Weekend reads: Publishing hypocrisy; false truths; scientists go rogue

This week at Retraction Watch featured a heartfelt essay by John Ioannidis on what he called the hijacking of evidence-based medicine, as well as the story of a peer reviewer who stole text for his own paper. Here’s what was happening elsewhere:

• “When it comes to publishing research, I have to come clean,” says Philip Moriarty. “I’m a hypocrite.”
• “Many scientific ‘truths’ are, in fact, false,” writes Olivia Goldhill in Quartz.
• A “handful of biologists went rogue and published directly to [the] Internet.” Amy Harmon reports on #ASAPbio and preprints in The New York Times.
• “In a bold move against publication bias,” a group of psychologists have “thrown up their own file drawer,” writes Neuroskeptic.
• How did the New England Journal of Medicine’s Lisa Rosenbaum get confidential patient information? asks The Cancer Letter. Michelle Meyer raises one possibility. Update: Meyer reports in Forbes that NEJM now says Rosenbaum “was not reporting that the cancer was stage IV before the time of the initial fibroid surgery.”
• Does scientific fraud cause harm to people? You bet it does, we argue in our newest STAT column.
• Last week, we covered a paper on “simple abstracts.” Here’s Hilda Bastian’s take on that study.
• “Why is ClinicalTrials.gov still struggling?” asks Kent Anderson at The Scholarly Kitchen.
• “Why Retractions of Medical Studies Are Good For Medicine:” Our Ivan Oransky speaks to the Berkeley Wellness Letter.
• Missteps in Nephrology: Participate in a different kind of March Madness, aka Neph Madness.
• The World Anti-Doping Agency funds academics, makes them sign non-disclosure agreements, then refuses to let them publish, says Roger Pielke, Jr.
• When it comes to data, a new set of proposed guidelines advocates “being ‘intelligently open’, rather than ‘religiously open.'”
• How have scholarly journals converted to open access? A new report takes a look.
• In Part 2 of “Saving Scientists from the Scientists,” the BBC’s Alok Jha “looks at the practices and cultures undermining the integrity of scientific research.”
• This is great: Elies Bik writes captions for a series of lab stock photos.
• “Should all research papers be free?” asks Kate Murphy. (New York Times)
• “When good nonprofits collide:” Lenny Teytelman looks at the clash between PLOS and scientific societies.
• “You can’t retract a designer baby,” writes Paul Knoepfler of CRISPR.
• “The research discipline of scholarly communication is not well-recognized,” says Danny Kingsley.
• What does psychology’s reproducibility “crisis mean for the future of science?” asks Brian Resnick in Vox.
• Nature Chemistry editor Stuart Cantrill was surprised to see his own images in an email from another journal, unattributed. But they apologized and fixed the error nearly immediately.
• “Is there ‘Institutionalised Corruption’ in Science?” asks Jeremy Garwood in Lab Times.
• There is “no evidence that industry funding increases misconduct,” Bruce Gingles writes in a letter to The Chronicle of Higher Education.
• A new publisher is promising publication within 20 days, Tansu Küçüköncü reports.
• “Can we trust food surveys?” The BBC talks to FiveThirtyEight’s Christie Aschwanden.
• Educating “citizen scientists” can “improve knowledge of basic research concepts and ultimately boost the integrity of scientific research,” according to a new study.

Retractions Outside of the Scientific Literature

• Oops: “A biotech company made an unfortunate typo saying it’s under criminal investigation,” Rebecca Robbins reports at STAT.
• A retraction of a retraction, from Thony Christie.
• Canada’s Senate “hired a private law firm to seek retractions in a TV network story depicting routine budget deliberations as ‘another backroom meeting’ to divvy up public funds.” The network, Global News, rewrote the story. (sub req’d)