- Want to be an author on a paper? Just write a check.
- Is the STAP stem cell mess over? Haruko Obokata was unable to reproduce her original findings, and has resigned her position at RIKEN.
- Why scientists hate their journals.
- We always eagerly await Craig Silverman’s list of the year’s best corrections. This year is no exception. This one, however, was too late for his list: “The original version of this post misidentified Barry Manilow as Rod Stewart. We deeply regret the error.”
- “Deciding who should and should not be on the author line of a science publication is not as simple as it seems,” writes DrugMonkey.
- “Authors and readers beware the dark side of Open Access.” Harvard Magazine takes its own look.
- “[T]here are situations where it’s less obvious that fierce competition for scarce resources leads to choices that really align with the goal of building reliable knowledge about the world,” Janet Stemwedel writes of two NPR stories on misidentified cell lines.
- How random is the conference presentation review process? One group of organizers tried to find out, in an experiment.
- “Exaggeration in news is strongly associated with exaggeration in press releases,” a study in the BMJ concluded. Here’s Bethany Brookshire’s take on the paper (quotes Ivan).
- “Let’s face it: The traditional peer-review process was not meant for a digital age,” writes Aaron Barlow. Here are ideas from three other scientists on how to drag scientific publishing into the 21st century.
- Lots of good items in this month’s COPE Digest, as usual.
- Yet another legal threat, this one from a struck-off psychotherapist.
- The apparent link between Lyme disease and fibromyalgia seems to have evaporated.
- A study of children in the U.S. has been cancelled after $1.3 billion was spent.
- “Most scientific claims are bogus,” and other advice John Horgan gives young science writers.
- “The wave of bullshit data is rising, and now it’s our turn to figure out how not to get swept away.”
- “[A]mong biologists and physicists at top research universities included in this study, women are much more involved in outreach than men.”
- “Exceptional papers do not need extraordinary journals,” says Nikolai Slavov.
- Here’s how scientists are learning to write.
- PubMed Commons will now feature online journal clubs.
- Diederik Stapel’s memoirs are now freely available in English. Here’s the ebook version. Meanwhile, Stapel has opened a new business as a coach and strategic advisor.
- One of the anonymous commenters being sued by Fazlul Sarkar has filed a motion to be removed from the case.
- “Seeing that my work was being used to provide a trivial and basic perspective of science infuriated me very much.”
- “Attempts to exempt speculative theories of the Universe from experimental verification undermine science, argue George Ellis and Joe Silk.” Sean Carroll has other ideas.
- A “one stop science shop” with close ties to corporations has become industry’s favorite consulting firm for assessing the toxicity of chemicals.
- The University of California has settled charges that a researcher received overlapping grants.
- eLife has published the first results of the Reproducibility Project in cancer biology.
- The Berkeley Initiative for Transparency in the Social Sciences reflects on two years of promoting transparency.
Related
This was a week of stem cell retractions, fake peer reviews, legal threats, and we announced that we’ve been awarded a $400,000 grant from the MacArthur Foundation. Here’s what was happening elsewhere:
Also new: How insights from Behavioral Economics might be used to “nudge” scientists into practicing research integrity
http://jmbe.asm.org/index.php/jmbe/article/view/868/html_154
The Seife paper in Scientific American is particularly chilling. It states, “In November Scientific American asked a Chinese-speaking reporter to contact MedChina, which offers dozens of scientific “topics for sale” and scientific journal “article transfer” agreements. Posing as a person shopping for a scientific authorship, the reporter spoke with a MedChina representative who explained that the papers were already more or less accepted to peer-reviewed journals; apparently, all that was needed was a little editing and revising. The price depends, in part, on the impact factor of the target journal and whether the paper is experimental or meta-analytic. In this case, the MedChina rep offered authorship of a meta-analysis linking a protein to papillary thyroid cancer slated to be published in a journal with an impact factor of 3.353. The cost: 93,000 RMB—about $15,000.”
What more proof do we need between the link between the gaming of the impact factor, fraudulent companies, scientists who use such services, and the gradual corruption of science and science publishing? In the plant scinces, I have seen a MASSIVE up-tick in papers being published in the leading plant science journals by Chinese scientists, and even though I am hopeful (he says, with some concern on the inside) that most Chinese scientists are not using such services to game the system and China’s ranking, there is nonetheless a nagging discomfort in seeing what I am seeing:
http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00299-014-1587-6
http://download.springer.com/static/pdf/249/art%253A10.1007%252Fs00299-014-1587-6.pdf?auth66=1419107725_e6b09a2f6610e29a658e60b146b71c8f&ext=.pdf
This merits greater investigation, but who is to do that investigation, and how, considering the language and cultural barriers?
My favorite item of “bullshit data” was “Washington residents complain about rats more than New Yorkers, as reported by Orkin.”
The next time I have an infestation of New Yorkers, I will know whom to call.
That is a language/grammar issue, not a scientific issue. Funny to read though 😉
In an ironic twist, the DOI returns 404.