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? You can make a tax-deductible contribution to support our work, follow us on X or Bluesky, like us on Facebook, follow us on LinkedIn, add us to your RSS reader, or subscribe to our daily digest. If you find a retraction that’s not in our database, you can let us know here. For comments or feedback, email us at [email protected].