It’s been a busy week here at Retraction Watch, with breaking news about hotly debated papers from Nature and about GMOs, but there have been interesting stories about retractions and scientific misconduct elsewhere, too. Here’s a sampling:
- Nature has a profile of three whistleblowers: Uri Simonsohn, Helene Hill, and “Clare Francis.” Francis’s name will no doubt be familiar to Retraction Watch readers.
- At Science, Mara Hvistendahl reveals a thriving black market for authorship spots and papers in China.
- You’d think that the chair of the fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual — psychiatry’s “bible” — would know when to disclose a conflict of interest. But apparently not, writes Bernard Carroll.
- The editor of a journal that published a paper by bogus authors tells his side of the story.
- The World Health Organization has retracted a claim that Greeks were injecting themselves with HIV to get benefits.
- Two mathematicians have retracted a claim that “there was a link between Bitcoin founder Satoshi Nakamoto and the man accused of running illicit online marketplace The Silk Road,” Business Insider reports.
Happy reading!
“The editor of a journal that published a paper by bogus authors tells his side of the story.” — The link refers to the RW entry, not to the story of the editor. Could that be fixed? Thanks!
Fixed — thanks.
$41.95 to read this if one does not have an institutional subscription!
And those 41.95 $ would be completely wasted. That editorial consists of merely 964 words which mainly reiterate what was said in the original retraction watch story. For that money you could buy 3-4 books. One wonders what business model Elsevier has. Who ever pays that sum for one article? Even going to your local university library for that stuff would be too much labor.
For me, 41.95$ is a day’s meals for me and my family. Yes, the greed model is definately in place in science publishing. Show me one publisher that pays scientists royalties. Several contracts, especially for books, are cleverly drafted so that the royalty for editors looks good, but only once a minimum number of units is sold, which almost never happens, of is almost never reported by the publisher to the editors. The worst part, and this is my latest gripe with Springer, is that editors are getting two free books and a low % royalty, while the authors. the true intellectual contributors who put good food on the tables of the CEOs, get a handsome reward: a PDF file with a water-mark “Author’s personal copy”. Our intellect is gradually being ridiculed and diminished by pseudo-ethics, marketing prowess and brain-dead editor boards (that comment applies to much more than Springer journals). The worst thing about the Nature and Science papers (and its not related to the publishers) is that even when we contact the corresponding authors for a copy of that PDF, they fail to provide it. One of the basic responsibilities of a scientist is to provide that academic record when another academic requests it. Almost every aspect of publishing a paper nowadays is starting to get so frustrating.
The newsfocus published by M. Hvistendahl (behind a paywall) is particularly scaring, and don’t really support the optimistic claims done by W. Yang, President of the National Natural Science Foundation of China, in an Editorial published in the same issue of Science magazine (“Research Integrity in China”; DOI: 10.1126/science.1247700).
what about the offers we receive everyday for a keynote address, plenary lecture, chairing a session and invited speaker availability….how are they being done?