This week at Retraction Watch, an explosives paper burned up, and we found that we’re cited in a $8 million lawsuit. Here’s what’s happening elsewhere:
- “Publishers, stop torturing your reviewers!” begs Bjorn Brembs.
- The managing editor of a Wiley journal offers his tips for peer review.
- Failure in real science is good – and different from phony controversies, says Chad Orzel.
- Journals without editors? This story from Dorothy Bishop is even stranger than the title suggests.
- Shoukhrat Mitalipov, the researcher who cloned human embryonic stem cells — but had to correct the paper — and Woo-Suk Hwang, the fraudster who claimed to have done so are getting together with $90 million in backing from a company. (Mitalipov says they won’t be collaborating on research.)
- Are “right to be forgotten” laws making cases of plagiarism disappear from Google?
- Publishers have a new avenue to attract paying authors, reports Scholarly Open Access: LinkedIn.
- “To improve their Impact Factors, some editors deliberately move articles scheduled for the December issue into the January issue–this technique is often referred to as ‘front loading.'”
- One in five scholarly articles suffers from “reference rot,” according to a new study, meaning URLs listed as supporting material no longer go anywhere.
- The news director of Mic has been fired for plagiarism.
- An obesity researcher who advises the UK government “strongly denied suggestions from a medical journal that her independence has been compromised by taking funding from the sugar and other food industries for research projects.”
- Citing a “history of deaths, injuries, and conflicts of interest,” a “leading state lawmaker has asked Senate leadership to postpone selection of University of Minnesota regents until next month’s state review of the university’s drug-trial program.”
- Both liberals and conservatives can have biases about science, according to a new study.
- “Why do many reasonable people doubt science?” asks Joel Achenbach.
- It’s time for more researchers to step up to debunk junk, says Edward Marks.
- Goodbye, Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, hello, Systemic Exertion Intolerance Disease.
- OK, so you have your own lab. Now what?
- “It would be nice if we could somehow accept criticism as, well, criticism of work and not a personal attack.”
- A new term paper requirement for high school students in Austria is clogging a plagiarism detection system, Deborah Weber-Wulff reports.
- Statistics for scientists: A resource collection from Nature.
- How has publishing in physics evolved over time? UC-Davis postdoc Alessandro Delfanti speaks on February 18.
- “We should listen to Roald Dahl, not Jenny McCarthy, on vaccinating our children,” says Jules Montague.
- All human studies should get a stamp of approval from an appropriate ethical body before starting, argues CMAJ editor John Fletcher.
- Patients are more willing to forgo their privacy by sharing DNA in exchange for more of a participatory role in research, says Jennifer Couzin-Frankel at Science.
- It’s the six degrees of Kevin Bacon in publishing: Andrew Gelman is in search of a plagiarism “loop,” in which A copies B, who copies C, and so on until Z copies A.
- Vox takes down the Toronto Star’s attempt to take down the HPV vaccine by presenting stories of girls supposedly harmed by the shot. The editor tells reporter Julia Belluz to “Stop gargling our bathwater and take the time to run yourself your own, fresh tub,” but “We failed,” the Star’s publisher admits.
- In other Canadian news, Merck is fighting back after British Columbia stopped covering the company’s diabetes drug, Januvia.
- Sharing data should be “the expected norm,” says Harlan Krumholz in the BMJ.
- …And here are some other ways to be nice – or at least, not a “jackass” – to your colleagues, courtesy of Stacey Patton.
- The Disturbing Influence of Flawed Research On Your Living Habits, courtesy of The Berkeley Initiative for Transparency in the Social Sciences.
- Lynne Peebles presents the legacy bad data leaves behind.
- “What is the ‘science of science communication'”? asks Dan Kahan.
- Craig Silverman explains “How News Websites Spread (and Debunk) Online Rumors, Unverified Claims and Misinformation.”
- When you swap “gravity” for “climate change,” any skepticism becomes comedic.
- “Being able to change your mind is a valuable skill for a scientist, but it must be practiced with care.”
Re: front loading. Doesn’t publishing ‘online before print’ versions of articles essentially serve a similar purpose (boosting IF and Immediacy Index)? It essentially allows for articles to be available for indeterminate periods of time and gather citations before they even get formally published, but as far as I noticed an article doesn’t get indexed until its ‘version of record’ gets assigned to a particular issue of a journal. And that’s a pretty widespread practice, too.
The link to this news item is broken.
“Shoukhrat Mitalipov, the researcher who cloned human embryonic stem cells — but had to correct the paper — and Woo-Suk Hwang, the fraudster who claimed to have done so are getting together with $90 million in backing from a company.”
Fixed, thanks.
“Are “right to be forgotten” laws making cases of plagiarism disappear from Google?”
No. Google makes things disappear from Google. In each removal request, Google has to weigh the public interest of having the information available in search results against the individual’s privacy interest. Or, as the EU Court of Justice puts it in (Case C‑131/12):
“a fair balance should be sought in particular between that interest and the data subject’s fundamental rights”.
Apparently in the cases mentioned Google has decided in favour of the individual’s privacy interest, so the question should really be whether Google is appropriately weighing the factors in those cases.
A few comments on some of these very important stories:
a) Dr. Brembs. Should authors ignore publishers’ and journals’ IFA requests?
b) To Brian Johnson from Wiley. Why should “peers” respond to a system that neither values them nor remunerates them for their professionalism?
c) Dr. Orzel: “Failure in real science is good” A slight mischaracterization. Most science is failure. In most cases, what we see in a paper represents only the most positive results, emphasizing why negative results must also be published, even if as supplementary files. There is too little emphasis on negative results.
d) Dr. Bishop’s story should be read in detail. In fact, it refers to an Elsevier journal Research in Autism Spectrum Disorders (RASD), where she states: “I realised that I had to take action for two reasons. First, RASD was an Elsevier journal. In 2012 I had resigned from the editorial boards of other Elsevier journals. But I’d been unaware that I was on the Editorial Board of RASD, so I had not written to them. Second, I was interested in Michelle’s concerns about editorial practices at the journal.” Take-home message: we have the responsibility of examining, in detail these editor boards, the papers and profiles of the editors and the publishing practices, especially of papers with a turn-around time of 6 days.
e) “It’s time for more researchers to step up to debunk junk”. Dr. Edward Marks, this is one corner-stone of post-publication peer review (PPPR).
f) Anonymous reviews are an essential element of PPPR. Provided they are civil, state the facts as blandly as possible, they serve simply, and exclusively, to state the concerns with work. Whether this states something about the authors themselves depends on additional factors. In any case, those whose work is being scrutinized will certainly feel defensive, and angry in some cases. But, this is a maturation process that eventually leads to the realization that PPPR is an intricate element of the peer review fiber of any paper, especially after it has been published, precisely to counter situations where there may have been peer reviewer failure or editorial bias.
g) How to deal with “reference rot”? Indeed, such papers deserve to have errata published because their content is basically flawed. Readers should know that what was true at the time of publication is no longer true at the time at which the paper is being read. By not correcting these errors, the publisher is not being responsible towards the literature it is selling, or advertising. I wouldn’t be surprised to start seeing retractions soon based on papers whose reference lists no longer support the claims made therein because the literature no longer exists. This would be a valid, but extremely dangerously damaging, reason for retractions. Scientists and publishers beware! Read the Klein et al. paper with great care. I think the bigger question behind the RR syndrome is how on earth did such URLs be allowed to be passed as scholarly references in the first place? Another true slap in the face of traditional peer review.
A quick off topic question for commenters.
Is it possible to plagiarize your own patent? I filled a patent a while ago, but have not finalized the paper for submission. Now the patent has been made public and can be found online. Obviously the data that supports the patent is the same as what we want to publish. Is there a problem with using that data. I dont think so, but never hurts to ask.
The only info I can find online is basically, patent first and publish later, which we have done.
John, I’m not sure I know the answer to that question. But I think you can reduce all risks, and place the full onus of responsibility on the editors and publisher by doing the following:
a) Indicating during the submission process that the paper is based on the patent.
b) Submitting, with a non-disclosure form that should first be signed by the editor, the actual full patent text, with the paper (use security-coded low-res PDF file, or low-res jpg file just in case).
c) Adding inverted commas to any text that is identical to the patent itself.
d) Adding, as a disclaimer or acknowledgements, a full statement that the data is based on the patent, and indicating clearly what data, text, tables etc. are derived directly from the patent.
If a high level journal, there should be enough common sense for the editor to then decide whether to proceed with the paper, or not. By doing the above, at least you safe-guard yourself, as much as possible, against future claims of self-plagiarism while also shifting the onus of responsibility to the editors/publisher if they eventually accept the paper for publication. At least, that’s what I would do in a similar situation.
The fact that you are asking this question indicates that despite centuries of publishing, and decades of patents, that rules and guidelines for such cases still remain unclear. A preposterous situation, in fact.
Thanks for your advise. I think a good editor should be able to help us through process. Now we just have to find a good journal. lol