Weekend reads: Publish and perish in Texas; clinical trial reporting poor but improving; forget peer review

The week at Retraction Watch featured a peer review nightmare come true, and a look at why publishing negative findings is hard. Here’s what was happening elsewhere:

• In Texas, publishing in the New England Journal of Medicine could lose you a state job. (AP, via The Austin Statesman) And In Toronto, a show trial can, if you study transgender children, Jesse Singal reports in New York.
• An investigation by STAT led to improved reporting of clinical trial results, according to ClinicalTrials.gov director Deborah Zarin. And a BMJ study out this week reports that “there is poor performance and noticeable variation in the dissemination of clinical trial results across leading academic medical centers.”
• “In sum, we should stop worrying about peer review,” says David Stern. His post was part of the commentary at ASAPbio, which met this week outside of Washington, DC, to talk about preprints and related issues.
• “Science, get over yourself: Zika data-sharing should be the norm, not the exception.” Our new column for STAT.
• As if the Paolo Macchiarini story couldn’t get any more strange, Neuroskeptic brings us the tale of the “star surgeon” and the gangsta rapper. And the BBC covers the case. Finally, Lancet editor Richard Horton says the journal will not be retracting a 2011 Macchiarini paper at this time. “Pre-emptive judgments about Macchiarini’s work would only worsen the reputation of science in the public sphere.”
• “Meet The Cops of The Scientific Method:” CBC’s The Sunday Edition talks to our Alison McCook.
• “CRISPR, Priority, and Credit: Do We Need to Edit Science’s DNA?” asks Hilda Bastian.
• “Environmental factors lie behind many irreproducible rodent experiments,” reports Sara Reardon at Nature.
• “Should we believe in science?” asks Michel Accad, examining recent controversies over data sharing.
• “Research integrity campaigner David Vaux” – a member of the board of directors of our parent organization – “has been accused of fudging his own studies in what he says is retribution for his efforts to expose research fraud,” The Australian reports of comments on PubPeer. (sub req’d)
• “New Approaches to Dealing With Survey Data Fabrication:” A conference in Bethesda, Maryland, this Wednesday, Feb. 23.
• “Peer reviewers’ assessments of funding proposals to the National Institutes of Health don’t correlate well with later publication citations,” writes The Scientist’s Kerry Grens of a new study by Ferric Fang, a member of our parent organization’s board of directors, and others.
• Among Nature readers, “some 10% have waited at least 3 years for one or more of their papers to be published in a journal. But more than one-third have never waited longer than a year.”
• Jeffrey Beall offers “best practices for scholarly authors in the age of predatory journals.” (sub req’d)
• FASEB offers recommendations for enhancing research reproducibility.
• We’ve written our last regular column for Lab Times. Here’s what we’ve learned in the past five years.
• “Editors on leading medical journals have co-produced research claiming that rivals have been publishing drug trials that may be little more than marketing by pharmaceutical firms,” David Matthews of Times Higher Education reports on a BMC Trials study.
• “Peer reviewers’ assessments of funding proposals to the National Institutes of Health don’t correlate well with later publication citations, a study shows.” (The Scientist)
• Police have questioned Haruko Obokata, the scientist at the center of the STAP stem cell scandal, a source tells Japan Times.
• “Psychology’s replication crisis has a silver lining,” says Paul Bloom in The Atlantic.
• “Processing a paper submitted to a journal takes 45 to 50 minutes of work,” David Matthews of Times Higher Education reports based on comments from the director of company that performs the task for publishers.
• Samuel Leistedt and Paul Linkowski offer “a biopsychosocial model of scientific frauds” in Science & Justice. (sub req’d)
• “To retract or to not retract, that is the question:” Andy Field says a recent psychology retraction should have been a correction.
• How should journals use plagiarism detection software? Thoughts from Jens Lykkesfeldt in Basic & Clinical Pharmacology & Toxicology. (sub req’d)
• “A practical guide for improving transparency and reproducibility in neuroimaging research,” from Krzysztof J. Gorgolewski and Russell Poldrack in bioRxiv.
• “Fifteen years after publication of the human genome’s first draft sequence, what has become of the hundreds of researchers who worked on the project?” asks Eva Amsen in The Scientist.

Retractions Outside of the Scientific Literature

• “This week, we fix an embarrassing oversight.” A classy acknowledgement from podcast Reply All that they should have mentioned Rosalind Franklin.
• The SB Nation sports website removed an article “criticized as sympathetic to convicted rapist” Daniel Holtzclaw, The New York Times reports.
• “In the Brunswickan Feb. 10 issue, a story that we ran was factually inaccurate.” A retraction from Canada’s oldest student newspaper.

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