in the market there is always the danger that some European power may purchase, or try to purchase, them. This would be an infraction of the Monroe Doctrine, and would at once involve the United States in a very serious difficulty with the European power which sought possession of the islands. In the interest of peace, it is of great importance that these islands should pass into the hands of the United States and cease to be a possible source of foreign complications, which might easily lead to war. From a military point of view the value of these islands to the United States can hardly be overestimated.”

Three weeks later, the Spanish–American War began, during which the United States secured its Pacific seaboard by obtaining Guam and the Philippines from Spain (America also annexed Hawaii during this period). Additionally, America obtained Puerto Rico and kicked the Spanish out of Cuba, which became a quasi-protectorate.

Spain had fallen far as a European power, but Russia, France, Great Britain, and a surging Germany remained great powers. The ongoing construction of the Panama Canal by the French only increased concerns about America’s Atlantic vulnerabilities.

The State Department again began negotiations with the Danish for the West Indies. By the winter of 1902, an agreement between Secretary of State John Hay and Danish Chargé d’Affaires Constantin Brun had been reached. The Americans ratified the treaty, but this time it was the Danish who refused to ratify. The nations had signed two treaties with nothing to show for it.

Securing the Islands

In 1910, Maurice Egan, the U.S. ambassador to Denmark, believed he had come up with a plan to obtain both the Danish West Indies and Greenland. Egan wrote to the State Department with the “very audacious suggestion” of a multi-country land trade agreement. Perceiving the Danish government gave “very little attention” to Greenland—combined with what he viewed as the growing threat of a triple alliance in the Far East of Russia, Japan, and China—he believed that Germany could be utilized as a way of obtaining the islands and placing an ally in the Philippines.

He proposed swapping Mindanao, the second-largest Philippine island, for Greenland (and after further talks, the West Indies). This would allow Denmark to swap Mindanao for the Schleswig-Holstein territory it had lost to the Germans in 1864. “I assure you that it represents the desires and the opinion of some of the best minds in Denmark, and some of them most highly placed,” Egan added.

The proposal, though interesting and complex, came to nothing. Egan, however, may have been onto something.

A year into World War I, it was Germany that caused the Americans to inquire again about the West Indies. Instead of a potential ally as suggested by Egan, Germany was now a threat.

The initial inquiry about the islands by Secretary of State Robert Lansing was rebuffed by Brun, who indicated Denmark “had very large commercial interests which were vastly increasing with the construction of the Panama Canal.”

Lansing communicated that the Americans were not concerned about the Danes’ commercial interests, but about Germany’s interests. Germany’s expanding empire, militarism, and growing commercial interests led the Americans to believe they might annex Denmark or force the sale of the West Indies. If that were the case, Lansing made it clear that “the United States would be under the necessity of seizing and annexing [the islands].”

“This plain spoken threat of what might occur under certain conditions had the desired effect,” Lansing recalled. On Aug. 4, 1916, Lansing and Brun signed the treaty, which both sides ratified, and the purchase of the now-U.S. Virgin Islands was completed on March 31, 1917, for $25 million in gold coins. Part of this agreement, however, confirmed Denmark’s rights to Greenland.

The Post-World War II Attempt

The acquisition of Greenland arose almost immediately after World War II. In 1946, the State Department took a page out of Egan’s book by suggesting a land trade. America would acquire portions of Greenland in exchange for land in Alaska’s Point Barrow district. Again, the land-swap idea was a no-go.

Interestingly, U.S. diplomat John D. Hickerson echoed Egan’s belief that ‘'Greenland is completely worthless to Denmark.” The State Department then offered $100 million for the “worthless” island that appeared “indispensable to the safety of the United States.”

Brief and unofficial discussions took place, but the matter was eventually dropped. Denmark and the United States, however, did sign a treaty in 1951 to establish a base in Thule, now known as Pituffik Space Force Base.

In 1953, Greenland was incorporated into Denmark, ending two centuries as a colony. It achieved Home Rule and then Self Rule in 1979 and 2009, respectively. It has the option to pursue independence, and despite its wealth of natural resources, which the Trump administration often mentions, it is considered a “welfare state,” requiring an annual $600 million Danish block grant.

Trump and Greenland

President Trump, in the spirit of Secretary Lansing, has made it rather clear he is not concerned about Danish or Greenlandic interests. His concerns are more immediate and widespread.

“We need Greenland from a standpoint of national security, and Denmark is not going to be able to do it,” Trump stated. “The European Union needs us to have it, and they know that.”

The national security threat is no longer from European powers as it was in the 19th and first half of the 20th century. The threats now come from Russia and China, whose navies roam the Arctic Ocean with seeming impunity. Trump claimed, perhaps with a hint of sarcasm, that Denmark was not doing enough to protect American or international interests with Greenland.

“You know what Denmark did recently to boost up security on Greenland?” he rhetorically asked reporters. “They added one more dog sled.”

The world was alarmed when Trump suggested military force was an option. No doubt, as the administration has made clear, purchasing Greenland is preferable. But when Rubio sits down with Danish officials this week, he may need to pull a page out of Lansing’s book. It may again have “the desired effect.” Additionally, much like our purchase of the Danish West Indies, maybe the third attempt is the charm.

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times or ZeroHedge.

Authored by Lawrence Wilson and Sylvia Xu via The Epoch Times,

Congress responded to the COVID-19 pandemic by passing the American Rescue Plan Act in early 2021. This $1.9 trillion spending bill was intended to provide relief and spark an economic recovery.

Among other provisions, the law expanded the availability of government-subsidized health care through the Obamacare Marketplace to help low- to middle-income people maintain health coverage until the economy normalized.

The measure brought millions of middle-class Americans into Obamacare, but had the unintended consequence of making many of them dependent on government aid.

The law also introduced temporary, enhanced subsidies, which raised Obamacare premiums, some observers say.

Though the enhanced subsidies expired on Dec. 31, 2025, Congress continues to debate their possible reinstatement.

Expanded Enrollment

Obamacare was created for people caught in the gap between Medicaid coverage and employer-sponsored health insurance.

The program provides income-based premium tax credits, which are subsidies paid directly to insurance companies, for people whose incomes are on the poverty line and up to four times above the poverty line (between 100 percent and 400 percent of the federal poverty level).

People earning less than—or in some states, up to 138 percent of—the poverty level are eligible for Medicaid. Obamacare offers help for people earning up to four times that amount, up to $62,600 per year or $106,600 for a family of three, based on the current federal poverty level.

During the pandemic, Congress created subsidies that had no income cap. These enhanced subsidies also lowered enrollees’ affordability cap—the maximum amount a customer would pay out of pocket for a monthly premium.

Under the enhanced subsidies, introduced in 2021, no enrollee would spend more than 8.5 percent of their monthly income on premiums. Some would pay no more than 6 percent, others 4 percent or 2 percent, and some would pay nothing.

Enrollment boomed, jumping from 11.4 million to 14.5 million in two years. By 2025, enrollment had doubled from its pre-pandemic level, topping 24 million, according to data from health research organization KFF.

The enhanced subsidies were set to expire in 2022, allowing just enough time to get people back to work.

But when the pandemic ended, the enhanced subsidies remained.

House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) and fellow Democrats hold a news conference on the East Front Steps of the U.S. Capitol on Dec. 18, 2025. Jeffries said on Jan. 5 that House Democrats are seeking to extend the Affordable Care Act tax credits, which expired on Dec. 31, 2025. Heather Diehl/Getty Images

Premiums Increased, Wages Didn’t

Health insurance premiums increased dramatically during Obamacare’s first five years. The average individual premium for a 40-year-old went up at least 75 percent, according to data reported by KFF.

Prices soared in commercial markets, too, where the cost of individual premiums rose about 120 percent from 2013 to 2019, according to The Heritage Foundation.

Obamacare prices leveled out before the pandemic hit and from 2020 to 2022, which includes the first two years of enhanced subsidies, prices dropped 5 percent, according to data reported by KFF.

But in 2022, the year the subsidies were set to end, inflation was on the rise, peaking at more than 9 percent by midyear, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Economists broadly agree that this was an unintended consequence of American Rescue Plan spending. The rising prices were “the product of easy fiscal and monetary policies, excess savings accumulated during the pandemic, and the reopening of locked-down economies,” Ben Bernanke, former chairman of the Federal Reserve, wrote in a co-authored assessment for Brookings.

Congress responded by spending even more money. The Inflation Reduction Act, passed in August 2022, would pump another $1.2 trillion into the economy within a decade, the Cato Institute estimated. That included a three-year extension of the enhanced subsidies.

(L–R) Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), Sen. Mike Crapo (R-Idaho), and Sen. Rob Portman (R-Ohio) speak at a press conference at the U.S. Capitol on Aug. 3, 2022. While most Republicans opposed extending the enhanced Obamacare subsidies, some supported a second short-term extension of one to three years. Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images

Obamacare premiums shot back up, according to data reported by KFF, rising more than 13 percent in three years.

Economic and policy researcher Cynthia Cox for KFF pointed to a number of factors driving the recent rise in premiums, including increased hospital costs, the rising popularity of expensive new drugs such as Ozempic, and the use of tariffs.

Many observers also cite the enhanced subsidies themselves as a driver of the problem they were created to address.

“The [Affordable Care Act] subsidy structure is itself inflationary—driving up health care prices and total premiums,” said Mark Howell and Brian Blase of the think tank Paragon Health Institute. “As Congress considers the future of the COVID Credits . . . it must confront the reality that the [Affordable Care Act] made coverage far less affordable.”

That reality was largely hidden from many who received the enhanced subsidies because their out-of-pocket premium payments were capped based on income. Price hikes above that cap were paid by taxpayers, which meant the enhanced subsidies were now even more important for people with modest incomes.

Meanwhile, the real wages of American workers were not keeping pace with the price of consumer goods, let alone the skyrocketing cost of health insurance.

Around that time, Rep. Jim McGovern (D-Mass.) commented on the value of the enhanced subsidies to members of his congressional district. “Without the Inflation Reduction Act, the average premium for these individuals would have increased by 76 percent, to $1,430, in 2023,” he said in a statement.

By 2025, the year the enhanced subsidies were again scheduled to expire, Obamacare premiums were at their highest point ever. Health insurers realized that, without the additional subsidies, healthier enrollees would drop their coverage in 2026, leaving a smaller, more expensive pool of people to insure, according to the Peterson-KFF Health System Tracker.

Insurers responded with premium increases ranging from 10 percent to 59 percent, Peterson-KFF found, with the median being 18 percent.

Congressional Democrats argued that the enhanced subsidies had become essential and moved to make them permanent. Some Republicans agreed that a second extension of one to three years was needed.

After five years of premium increases largely paid for by federal taxpayers, both the insurers and the insured appear to have become dependent on the enhanced subsidies.

Increased Fraud

Most Republicans opposed extending the enhanced subsidies. Before spending more money on rising premiums, they said another problem hidden in the system needs to be fixed first—fraud.

There has been no dispute among lawmakers that the enhanced subsidies have been a boon to consumers.

The average Obamacare premium for 2025 was $619 per month, of which subsidies covered more than $500. More than 10 million enrollees, 46 percent of those receiving aid, paid $10 or less per month out of pocket for premiums.

About 8 million paid $0, according to Brookings.

That’s exactly the problem, according to some analysts, because the possibility of enrolling large numbers of people who would never receive a bill created a ripe opportunity for fraud.

Many people were enrolled in the program without their knowledge by unscrupulous insurance brokers, Blase alleges, prompting the federal government to send a commission check to them—and premium payments to an insurance company.

These phantom enrollees are detected in part by their lack of activity once enrolled, Blase said.

“In 2024, nearly 12 million enrollees did not use their plan a single time—up from fewer than 4 million in 2021,” Blase told the House Judiciary Committee on Dec. 10.

Overall, 35 percent of all exchange enrollees never used their plan, and 40 percent of fully subsidized enrollees did not have a single claim, which Blase said is double the rate in both the commercial market and pre-pandemic Obamacare.

America’s Health Insurance Providers, the trade association for health insurance companies, disputed that claim.

“A ‘no-claims’ year is evidence that a consumer stayed healthy or only had a few months of coverage—not that taxpayer money was misdirected or that their policy was illegitimate,” the group said in an Aug. 18 statement.

Yet in December 2025, the Government Accountability Office provided evidence of enrollment fraud in Obamacare that suggests fake accounts are being created.

Pages from the U.S. Affordable Care Act health insurance website healthcare.gov are seen on a computer screen in New York City on Aug. 19, 2025. Patrick Sison/File/AP Photo

Investigators were able to enroll 20 nonexistent identities in Obamacare in 2024 by using Social Security numbers that had never been issued to any person and other easily created counterfeit documents.

Of the 20 false enrollments, 18 were still active in September 2025, costing taxpayers more than $10,000 per month.

Investigators also found 26,000 accounts that received subsidies in 2023 based on Social Security numbers that matched records in the Social Security Administration’s death file.

More than 7,000 Social Security numbers belonged to people who were reported dead before enrolling in Obamacare, and 19,000 Social Security numbers matched death data by number but not name and address, indicating that false identities may have been created for enrollment.

Taxpayers paid more than $94 million in subsidies for one year based on those numbers.

Another indication of fraud is the number of states where enrollment in Obamacare plans with a $0 premium is unreasonably high compared to the number with a qualifying income.

Twenty-four states have more Obamacare enrollees claiming incomes between 100 percent and 150 percent of the federal poverty level than there are people living in the state with that income, according to data from the U.S. Census Bureau.

The problem appears worse in states that have not adopted expanded Medicaid, which would have increased Medicaid eligibility to 138 percent of the federal poverty level.

Obamacare customers are automatically re-enrolled each year, so a fictitious account would continue to generate fraudulent commissions and wasteful insurance payments until detected.

Fraudulent enrollment costs up to $20 billion per year, according to Paragon Health Institute.

A Social Security card sits alongside checks from the U.S. Treasury in this photo illustration in Washington on Oct. 14, 2021. The Government Accountability Office found evidence of Obamacare enrollment fraud involving fake accounts created with Social Security numbers of people reported dead before enrollment. Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images

Making Health Care Affordable

The enhanced subsidies expired on Dec. 31, 2025.

Congressional Republicans and Democrats continue to agree that the U.S. health care system has become unaffordable and want to address the problem. They differ in approach.

Democrats generally favor government intervention in the system, as in the case of Obamacare, where taxpayers pitch in to cover rising costs.

The Senate in December 2025 rejected a proposal to make the enhanced subsidies permanent.

House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) said at a press conference on Jan. 5 that his party continues to seek an extension of the subsidies “to protect the health care of tens of millions of … everyday Americans, middle-class Americans and working class Americans.”

Without the subsidies, Jeffries said, some consumers would face cost increases of up to $2,000 or more per month.

Republicans generally favor using the power of government to create marketplace competition. Senate Republicans recently presented a plan to provide dedicated funds directly to consumers, which they could use to shop for health care. That plan, too, was rejected by the Senate.

Sen. John Thune (R-S.D.), the Senate majority leader, addressed the differing philosophies in a Dec. 16, 2025, press conference.

“If [Democrats are] willing to accept changes that actually would put more power and control and resources in the hands of the American people, and less of that in the pockets of the insurance companies, I think there’s a path forward,” he said.

The House passed a three-year extension of the enhanced subsidies on Jan. 8. A bid by Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y) to pass the bill via unanimous consent in the upper chamber failed on Jan. 14.

President Donald Trump has said he would veto any extension of Obamacare subsidies that came to his desk.

Authored by  Mary Prenon via The Epoch Times,

Home foreclosures across America were on the rise in 2025, increasing by 14 percent from 2024, with Florida experiencing the highest numbers in the nation.

In its Jan. 15 report, property data and analytics provider ATTOM, said that 367,460 U.S. properties were involved with default notices, scheduled auctions, or bank repossessions last year.

Those properties represented 0.26 percent of all housing units, a slight uptick from 0.23 percent in 2024, but down from 0.36 percent in 2019.

While the amount of the annual foreclosures were also down by 25 percent from 2019, the fourth quarter alone saw a total of 111,692 properties with foreclosure filings—up by 10 percent from the previous quarter and 32 percent from the fourth quarter of 2024.

Nationwide, one in 1,274 properties was involved in a foreclosure filing in the fourth quarter of 2025.

Florida led in foreclosure filings last year (1 in 230 housing units), followed by Delaware (1 in 240), South Carolina (1 in 242), and Illinois and Nevada (1 in 284).

“Foreclosure activity increased in 2025, reflecting a continued normalization of the housing market following several years of historically low levels,” ATTOM CEO Rob Barber said in the report.

“While filings, starts, and repossessions all rose compared to 2024, foreclosure activity remains well below pre-pandemic norms and a fraction of what we saw during the last housing crisis.”

Barber added that the data indicates the recent surge in foreclosures is being driven more by “market recalibration” than homeowner distress.

Rounding out the top 10 states with the highest foreclosure rates in 2025 were New Jersey (1 in 273 units), Indiana (1 in 302), Ohio (1 in 307), Texas (1 in 319), and Maryland (1 in 326).

In December 2025 alone, 1 in 3,163 properties nationwide had a foreclosure filing, with New Jersey leading the pack for the highest foreclosure rates.

In total, 28,268 properties began the foreclosure process in the month—a 19 percent hike from the previous month and 47 percent higher than December 2024.

Among metro areas with a population above 1 million, Cleveland fared the worst in terms of 2025 foreclosures, followed by Jacksonville, Las Vegas, Chicago, and Orlando. Lakeland, Florida, took the lead for the most foreclosures in metro areas with populations of at least 200,000. Joining Lakeland were Columbia, South Carolina; Cleveland; Cape Coral, Florida; and Atlantic City, New Jersey.

The report shows that foreclosure starts also increased during 2025 in all regions of the country. In total, lenders started the foreclosure process on 289,441 properties, up by 14 percent from 2024. Texas led with 37,215 starts, followed by Florida (34,336), California (29,777), Illinois (15,010), and New York (13,664).

Described as the official beginning of the legal process in which a lender attempts to recover and sell a property due to non-payment, a foreclosure normally begins after 120 days of missed payments.

According to Rocket Mortgage, the process can vary from state to state.

In those metro areas with populations over 1 million, New York City placed first with the most foreclosure starts at 14,189 last year. Chicago recorded 13,312 starts, Houston, 13,009, Miami, 8,936, and Los Angeles, 8,503.

In terms of bank repossessions last year, lenders took over 46,439 properties, representing a 27 percent hike from 2024. Texas, California, Pennsylvania, Florida, and Illinois saw the largest numbers of repossessions during 2025.

The ATTOM report indicates that properties foreclosed during the fourth quarter of 2025 had been in the foreclosure process an average of 592 days, a 3 percent decrease from the previous quarter and a 22 percent decrease from December 2024.

Authored by Vince Bielski via RealClearInvestigations,

This is the fourth part of a series on the crisis in academic research and publishing. Read the first three parts here, here and here.

The driving ethos of academia, “publish or perish,” is fighting for its life. 

The requirement that scholars constantly publish or face academic ruin has been considered the primary engine of scientific discovery for decades. But a growing movement of universities and researchers is trying to banish the practice to the archives, saying it has perverted the pursuit of knowledge and eroded the public’s trust in science.

Reformers at top universities in Europe and the U.S., including Cambridge, Sorbonne, and UC Berkeley, say this traditional system of advancement has led to an explosion in the growth of low-quality research, with little meaningful impact on academic fields or society. It has also sparked the spread of fraudulent research, as “paper mills” churn out fake articles for sale to academics seeking to pad their CVs. 

To weaken the “publish or perish” stranglehold on universities, hundreds of research institutions are reforming the incentive system that shapes academic careers. It currently rewards scholars for frequently winning grants and publishing papers, with extra points for landing in the most esteemed, high-impact journals, even when the articles are not themselves influential. 

The new incentives vary at different universities and research centers, but tend to focus on the actual quality of the research rather than the quantity or the prestige of the journals. The research’s influence on academic fields and, when appropriate, on society and public policy, is also often rewarded. So is a commitment to share papers and data as widely and freely as possible with the public. The goal is to break science out of its self-serving and insular bubble and better connect the enterprise with the public that funds it. 

“The incentives dictate how people behave, and we have a long tradition of rewarding publications in high impact journals,” said Ginny Barbour, a Cambridge-trained physician, medical journal editor, and co-chair of the Declaration on Research Assessment, or DORA. “If we don’t get research assessment right, then the whole foundation of academic life is undermined.”

The growing movement to revamp the rewards that set the direction of science is spearheaded in the United States by DORA, which is also the name of its declaration of principles. The declaration has gathered 3,500 signatures of support from organizations, and 23,000 from individuals, since its founding in 2012 at a cell biology conference in San Francisco.

In Europe, the Coalition for Advancing Research Assessment (CoARA) operates much like DORA. Some 700 organizations and 450 higher education institutions  – and 27% of all Ph.D. awarding universities in Europe – have committed to its principles since 2022, according to a study co-authored by Alex Rushforth at Leiden University in the Netherlands.

“In Europe we have made a lot of progress in a short period of time. CoARA has been a very impressive catalyst,” said Rushforth. “Of course, signing CoARA is one thing and implementing culture change is quite another thing.”

Overturning an Entrenched Culture

Despite these significant inroads, reformers of the deeply embedded “publish or perish” culture face a huge challenge. High-ranking university officials, from presidents on down who would have to approve a new reward system, have greatly benefited from the current one. “This system worked for me so why wouldn’t it work for anyone else?” said Professor Mike Dougherty, explaining the thinking of those who questioned the assessment reforms he eventually won at the University of Maryland. 

Defenders of the status quo, which is intended to bring out the best in scientists, can also point to notable progress as recently as the last decade, especially the dazzling breakthroughs in healthcare. A system that pushes researchers to aim high can get impressive results.

The iconic journal Nature is among the most influential drivers of this culture. The Nature family of journals is near the top of the publishing pyramid largely because of their “Journal Impact Factor,” or JIF, scores. JIF is a beauty contest based on the number of citations the articles in the journal receive. The more citations, the higher the JIF, and the greater the journal’s esteem. Publishing in journals with high JIF scores can make a career.

The Nature family is highly selective, attracting more than 50,000 scholarly submissions a year and publishing less than 10% of them. Nature’s tendency to report on major advances in many fields, famously illustrated by the Watson and Crick paper on DNA structure, has helped give the 157-year-old journal its magisterial reputation.

But the fact that prestigious journals publish important articles doesn’t mean everything they run is noteworthy. Studies show that a journal’s impact factor is often determined by a small number of influential articles that receive a lot of citations, reflecting glory on many less influential papers that are not cited much. In other words, many marginal papers make the cut. It’s as if Aaron Judge’s Yankees teammates got credit for his home runs. 

JIF is also easy to manipulate: Authors are sometimes encouraged to include citations to articles in the same journal that they are publishing in to raise the JIF score.  Even the publisher of Nature warns research institutions not to place too much emphasis on its own JIF, and DORA says the metric should be completely ignored.

As he was trying to convince his faculty in Maryland’s psychology department to support reforms that would sideline JIF, Dougherty examined 45,000 papers in a couple of hundred journals to determine if the journal metric and citation counts were indicators of research quality, based on factors like statistical errors and the strength of evidence. “What we found is that there is no evidence to support the claim that higher-impact journals publish higher quality research,” Dougherty said.

The need to be published in prestigious journals leads some scholars to shape their research to fit what they believe will be accepted. That means researchers take fewer experimental risks, jump on popular trends, and shelve negative findings that are very important to report, creating what DORA’s Barbour calls a “gap in the literature.” 

The quest for glamour publications also delays by years the dissemination of knowledge and the possibility of breakthroughs, said Professor Steve Russell, who led the implementation of assessment reforms at Cambridge. “Young researchers in particular start at the highest impact factor journal, go through peer-review, get rejected, and then work their way down to the next highest impact factor, and on and on,” said Russell, who has bylines in both Nature and Science. “It’s a complete and utter waste of time.”

When researchers can’t clear this high bar, the fallback option is to maximize the quantity of papers to list on their CVs. This is enabled by what Dougherty calls “salami slicing” the data. Rather than producing the most substantial paper possible, scholars divide their experimental data into several small slices, allowing them to generate more papers that contribute little to science but add to the flood of publications that’s making quality control and fraud detection through the peer-review process almost impossible. 

The publication of fraudulent articles full of fake data is growing at a faster rate than legitimate papers, according to a 2025 study, threatening the legitimacy of the scientific enterprise. “We know that the incentives for people to publish in high impact journals skews behavior,” said Barbour. “And at its worst, it skews behavior towards the fabrication and falsification of research, and that’s highly problematic.”

U.K. Funders Push Reform

Most universities in the U.K., which gave birth to the first academic journal in 1665, have embraced research reform, either in word or deed, along with many in the Netherlands, Norway, and Finland. Pressure from funders looking for more research with greater societal impact is one reason why. 

UK Research and Innovation, the largest government funder of research and a signatory to DORA in 2019, runs a program that annually assesses universities’ research contributions to academic disciplines and society. It then divides £2 billion in grants based on those scores. The Wellcome Trust, which is the other major source of grants, restricts them to researchers at institutions that have reformed assessment practices, aiming to produce a bigger impact on people’s health and well-being from the billions of pounds it provides. 

“Funding pressure was initially the driving factor. When the people giving money say this is what we expect, change happens very quickly,” said Cambridge’s Russell. “But there was also a group of academics who were very vocal that we needed to change the way that we assess researchers.”

At Imperial College London, a tragedy added to the impetus for reform. In 2014, Professor Stefan Grimm took his own life as he was struggling to win grants and publish papers needed to succeed in the faculty of medicine. It went as far as to list the high-impact journals that mattered most. 

“People were shocked but not necessarily surprised,” said Stephen Curry, an emeritus professor of biology at Imperial who helped push through reforms. 

The suicide catalyzed a review of assessment practices that, with the strong support of the vice provost of research, led Imperial to sign DORA in 2017 over the opposition of some engineering faculty. The changes discourage the consideration of metrics like JIF in hiring and promotion while placing greater emphasis on the quality of teaching and the impact of research. 

Curry said mandates from the top don’t quickly erase ingrained habits. But in 2023, Curry sat in on dozens of recruitment and promotion interviews in different faculty groups and was impressed with what he observed. 

“There has been a shift away from dwelling overmuch on numbers and journal impact factors,” he said. “These things haven’t gone away and people certainly still feel that heat of competition, but I think it is more evident now that the quality of one’s work, as well as one’s wider contributions to the university and to society, are more important than they were.”

U.S. Universities Slower to Change

While the U.K. is a success story for reformers, they have yet to deeply penetrate the biggest research system of all – the U.S. – where only a handful of major research institutions have joined the movement. Unlike in Europe, U.S. universities don’t face federal funding pressure from above to transform how they reward scientists. Under the Trump administration, federal agencies are mainly focused on ending what they deem, sometimes wrongly, as DEI-related research, and reducing overhead fees that add up to 70% to the cost of research grants.

Reformers in the U.S. also face resistance from below. University faculty wield much more power over academic affairs than their peers in Europe, where administrators are more likely to make the rules. Some U.S. scholars don’t see the case for abandoning long-standing reputational metrics, according to a survey by Leiden’s Rushforth. Even if JIF and the number of citations a paper receives aren’t perfect proxies for quality, survey respondents said, they offer a practical way for busy academics on hiring committees to efficiently evaluate a long list of candidates. 

Maryland’s Dougherty says university departments are also wary of being on the cutting edge of reform in case it doesn’t work out. “A lot of the resistance comes back to people saying ‘We won’t do it until other universities do it, or until other people within our discipline are doing it,’” he said.

Even academics like Mark Hanson, who is critical of the “publish or perish” culture and has published papers about the misconduct it breeds, see some downsides to assessment reform. The University of Exeter professor’s fundamental research has overturned assumptions about genes and disease resistance, opening the door to rethinking therapeutic designs. Hanson is concerned that the reform movement’s emphasis on research that’s tied to practical problems will further diminish fundamental research that generates the new ideas that science needs to advance.

“With increasing pushes to fund only directly-applicable or policy-impacting research, we’re stuck in our current state of knowledge and we just iterate and explore its crevices endlessly,” said Hanson.

Reform in the U.S. has been mostly left to lone scientists with a passion for the cause. After Sandra Schmid enacted assessment changes to focus on research quality rather than metrics like JIF at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, she became chief scientific officer in 2020 at Biohub, founded by Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan. One year later, Biohub, which creates AI tools for biological research, signed DORA. 

Another research group, the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, signed DORA in 2013. In its competitions among researchers for employment and grants, and in evaluations for continued support, journal names are removed from applications, turning the focus on the quality of scholarship, not whether it was published in a prestigious journal.

Nonprofits like the Pew Charitable Trusts are also joining the movement. Pew is working with a group of philanthropic and public funders who want their grants to produce a bigger impact in healthcare, education, and other areas. To engage researchers in the effort, Pew has convened a group of 18 university leaders, including those at Brown, Duke, and UC Berkeley, who are redesigning their reward systems to encourage the public interest research that the funders seek. 

At Maryland, Dougherty almost single-handedly championed the reforms. It took five years of meetings, his aforementioned study, and two rounds of assessment guideline revisions before Dougherty finally won the unanimous approval of his 27 faculty members. The new assessment practices, implemented in 2022, focus on measures of quality, such as the reproducibility of research, making papers and data widely accessible, and their impact on academic fields and, when applicable, on public policy. 

Dougherty says so far, so good. Some faculty are more motivated to pursue important questions and take risks they would have avoided earlier because high-impact journals may not be interested in their work.

But is the overall quality of research improving in departments that have established new incentives? It’s the ultimate goal. But so far, no one has tried to answer this important question of whether the hard work of changing the culture of academia is producing better research, leaving a gap in understanding that needs to be filled, said Leiden’s Rushforth. 

“We should be collecting data and testing our hypotheses and not taking for granted that if you change the incentives, you get a different type of academic research,” Rushforth said. “There should be some sort of accountability.”