Weekend reads: Academic article brokering; favorite fieldwork bloopers; worst peer review ever

This week, we marked the fifth anniversary of Retraction Watch with the announcement of a generous new grant. We also covered the retraction of a slew of papers in a journal plagued by problems. Here’s what was happening elsewhere:

• “[I]n an era where the rewards for publishing appear to outweigh the risk of being caught, more and more complex methods of deception are being developed, and these have spawned an industry—’academic article brokering,'” writes Ginny Barbour.
• Jeffrey Beall weighed in on article brokers, too.
• What’s your favorite fieldwork blooper? Read others’ choices here.
• What’s the worst piece of peer review you’ve ever received?
• “Blind peer review is dead,” says Aaron Barlow, recapping a 1992 talk. “It just doesn’t know it yet.” Bonus: See Retraction Watch favorite Randy Newman perform “I’m Dead But I Don’t Know It.”
• Five years of Retraction Watch: Ivan talks to Michael Clarke for the Scholarly Kitchen’s podcast.
• Just because a journal has a high impact factor doesn’t mean it adheres to high standards for its instructions for authors, according to a new study.
• Cardiac stem cell researchers Piero Anversa and Annarosa Levi have appealed the dismissal of their lawsuit against Harvard.
• “Should we charge patients for medical research?” ask Ezekiel Emanuel and Steven Joffe.
• The moral goal for today’s bioethics? “Get out of the way,” says Steven Pinker.
• “If you wish to publish your paper immediately without peer review. We can do it for you.” Australia’s ABC’s Background Briefing stings a predatory publisher. Listen to a podcast in which the program dives into the workings of publisher OMICS, which has now apologized to a few Australian academics for including them on journal editorial boards without their permission.
• “The involvement of online discussion sites in the identification of errors, anomalies and worse in the published literature continues to demonstrate the usefulness of post-publication review,” say the editors of Nature Plants, discussing the Voinnet case. “It also highlights the ambiguous power of anonymity.”
• A recent case at the University of Oregon is a “vivid illustration of a problem that may be more common than is generally acknowledged, and one for which harsher penalties are needed,” says The Register-Guard.
• Are there, and should there be, “different standards of plagiarism in different communities?” asks Andrew Gelman.
• Here’s “why an increase in boring results is an important advance for medicine,” from Carolyn Johnson.
• There’s “something central” missing from discussions of scientific ethics and reproducibility, says Martin Schwartz.
• A landmark 2013 paper “underestimated methane leaks from gas production,” Inside Climate News reports.
• “[R]ejection in science is nothing compared to the Fort Knox–like exclusion that the Nashville fortress foists on newcomer-wannabes” in the music industry, writes C. Neal Stewart Jr.
• A drug company “controlled and influenced” dozens of papers to make their products look safer, according to testimony by former FDA commissioner David Kessler (Toronto Star).
• “Low retraction rates can be corrected through technologies that derive ‘peer p-values,'” writes Marcos López de Prado of finance research.
• “There is someone in West Africa who creates a new scholarly open-access publisher every one or two weeks,” reports Jeffrey Beall.
• Elsevier “agrees that metrics should support human judgment and not replace it,” says Peter Darroch.
• “If We don’t Know What Citations Mean, What Does it Mean when We Count Them?” asks Karin Wulf.
• Listicles appear in peer-reviewed journals, too, says P.Z. Myers.
• Here’s something unusual, courtesy of Marion Nestle: Two industry-funded studies that don’t favor the sponsors’ interests.
• Authors “should not equate the impact factor of the journal to the impact of the published paper,” write the editors of The Journal of Physical Chemistry Letters.
• You’d probably miss the erratum for the paper about plague and anthrax on the New York City subway, says Lenny Teytelman.
• “It would be biased to question a country’s research integrity solely on the basis of the number of retracted manuscripts.” Three Chinese medical scholars respond to a Lancet editorial questioning their country’s research integrity.
• “The alluring idea that we can cure cancer has become a trap,” writes Carolyn Johnson.
• GMO opponents are using public records requests to probe links between science and industry, Keith Kloor reports.
• Here’s how to publish your dissertation as journal articles, from Eva Lantsoght.

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