This week at Retraction Watch featured seven retractions in a long-running case involving cancer research, as well as the retraction of a paper claiming a link between a vaccine and behavioral issues. Here’s what was happening elsewhere:
- A professor at Washington State University has been charged with $8 million in Federal research fraud, Katherine Long of The Seattle Times reports.
- “The Unbearable Asymmetry of Bullshit.” Bryan Earp writes: “While it is true that most scientists — at least the ones I know and work with — are hell-bent on getting things right, they are not therefore immune from human foibles.”
- Our Ivan Oransky is “waging war on bullshit science,” says David Freeman at Huffington Post.
- Henry Miller and Robert Wager are worried about “the increasing frequency of publication of the results of flawed ‘advocacy research’ that is designed to give a false result that supports a certain cause or position and can be cited by activists long after the findings have been discredited.”
- More fallout from the Macchiarini affair: Another senior official at the Karolinska Institutet has resigned, according to SVT Nyheter. (in Swedish)
- “The Stress Test:” The STAP stem cell scandal, told by Dana Goodyear of The New Yorker..
- Please cite women academics, says Meryl Alper.
- “What does a journal do?” asks Lenny Teytelman.
- How many replication studies are enough? asks Dalmeet Singh Chawla at Nature.
- Scientists are cynical, says a new survey. Can you blame them? Our new column for STAT.
- The debate over Sci-Hub, which provides access to millions of journal articles, has moved to the Scholarly Kitchen, as Angela Cochran explores it. Don’t miss the comments, where Sci-Hub founder Alexandra Elbakyan weighs in. And Kent Anderson says that the site is likely to help big publishers, not hurt them.
- “We conclude that it is not feasible to use the p-curve to estimate the extent of p-hacking…” A new study from Dorothy Bishop and Paul Thompson in PeerJ.
- Michael Eisen is excited about what happened at #ASAPbio, a meeting on preprints.
- A department head has been arrested for taking a bribe from a PhD scholar, The Times of India reports.
- A Finnish man is using predatory journals to publish “junk climate science,” says Jeffrey Beall.
- The Impact Factor denominator needs better definition, says Phil Davis. And a somewhat less serious take on IF measurements by C&EN Onion. Meanwhile, Lior Pachter is doing something interesting to compare various “glamour journals,” but you’ll have to read his post to find out what.
- Richard Poynder doesn’t want to be associated with Dove Press. Here’s why.
- Andrew Gelman weighs in on why it’s “unrealistic to expect scientific journals to retract their huge backlog of erroneous papers.”
- Stephen Davey is leaving Nature Chemistry for a new Nature Publishing Group project.
- The lead authors of a new paper used pseudonyms, and that created a headache, says John Bohannon at Science.
- “The young author realizes in shock that even the supposedly safe arena of academia is not exempt from fraud and is ashamed of being taken for a fool.” A look at predatory publishing from the European Journal of General Practice.
Retractions Outside of the Scientific Literature
- The Daily Pennsylvanian has retracted a post about a video of U.S. presidential candidate Marco Rubio that was cited by the communications director of another candidate’s campaign – who was asked to resign.
- The governor of Oregon asked a newspaper to retract an editorial. Have you heard of the First Amendment, Governor?
- A medical news website has rewritten a highly criticized story about stem cells, but maybe not enough, says Paul Knoepfler.
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“The debate over Sci-Hub…”
got a bit off topic at Scholarly Kitchen.
More here (both pro and con) at
“What should we think about Sci-Hub?”
http://svpow.com/2016/02/22/what-should-we-think-about-sci-hub/
at “Does Sci-Hub phish for credentials?”
http://svpow.com/2016/02/25/does-sci-hub-phish-for-credentials/
and at “Sci-Hub as necessary, effective civil disobedience”
http://bjoern.brembs.net/2016/02/sci-hub-as-necessary-effective-civil-disobedience/
I liked the Scholarly Kitchen piece. It did go off topic, especially when Elbakyan jumped into the discussion. Once again, Elbakyan shows off her ignorance but her comments demonstrate that she excels at diverting criticism. She played with her critics.
What is rarely mentioned is that she takes donations – she mentioned this in her letter to Elsevier. Taking donations for stolen journal articles is acceptable in her mind.
Did she ever pursue graduate work and, if so, did she complete it?
The real victims in all of this is the research community with very limited access. Pirated sites are not sustainable.
One benefit of Sci-Hub is that it highlights the people and organizations who have been working for years to reduce the access gap.