As we noted Saturday, there was so much happening around the web last week that it made sense to break up Weekend Reads, especially since this is a holiday weekend in the U.S. and elsewhere. Here’s part 2:
- Last Wednesday, 102-year-old Ingeborg Rapoport became the oldest person to ever receive a PhD, righting a Nazi wrong.
- Is this the most embarrassing citation ever? asks Lior Pachter.
- Should we blame the reproducibility crisis on bad antibodies? Monya Baker reports.
- “Lab techs and other highly qualified employees are too often given short shrift by the biomedical research enterprise,” argue two professors and a student in The Scientist.
- A researcher sanctioned by his university has sued John Mashey for $2 million, claiming “tortious interference with contracts, asserting conspiracies, [and] malice.”
- Is Twitter the best place to discuss potential flaws in research papers?
- We examine what happens when a retracted study falls in the forest, in the latest issue of Editorial Office News.
- A picture of North Korea’s Ki Jong-un watching a missile launch was likely doctored, say experts, leading Andrew Gelman to report that Princeton had un-hired him as a professor of aeronautical engineering.
- “Shane Gero and Maurício Cantor believe that giving citable recognition to reviewers can improve the system by encouraging more participation but also higher quality, constructive input, without the need for a loss of anonymity.”
- “We Need To Take A Look At The Data:” A Q&A with David Broockman, one of the Berkeley grad students who questioned the gay canvassing study.
- Five tips to help editors find the best reviewers, courtesy of Wiley’s Thomas Gaston.
- Want to be a successful university administrator? Here are Philip Moriarty’s rules.
- More details on the Macchiarini case (in Swedish).
- “[I]f a journal issues press releases and embargoes work for the biggest news splash, take it less seriously,” says Chris Blattman.
- What role does university science communication play in the public’s trust in science? Kirk Englehardt gives his take.
- A study suggests “the current consent process is flawed,” writes Viviane Callier.
- So you have your own lab, part 3.
- A study of drug use at festivals was, well, bullshit, says Zel McCarthy.
- A Q&A with Adam at EducPros.fr (in French).
- “Basic research can seem wasteful,” says Michael White, “but politicians should resist the temptation to set science’s priorities.”
- Time for academic writing to evolve, says Filipe Branco dos Santos.
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Thanks for the note above on $2M lawsuit,, which fortunately did not get very far.
For RW though, more relevant is the history:
1) Between George Mason U’s Ed Wegman, his asscoaite Yamsin Said, and some of his students, about 100 pages of plagiarism have been documented and reported. THis was n’t subtle, but pathwritten copy-paste-edit, typically with 50% word-for-word copied, maybe 20% trivial edits, and 30% original or unidentified.
2) GMU rejected or ignored or ignroed all of this except onhe article that had been retracted for plagiarism already.
3) Wegman and Said wrote 2 such articles for WIley’s WIREs:Computational Statistics, which they co-edit. Said was also using a false rank/affiliation (Professor Oklahoma State University) on the masthead. All this was reported to Wiley, who basically stonewalled, and then let them replace the articles, with no admission of any problems and minimal notice.
4) Eventually, although unclear why, Wiley forced their resignation June 2012.
5) In mid 2014, they launched lawsuits, but didn’t bother to tell me until March 2015.
Five weeks later the case was over, as they voluntarily dismissed it.
Wiley’s behavior was very strange.
Low quality polyclonal ABs sometimes produced in substandard facilities are definitely a menace. The same can be said about a number of “selective” receptor agonist/antagonist small molecules and peptides (subtle cytotoxicity, massive off-target effects).