Weekend reads: Publish a paper, get $10,000!; Lancet editor Horton under fire

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

• Publish a paper, get $10,000!
• “Following the publication in The Lancet last month of an open letter to the people of Gaza, a number of doctors have begun a petition to force editor-in-chief Richard Horton to resign. Should medical journals get political?

• A heavily political plagiarism accusation about a new book on Ronald Reagan defines plagiarism as “quoting with full attribution” and “using the same historical facts,” says David Dayen at Salon.
• “First, all papers will only be transiently available, so there is no need for retractions.” A spoof from Jonathan Eisen.
• A peer-reviewed study has found that a famous medium’s discussions with the dead were accurate.
• Award-seeking and career-building behavior is contributing to the rise of bad science, says a Harvard postdoc.
• The firing of a Los Alamos researcher for revealing classified information is being criticized, Science reports (subscription required). Meanwhile, an Office of the Inspector General report of how the Department of Energy’s Department of Science, which manages national labs such as Los Alamos, handled misconduct allegations at other national labs found that “nothing came to our attention to indicate that allegations were not appropriately addressed” but that there were “instances where notifications were not made or local laboratory procedures were not followed.”
• “What was the point, anyway, of telling the General Public anything about science?”
• “Research does not stop with the publication of a paper; often experimental designs are rapidly refined, and new techniques are developed that can affect the original conclusions,” notes eLife as it introduces a way for authors to introduce new information after a paper is published.
• Why are researchers still denying some study participants potentially life-saving therapies? asks microbiologist Nathalia Holt.
• Carl Zimmer explains why we can’t rule out Bigfoot.
• A guide to fooling the world with bad science, from Ethan Siegel.
• “A newspaper fact-checks its own right-wing op-ed; hilarity ensues.”
• Why is the media so obsessed with female scientists’ appearance? asks Alice Bell. Related: Harassment in science, replicated, by Christie Anschwanden.
• Respect the lowly case report, says John Gever.
• The Committee on Publication Ethics’ August newsletter has lots of interesting links.
• “One criticism of Australian universities is that they indulge in oversupplying graduates in certain fields such as dentistry and journalism.”
• The Three Minute Thesis competition is challenging young scientists to explain their work quickly, and without using jargon.
• “Even if they’re not vile and psychologically damaging, most [online comments] aren’t worth your time,” says Nicholas Jackson. [We disagree.] “And we already have a better system in place.”
• Climate scientist Michael Mann has an unusual collection of foes in his libel and defamation case against the National Review, Alison Frankel reports.
• Open access advocates are critical of Science Advances, a soon-to-be-launched open access journal from the publishers of Science.
• Who governs science? asks Stephen Curry.
• “If we want to deal with research misconduct, we need to change the incentive structures in scientific research,” argues Zen Faulkes in response to a commentary on why “good science requires better teaching.”
• The history of fact-checking, and the new urgency for verification, from the master of corrections, Craig Silverman.