Weekend reads: Does publishing take too long?; Zika data complaints; a Valentine’s Day special

The week at Retraction Watch featured two high-profile resignations linked to the Paolo Macchiarini case, as well as a Q&A with a long-frustrated — and now vindicated — whistleblower. Here’s what was happening elsewhere:

• “Does it take too long to publish research?” Some scientists say it does, writes Kendall Powell at Nature.
• Just in time for February 14, a Retraction Watch classic from five years ago about a retracted editorial in Surgery News that suggested forgetting chocolate on Valentine’s Day and trying semen instead.
• When a group of psychology researchers looked at a study of social priming, they found “a number of strange oddities.” (Basic and Applied Social Psychology)
• Even as a number of journals, funders, and others committed to sharing data on the Zika virus, a researcher complained that he and others who posted genomes of the virus online did not receive proper credit in a publication, Ewen Callaway reports at Nature.
• The embargo on the finding of gravitational waves was broken by a cake, reports Rachel Feltman of The Washington Post. Really.
• A new paper about how infant cognition labs bridge “the distance between an uncontrollable research object and a professional culture that prizes methodological rigor,” says Sanjay Srivastava, “reveals one problematic practice after another.”
• NBC News appears to have retracted a documentary on Paolo Macchiarini, according to Ian Mohr of The New York Post.
• Press releases stink. In our new STAT column, we explain why that matters.
• Jeffrey Beall says “we need to end the system of payments from authors.” See more in this interview with Joe Esposito of The Scholarly Kitchen.
• An economics journal is crowdsourcing its replications policy, says assistant editor Claire Boeing Reicher.
• Andrew Gelman doesn’t think that replications on YouTube count for much­.
• Stop predatory publishers now, say David Moher and Esther Moher in the Annals of Internal Medicine. (sub req’d)
• Reviewers who know editors “are much more likely to answer the invitation and finish the review than other reviewers,” according to a new study in Scientometrics. (sub req’d)
• As another sexual misconduct case rocks anthropology, reported by Michael Balter at Science, and a sustainability researcher dogged by allegations is appointed to a senior position (The Hindu), “how should science funders deal with harassers?” asks Alexandra Witze at Nature.
• “After getting shut down late last year, a website that allows free access to paywalled academic papers has sprung back up in a shadowy corner of the Internet.” (Kaveh Waddell, The Atlantic)
• An invitation to have an article ghost-written for Retraction Watch. But sent to Lenny Teytelman.
• A conservative who argued against expanding Social Security in the U.S. is retracting articles in major news outlets after an agency whose calculations he based them said they’d erred. (Michael Hiltzik, Los Angeles Times)
• “85% of health research is wasted,” says The BMJ’s Trish Groves, announcing a new program from the journal and the University of California, San Francisco designed to change that.
• Research practices at the University of Minnesota’s psychiatry department, long criticized by ethicists and others, “demonstrate a profound lack of knowledge about how to conduct clinical research,” according to a new report.
• “The academic journal is 350 years old,” says Lenny Teytelman. “Any plans to retire?”
• Political scientists “cut-and-paste their way to 3 publications from the same material,” says Andrew Gelman.
• A global network of science and medical academies has released “a new publication that offers guidance on conducting research responsibly in a research environment that is increasingly international and multidisciplinary.”
• Is there a way to make metrics meaningful? asks Barbara Fisher in Inside Higher Ed.
• A critic of the methods used to arrive at campus rape statistics has taken to PubPeer, Robby Soave of Reason reports.
• As PLOS ONE shrinks, says Phil Davis, expect its impact factor to rise. (Scholarly Kitchen)
• “Concerns over trial data relating to the anticoagulant rivaroxaban have not changed the European Medicines Agency’s conclusions on the drug’s overall safety and benefit-risk balance,” Good Health Suite reports.
• The EU’s “Right to Be Forgotten” policy sets a “bad precedent for free expression worldwide,” say Jens-Henrik Jeppesen and Emma Llanso.
• A researcher is raising concerns over trials of cancer screening in India, Aarefa Johari of Scroll.in reports.
• The “role of [institutional review boards] IRBs with regard to compassionate use [of unapproved drugs] must be examined and potentially revised,” argue Barbara Redman and Alison Shea Bateman-House in Therapeutic Regulation & Regulatory Science. (sub req’d) And Arthur Caplan and Amrit Ray argue in JAMA for a new model for such uses.
• A legal tussle has delayed the launch of a large toxicity database, Natasha Gilbert of Nature reports.

Retractions Outside of the Scientific Literature

• “If you’re looking for our transcript on the Orillia debates, we have removed it from this website, and will print a retraction in our next paper issue as well.”
• “Trapped within a surreal ‘M.C. Escher nightmare’, Charlotte’s already strange newspaper job descends into a dark, twisted journey through alternate realities, psycho- sexuality, and poisonous human attachment.” A play called Retraction.
• “Correction and Retraction: Rhode Island Department of Health Did Not Claim that Vaping is as Hazardous as Smoking.”

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