The big news this week at Retraction Watch was the release of more than two dozen retractions for accounting researcher James Hunton, and the sentencing of Dong-Pyou Han for scientific fraud (see more below). Here’s what was happening elsewhere:
First, the Han case:
- A judge sentenced the HIV vaccine researcher to 57 months in prison for faking his results.
- In the Des Moines Register, we argued that the punishment sent a strong message to other researchers.
- Hardly any scientific fraudsters every go to jail, note Azeen Ghorayshi and Retraction Watch alum Cat Ferguson in BuzzFeed.
Other interesting reads:
- If you don’t share your data, is that scientific misconduct? Yes, says Nicole Janz.
- “Is this the worst academic journal ever?” asks Academia Obscura. And more from Academia Obscura: Want to increase your h index (well, maybe)? Just £125!
- “What’s so fun about fake data?” ask Kaiser Fung and Andrew Gelman. Plus, a response from one of the researchers they mention.
- What’s the best way to reduce fraud in science? asks Uri Simonsohn.
- Dutch universities have begun a plan to boycott Elsevier.
- A medical journal “is in the process of evaluating” what effect, if any, issues in the U.S. National Cancer Institute’s SEER database — which are less serious than previously thought — might have on papers they’ve published.
- The cancer reproducibility effort is facing a backlash, reports Jocelyn Kaiser at Science.
- “My laboratory doctored results,” says an anonymous scientist in Die Zeit.
- There are “too many mitochondrial genome papers,” and “too few insights gleaned from them,” says David Roy Smith.
- A controversial autism researcher committed suicide following a raid by the FDA, according to authorities.
- Do journalists sensationalize findings, or do scientists exaggerate importance of their work? Both, says Samuel Mehr.
- “The Smithsonian Institution has written new rules to head off conflicts of interest, part of its long-awaited response to revelations that one of its scientists, climate contrarian Wei-Hock “Willie” Soon, failed to divulge the funding sources for research questioning man-made global warming,” Inside Climate News reports.
- Six steps to writing a literature review, courtesy Tanya Golash-Baza.
- Five more things to know about meta-analyses, from Hilda Bastian.
- Trigger warnings “are inimical to the academic setting,” says the AAUP.
- Physics should tighten the requirements for declaring a breakthrough, says Jan Conrad.
- “A misleading piece of statistical rhetoric has appeared in a paper about an experimental antidepressant treatment,” writes Neuroskeptic.
- The dramatic growth of open access, in a chart.
- “Editing a journal gives the incumbent a great deal of academic power,” writes Nick Rushby.
- Replication can form the basis of a credible pre-analysis plan, argues Raphael Calel.
- So, you’ve got your own lab, part IV.
- “I suggest that the internal process by which we separate self interest from the scientific process is a crucial and neglected part of training,” writes Martin Schwartz. “Consideration of these issues might help us train better scientists instead of just scientists who adhere to the rules.”
- “10 Reasons Why Peer Review Makes Sense:” A list from Journal of Physical Chemistry Letters editors Prashant Kamat and George Schatz.
- Diagnostic Pathology, one of the BioMed Central journals that retracted more than 40 papers in March for fake peer reviews, has updated one of the notices, saying that the authors “intended to purchase language editing services for their manuscript only and did not participate in influencing the peer review process.”
- Doing research that makes a difference is correlated with job security, write Siobhan Phillips and Rhona Heywood-Roos.
- A guide to not getting misled by data, from Jordan Ellenberg.
- The trial of student Diego Gomez, who faces eight years in prison for sharing a scientific paper, has been postponed until October.
- A new tool “provides a significant improvement over existing static visualizations for assessing plagiarism cases,” according to the authors of a study.
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Does anyone know more about the background of Diego Gomez, and the exact paper he shared (i.e., from which journal and publisher), and on what site he shared that file?
“Diego posted a thesis from the “Master’s Program at Universidad Nacional de Colombia” on Scribd, five years after the piece of work was published and set available to the users of the University Library. Now, Diego is facing a penal process for violating copyright, something which could result in 4 to 8 years of prison.”
http://www.digitalrightslac.net/en/compartir-no-es-delito/
The ScienceInsider paper released one year ago includes an interesting comments thread.
http://news.sciencemag.org/latin-america/2014/07/colombian-grad-student-faces-jail-sharing-thesis-online
For example comments done by commenter “Lizarazo” are instructive:
“The thesis is only legally available in a special room of a university library on a CD ROM & under certain restrictions, but has not been published or edited as such.”
All the case seems ludicrous, something like an instance of these ridiculous battles between lawyers whose sole purpose is to gain fifteen minutes of fame.
By the way… I coincidentally realized yesterday that someone posted on Baidu the pdf of an article I co-authored 10 years ago. This article was published in a paywalled section of Acta Crystallographica (edited by the IUCr):
http://wenku.baidu.com/view/592173ebb8f67c1cfad6b8cb.html
Should I file a complaint against Baidu?
It is not _your_ copyright that is violated.
Agreed. However, I signed the transfer of copyright. Moreover, the file posted on Baidu is NOT even the “authorised electronic reprint” made available to authors upon publication.
I suppose you should technically contact the Journal. However I think most scientists would like to see their work more circulated (if you can’t read it you can’t cite it).
Personally I stand outside the train station everyday handing out PDF’s…..
The report on doing research that makes a difference being correlated with job security is from officers at the European Science Foundation (ESF) based on a pilot survey. Some critiques:
The authors write that those on permanent contracts were:
1. “Nearly twice as likely to have undertaken public engagement activities (17% compared to 12%)”. That’s a rather unremarkable difference, esp. given the tiny numbers reported in the survey. What’s far more relevant is that most researchers report not being involved in public engagement.
2. “Twice as likely to have published a book”. In the table above one sees the numbers are 8% for those on permanent contracts vs. 5% for those that are not. Again, the numbers of respondents involved are laughably tiny (13 vs. 14).
It is easy to see that differences in “Output/Impact” between permanent vs. temporary contract researchers in the table shown on the LSE blog are generally totally unremarkable. Thus the overall conclusion should be that the differences between researchers with permanent vs. temporary contract posts are on the whole quite trivial, and that the relationship between job security and “making a difference” (i.e. “impact”) are at best weak.
You can read the full glossy report from the ESF here:
http://www.esf.org/fileadmin/Public_documents/Publications/Career_Tracking.pdf
I would like to a add a disclaimer that the ESF report linked to above is rife with the same forms of problems illustrated above.
I don’t think physics has a reproducibility problem. All cases mentioned in the article have been caught during peer review, which shows that the system is working more or less as intended. People have been circulating rumors way before the days of the arXiv, and if nobody gave press conferences before results are published, departments would be bombarded with press inquiries once these rumors reach the media. Of course, it doesn’t hurt if press releases contain a note to take findings with a grain of salt prior to peer review, but usually, press releases indeed contain such language (AFAICS only the BICEP2 release didn’t). If media organization simply skip over such warnings, is it really the physicists to be blamed?