Holden Thorp

Scientific research doesn’t always get everything right the first time. In recent years, Holden Thorp, editor-in-chief of the Science family of journals, has stood out in the academic publishing world for challenging the stigma around corrections and retractions with an eye toward increasing public trust in the scientific enterprise. In 2023, Thorp’s public profile — and advocacy for changing the ways in which the field approaches concerns about data integrity — became increasingly prominent as a result of the investigation into research misconduct allegations against former Stanford president Marc Tessier-Lavigne, which included two papers he’d co-authored and published with Science. (Tessier-Lavigne later submitted corrections to Science, about which Thorp said: “We’re the ones that dropped the ball.”) Thorp also added a potentially influential new criterion for retractions at Science, allowing journal editors to move to retract papers when enough corrections or errors have been found “to cause the editors to lose confidence in it.”