This week at Retraction Watch featured an ironic case of what doesn’t make a journal great, and the retraction of a paper from JAMA. Here’s what was happening elsewhere:
- Which countries and journals account for the most retractions? An analysis from Helmut Dollfuß (in German).
- Who’s on top? 100 social psychology departments, ranked by replicability.
- We think this would be a good development: The names of researchers in Canada who commit fraud may be disclosed, a change in policy, Laura Eggertson reports.
- “An embarrassing acknowledgement” as the US drops charges that a professor shared secrete technology with China.
- Ross Mounce won’t review for Wiley journals anymore. Here’s why.
- “Can high-tech academia survive Silicon Valley’s hiring binge?” asks The New York Times.
- “Do businesspeople make good university presidents?” wonders a piece in The New Yorker.
- “We liked your article on retractions, do you need a microscope?” That was the gist of an email to Liz Wager.
- Men get larger lab startup packages than women do, according to a new study (via Chronicle of Higher Education).
- A study by embattled researcher Jens Förster fails the replication test.
- Wolfgang Stroebe and Miles Hewstone aren’t so keen on the Reproducibility Project.
- Are conflict of interest disclosure rules doing any good? Sara Reardon investigates.
- “Relationships between industry and researchers can be hard to define,” says Nature in an editorial, “but universities and other institutions must do more to scrutinize the work of their scientists for conflicts of interest.”
- The tale of a scientist, as might have been told by Dante.
- What does the paper of the future look like? The Grumpy Geophysicist gives an answer.
- “A recent scientific paper claiming that the children of Holocaust survivors showed evidence of inherited stress was deeply flawed,” says Ewan Birney.
- “WikiGate:” A relationship between Elsevier and Wikipedia makes some question the online encyclopedia’s commitment to open access, Glyn Moody writes.
- “The hype cycle doesn’t even need conscious hype,” says Andrew Gelman. “All it needs is what John Tukey might call the aching desire for regular scientific breakthroughs.”
- Bogus metrics for sale! (via Jeffrey Beall)
- What’s the future of science in the U.S., given increasing competition? Nobelist Jack Szostak weighs in.
- “Do Nobel laureates change their patterns of collaboration following prize reception?” asks a new study.
- “Why aren’t people sharing their data and code?” asks Andrew Gelman.
- $35,000 for your science: Find out more about the Wiley Prize.
- “How interdisciplinary are you?” Take Nature’s quiz.
- Rowena Murray explains how a structure writing retreat can help develop the skills necessary to write scientific papers.
- This year’s Golden Goose Awards — which honor “seemingly obscure studies that led to major scientific breakthroughs” — went to ” researchers who mapped human populations, showed spots to cats, and offered children marshmallows to examine the kids’ patience and self-control,” The Scientist reports.
- There’s no set career path for scientists, says Zoe Self.
- Studies in brief: “Dalmeet Singh Chawla looks at short, sharp new ways to impart information from journal articles.”
- A new journal title mimics an old journal title, courtesy Jeffrey Beall.
- Lots of companies now offer services to authors. How can they be validated? A Q&A with Donald Samulack, who has one solution.
- Paul Knoepfler explores how science bloggers can confront plagiarism.
- “In response to the increasing casualisation and scarcity of academic jobs, and instead of just waiting around to get an academic position post-PhD, these posts exhort graduates to make themselves more competitive by engaging in various academic activities (research, attending conferences, networking) without the support of a university position,” writes May Ngo.
- “Only full disclosure of drug trial results will maintain trust” in pharma, says New Scientist.
- A University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, lab is doing just that.
- Marco Bella raises more questions about studies of the Shroud of Turin (in Italian, English translation at end).
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Hallo. It looks like the Wolfgang Stroebe and Miles Hewstone link is broken.
Fixed, thanks.
Ross Mounce makes a very pointed argument. I found one particular paragraph absolutely correct: “Wiley are a significant player in the modern oligopoly of academic publisher knowledge racketeering. Data from FOI requests in the UK show that in the last five years (2010-2014), 125 UK Higher Education Institutes have collectively spent nearly £77,000,000 renting access to knowledge that Wiley has captured. That’s just the UK. Wiley doesn’t pay authors for their content, nor do they pay reviewers.” He also states, quite aptly, “I am already boycotting Elsevier, and am considering applying the same to subscription-access Nature Springer and Taylor & Francis journals for similar reasons.”
Why then, do scientists continue to peer review for these for-profit publishers for free? And why do these publishers not pay reviewers and editors fees for their professional services and royalties to authors based on profits from their papers?
One possible counter-argument to Ross Mounce might be: who would Dr. Mounce expect to review his own papers submitted to Wiley, or any journal published by a publisher he is criticizing? And this is the deep quagmire we are in as scientists.
The solution: open-ended peer review in open access format.
Not surprised they’d raid universities for people. Universities are essentially incubators of ideas tested by comparatively cheap graduate students. It’s the same as any tech company: working conditions are bad, then employees leave. If academia expects its trained PI’s/postdocs/etc to just grin and take it from indirect costs and tenure politics all day long, perhaps it’s time someone shows them how wrong they are. Also on the plus side, it’s revealing that perhaps the future of the PhD isn’t just more postdocs and fighting for limited faculty positions…it’s using your graduate training and your postdoc position, and your academic appointment to position /yourself/ for greatness, within the ivory tower or outside of it.
I was rather surprised to see that RW cites the data from a paper that was apparently not peer-reviewed, and whose author seems not to be affiliated with any university or institute, as replication failure of Jens Förster’s work. I would agree that there are many problems with Förster’s work – and hopefully more news on this case will follow soon – but this move of RW seems disapppointingly tendentious and wrong.