The week at Retraction Watch featured the temporary removal of the director of the U.S. HHS’ Office of Research Integrity, a mass resignation of an journal’s editorial board, and a court injunction against OMICS. Here’s what was happening elsewhere:
- “A researcher has taken a Dutch university to the country’s Institute for Human Rights for not allowing him to defend his PhD dressed as a pirate.” (David Matthews, Times Higher Education)
- Prior to an offshore herpes vaccine trial, a researcher experimented on patients in U.S. hotel rooms. (Marisa Taylor, Kaiser Health News, via Scientific American)
- “Your manuscript should not, as a rule, be hard to distinguish from the work of someone who is beginning to lose their grip on reality.” (Derek Lowe, In The Pipeline)
- Multiple papers from Cornell’s Brian Wansink have exactly 770 survey responses. Hmm. (Stephanie Lee, BuzzFeed)
- Jeff Leek offers up a list of ways to reduce stress around replication and reproducibility in science. (Simply Stats)
- “Open access has turned out to be a misnomer,” say Andrew Suarez and Terry McGlynn. (The Chronicle of Higher Education) But Lenny Teytelman says the piece includes a number of fallacies. (protocols.io)
- “A US Research Integrity Advisory Board is long overdue,” says Nature, picking up on a recommendation from earlier this year.
- Hungary is hoping to boost its research standing by giving extra money to highly-cited scientists. (Alison Abbott, Nature)
- “Small shifts in encouragement” can help researchers realize the value of negative results and replications studies. (Editorial, Nature)
- “Do bibliometrics and altmetrics correlate with the quality of papers?” ask Lutz Bornmann and Robin Haunschild. (arXiv)
- Academic fraud is a question of morals and integrity, says Lee Kay Yan. What if universities interviewed scientists the way NASA does? (The Straits Times)
- What to do when scholarly publishing goes awry? Joanna Thielen has some ideas. (Preprint, JHU Muse)
- “But is it corrupt to charge a subscription for a hybrid journal while also realizing revenues from article processing charges (APCs)?” asks Kent Anderson. (Scholarly Kitchen)
- “Peer review should be self‐organised in a centralised and publicly funded peer review platform,” argue Ignacio Amigo and Alberto Pascual-Garcia. (EMBO Press)
- The gang at 100% CI has a number of “stupid solutions to real problems in science.”
- A new analysis “suggests that reporting checklists may not improve the use and reporting of formal power calculations.” (bioRxiv)
Like Retraction Watch? Consider making a tax-deductible contribution to support our growth. You can also follow us on Twitter, like us on Facebook, add us to your RSS reader, sign up on our homepage for an email every time there’s a new post, or subscribe to our daily digest. Click here to review our Comments Policy. For a sneak peek at what we’re working on, click here. If you have comments or feedback, you can reach us at [email protected].