Weekend reads: Dope-addicted doctors running drug trials; jailed for copyright violation?

booksAnother busy week at Retraction Watch. Here’s what was happening elsewhere:

13 thoughts on “Weekend reads: Dope-addicted doctors running drug trials; jailed for copyright violation?”

    1. We all know how the impact factor is calculated, using three simple letters, A, B and C. The efforts by Thomson Reuters are slow, minimal and do not address key issues, including more transparency, open access, clarification of “review” boards for journal selection, etc. I have hammered out my criticism in 2013, already [1]. Of course, seeking a response from Thomson Reuters, I got none.
      [1] http://www.globalsciencebooks.info/JournalsSup/images/2013/AAJPSB_7(SI1)/AAJPSB_7(SI1)81-83o.pdf

      1. Re: the impact factor. On July 31, 2014, Frontiers in Plant Science was too young to have an IF. On August 1, 2014, the IF score was 3.6*, a higher score than some plant science journals that have been in existence, publishing good science, for decades. The unfortunate thing is that many plant scientists will be claculating the amount of money they can make off publishing in this IF score journal vs the amount of money they will have to spend on the open access fee.
        * http://www.frontiersin.org/Plant_Science

  1. [Perception of scientific fraud in the Spanish biomedical journals.]
    [Article in Spanish]
    Med Clin (Barc). 2014 Jul 26. pii: S0025-7753(14)00376-5. doi: 10.1016/j.medcli.2014.03.036. [Epub ahead of print]
    Martín-Arribas MC, Martínez-Hervás I, Rodríguez-Lozano I, Arias-Díaz J.

    This doesn’t seem to be available yet; it doesn’t come up anywhere on the journal’s website.

      1. If the Colombian could face jail time for posting a colleague’s thesis online, then what about the dozens of apparently copyrighted PDF files administered by Dr. Abraham Blum (Israel) on his web-site? http://plantstress.com/
        Just as one example, an Elsevier Ltd. copyrighted paper:
        Original (payment acess only): http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18467158
        Free using Blum’s web-site: http://plantstress.com/Articles/up_drought_files/hRootSignal-Trends%202008.pdf
        And others on the same page: http://plantstress.com/Articles/index.asp
        See the full lists here (click on articles): http://plantstress.com/Articles/index.asp
        Nobody on this page has responded to my queries and the copyright notice seems almost contradictory to what is being displayed: http://www.plantstress.com/about.htm

      2. Tragedy has stuck in Japan in the Obokata case. Yoshiki Sasai (sub-director), who had – until the STAP case – commanded a strong career and several high-level prizes, has puportedly hung himself with a rope from a 4-5th floor of a building in the Riken center*. At the time when the revelations first came out, I had issued genuine concern about Obokata being at risk of suicide. Unfortunately, all eyes were focused on the wrong individual at the time.
        * http://news.yahoo.co.jp/pickup/6125775

  2. Is it somehow possible to limit the amount of posts by this particular reader of yours? It is getting beyond ridiculous and unfortunately the whole experience of your wonderful website is getting worse by each and every day.

  3. The figures in the PeerJ preprint on p-values are very, very confusing (reporting numbers of papers as %, reporting numbers of papers of negative results, but percentages for positive etc.). I certainly hope it will get polished during the review process…

Leave a Reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.