The week at Retraction Watch featured a lawsuit over the authorship of a paper, and a look at when exactly a study should be retracted. Here’s what was happening elsewhere:
- “Peer review is faith-, not evidence-based; ineffective; a lottery; slow; expensive; wasteful; ineffective; easily abused; biased; doesn’t detect fraud; irrelevant,” former BMJ editor in chief (and current Center for Scientific Integrity board of directors member) Richard Smith said earlier this week. “Apart from that, it’s perfect.”
- Lab bloopers, courtesy of Reddit.
- “Post-publication peer review is a reality, so what should the rules be?”
- What was peer review like before the citation craze? Hilda Bastian wonders.
- A Facebook for science? Neuroskeptic talks to Brett Buttliere.
- Double the NIH budget, says former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich.
- “How did I go from being a high school student who played in a rock band to a mad scientist conducting cruel animal experiments?”
- “[S]cience is an imperfect enterprise, born of the struggle against authority, encouraging its practitioners to question and doubt,” writes Circulation editor in chief Joseph Loscalzo.
- Ralph Nader interviews whistleblower Helene Z. Hill about what it’s like to bring forward allegations of scientific misconduct.
- Irwin Schatz, who tried to sound the alarm about the unethical Tuskegee Study, has died. He was 83.
- “BuzzFeed says posts were deleted because of advertising pressure,” reports The New York Times.
- “How much do you value the ‘Authors Contribution’ statement?” Take a poll.
- Here’s how to avoid plagiarizing your thesis (French).
- How long does a scientific paper need to be? asks Dorothy Bishop.
- What does “open science” really mean for publishing? ask Sabina Leonelli and Barbara Prainsack.
- 10 things you need to know before you peer review, courtesy of Wiley. And peer review, explained in a cartoon.
- The April issue of the COPE Digest includes a slew of news items.
- Which metrics should editors track? Danielle Padula weighs in.
- “Emerging trends in retraction of publications in PubMed-indexed medical journals:” An analysis of retractions from selected countries.
- “Improving research integrity will require a bi-directional approach,” says David Vaux, a member of The Center for Scientific Integrity’s board of directors.
- A journal in Mexico is demanding a “mordida” from authors who want to publish in it, reports Jeffrey Beall.
- “I’d like to think that the halls of higher education are less vulnerable to the siren calls of fame and fortune than other byways of American life are,” writes Frank Bruni.
- A judge has told Stony Brook University that it needs to justify why it’s keeping its research chimps.
- “The study that never existed, cancer edition.”
“The study that never existed, cancer edition.”
That story is worth reading. Briefly: a university PR flack sent out a press release to promote a talk to the AACR. Because “Professor re-hashes unreplicated results from a 2012 paper and draws a broad conclusion from mutually-contradictory studies” is lacking in oomph, the flack made stuff up about “new research”.
The flack is now blaming the resulting publicity — the blizzard of “supplements-cause-cancer” media reports — on journalists and bloggers relying on the honesty of his press release.
Some obscure commenters went on futile searches for facts right at the start of the story.
1) Cat Ferguson has left RW.
2) The Blogroll piece about etiquette says basically nothing about etiquette. No rules are defined and only broad comments are made.
3) Several papers by David Vaux are featured on PubPeer:
https://pubpeer.com/search?q=David+Vaux&sessionid=0FDFB7363E95A5ED5CB9&commit=Search+Publications
The online submission system for Scientific Reports, a journal published by Nature Publishing Group, states the following:
“FAST-TRACK PEER-REVIEW TRIAL – NOW ENDED
From March 24th 2015 – April 20th 2015, Scientific Reports ran a small scale trial to offer authors submitting a Biology manuscript the option of a fast-track peer-review service. This trial has now concluded, and further results will be reported later in 2015. For further information please visit our blog: ‘further experiments in peer review’.” That link leads to here:
http://blogs.nature.com/ofschemesandmemes/2015/03/27/further-experiments-in-peer-review
A rejection of a paper by Springer’s 3Biotech this morning:
“It is the general policy of the journal that all submissions are first screened for suitability and broad interest. Your manuscript was discussed at the editorial office and was found to be too specialized to warrant broad interest.”
What does that even mean? A perusal of most papers published in this journal indicate that they are specialized.
I wish to focus on, very briefly, the issue of publisher-induced errors. In recent times (about 1 year back), I started noticing errors in the proofs of my papers that did not exist in the final version of the paper. In other words, these were being introduced by the proof setters at the publisher’s proof department. In all cases in which I issued a formal complaint, the editors were also not aware of this issue. I think it is worthwhile debating this topic in a bit more detail because it falls under the retraction umbrella, for the following reason: errors, whether introduced by authors, or by publishers, are finally subject to scrutiny by peers. When a reader, or peer, reads a final PDF file of a published paper, they do not know, however, if that error was in fact introduced by the reader, or by the publisher. In serious cases, where criticism may be severe, a retraction may arise. Thus, this fine-scale analysis is going to become increasingly important, so I wanted to start the ball rolling now. Does anybody have any experiences or case studies to share?
The Journal of Forest and Environmental Science, published by the Institute of Forest Science, Kangwon National University, lost my final file that was accepted for publication on March 18, 2015.
JFES URL: http://www.koreascience.or.kr/journal/AboutJournal.jsp?kojic=SRGHBV
Let me walk you through it. First, the acceptance after the files were deposited on the online submission system (text, figures and title page as 3 files; blind peer review).
“On Wednesday, March 18, 2015 1:57 PM, The Journal of Forest and Environmental Science [redacted] wrote:
Dear Dr. [redacted]
Our referees have now considered your paper and have recommended publication in Journal of Forest and Environmental Science. We are pleased to accept your paper in its current form which will now be forwarded to the publisher for copy editing and typesetting.
You will receive proofs for checking, and instructions for transfer of copyright in due course.
The publisher also requests that proofs are checked and returned within 48 hours of receipt.
Thank you for your contribution to Journal of Forest and Environmental Science and we look forward to receiving further submissions from you.
Sincerely,
• Manuscript ID : JFS-13-022
• Manuscript Title : [redacted]
• Date of submission : 2013-04-16
• Date of acceptance : 2015-03-18
Contact us Editor : Portia Lapitan
Email : [redacted]
The Editorial Office
The Journal of Forest and Environmental Science
Tel: +82-33-250-8323
Fax: +82-33-259-5615
E-mail: [email protected]
Homepage: http://www.jofs.or.kr”
I was then contacted by an agency that appears to process the proof.
“On Wednesday, April 29, 2015 1:40 PM, (주)메드랑 편집부 wrote:
Dear Sir,
We are MEDrang Inc., the publisher of JFES(Journal of Forest and Environmental Science). We’re editing your manuscript now, but the final file of online page(e-submission) is empty.
We need the text of the final file. Could you provide the file?
Thank you for your cooperation.
Warmest regards,
MEDrang Inc.
편집부
서울시 마포구 월드컵북로5가길 8-17
편집부 대표: 02-6711-4760
Fax: 0303-3139-0118
E-mail: [email protected]”
I then complained:
“From: [redacted]
Sent: Wednesday, April 29, 2015 2:08 PM
To: (주)메드랑 편집부; [redacted]
Cc: [co-authors’ e-mails redacted]
Subject: Query: Journal of Forest and Environmental Science Vol. 31, No. 2, 2015 (13-022)
Dear MEDrang Inc.
Are you somehow suggesting that the publisher has LOST our final version of the paper? In our acceptance letter in late March, the publisher already confirmed that the file was sent for production (see March 18 e-mail below).
It is most definitely not the authors’ responsibility if the publisher’s online submission system is dysfunctional.
Kindly deal with the publisher directly and confirm that they have the correct final file.
We look forward to receiving the proof soon.
Sincerely,
[redacted] and co-authors”
A response a few hours later:
“On Wednesday, April 29, 2015 3:49 PM, (주)메드랑 편집부 wrote:
Dear Sir,
We are MEDrang Inc., the publishing company of Journal of Forest and Environmental Science. First, we’re very sorry for the inconvenience.
We asked about this problem to the INFOrang, our subsidiary company which run the online submission system of Journal of Forest and Environmental Science. And they answsered that your manuscript have been failed to be uploaded on the system at all because of the new security enhancement policy for Window operating system by MicroSoft Inc. They said they are solving this problem now.
We seek your generous understanding about this point, and earnestly ask you to send your manuscript to us.
We apologize sincerily for the inconvenience again.
We will make best efforts for editing your article.
Thank you for your kind assistance.
Warmest regards,
Department of Editing, MEDrang Inc.”
Another concern: Do third parties have access to our online accounts? (without our prior consent and knowledge?)