Weekend reads: Potti trial to begin; fraudster post-doc fired; how to avoid predatory journals

This week at Retraction Watch featured a hotly debated guest post from Leonid Schneider and two ORI findings. Here’s what was happening elsewhere:

• The civil trial against Duke University, Anil Potti, Joseph Nevins, and others begins Monday. The Cancer Letter describes Duke’s legal strategy as “We Did No Harm,” and C.K. Gunsalus asks, “Should detecting and stopping bad and harmful research be this hard?” Potti has 11 retractions, one partial retraction, and seven corrections.
• The Oklahoma post-doc whose fakery we reported on Sunday was fired last month, The Oklahoman reports.
• How to avoid predatory journals: A five-point plan from Jocalyn Clark.
• A journalism school director has been fired for plagiarism, following earlier questions.
• A Columbia University mesothelioma researcher sent patients to a law firm in exchange for a grant, according to the case against New York State Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver, who earned millions from the firm.
• “Can I slack and get a PhD?” Points for…honesty?
• “The research community doesn’t need more journals. It’s time we embrace non-traditional publishing platforms.”
• “Like I said before, the normal reaction of science is to address criticism, and not to silence it. To educate rather than litigate:” An analysis of PubPeer.
• “So maybe what we see happening online to the Monckton et al. paper is a glimpse at the future of peer review: public, non-anonymous, fast, and vicious,” John Bohannon tells Motherboard.
• A blog that “defend[s] the CrossFit brand from misrepresentation” is raising more questions about the work of a researcher whose previous study is the subject of a lawsuit by the company.
• Did a Romanian researcher game Google Scholar to raise his citation count? asks Jeffrey Beall.
• “Is redoing scientific research the best way to find truth?” asks Tina Saey at Science News.
• Ulrich Schimmack takes another look at the abnormalities in Jens Förster’s data.
• “Because of a rules violation, this photo has been disqualified from the competition.” The nature of that rules violation is left unsaid.
• “Can We Trust Published Scientific Research?” asks SkeptVet. And Andrew Farke explains what the scientific literature is actually used for.
• The Grumpy Geophysicist opines on the unfairness of citations.
• Here are Hilda Bastian’s 7 tips for women at science conferences.
• A new open access journal plans to pay peer reviewers.
• At The Scholarly Kitchen, Kent Anderson suggests some lessons to learn, and twists to watch, in the Macmillan-Springer deal.
• More scientific papers should be full of beautiful prose, argues Chris Woolston.
• “Therefore, our assumption is more or less justified.” Seems like a reasonable thing to say in a scientific paper, right?
• An analysis finds that “an Internet-based collection of firms that provide students with papers, written by others, which satisfy their coursework assignments” makes at least $100 million per year.
• You need to know “the critical difference between explanatory statistics and predictive statistics,” according to Perry Wilson.
• Dave Fernig offers his take on Leonid Schneider’s recent guest post, “What if universities had to agree to refund grants whenever there was a retraction?“
• New Yorker writer Peter Hessler says he didn’t pen an op-ed in a Chinese paper that carried his byline. At least one version of the piece has been removed from the site.
• An online publication has retracted an article about alleged cruelty to dolphins following a lawsuit.
• A U.S. House of Representatives science committee is targeting a productive fossil database as wasteful spending.
• How do you convince referees when responding to reviews? Richard Threlfall suggests cooperation, not confrontation.
• This must-read Michael Moss story will cause you pain, but not as much pain as that suffered by the lab animals in it.
• Five modes of science engagement explained, from Roger Pielke, Jr.
• On social media channels, anti-fluoridation material dwarfs pro-fluoridation content. Keith Kloor takes a look at why.
• Is there really much support for academics who engage the public on science?