Weekend reads: Fraudster rises again as filmmaker; Elsevier, open access publisher?; unethical ethics research

The week at Retraction Watch featured the retraction of a paper on the potential dangers of Wi-Fi, and our 3,000th post. Also, have you taken our survey? Here’s what was happening elsewhere:

• Commit fraud, have a paper about vaccines and autism retracted, screen a film at the Tribeca Film Festival: Andrew Wakefield rises again. Robert De Niro has defended the selection. Please see this update.
• Elsevier was the 4^th-largest open-access publisher in 2015, says the company’s Tom Reller. The 20,000 open-access articles were about 5% of the publisher’s total.
• Some retractions show that “research in ethics is not always conducted ethically,” writes Sven Ove Hansson in Science and Engineering Ethics.
• “Academic publishing is a goddamned exploitative farce,” says Erika Price. (Medium).
• “Is most science news bullshit?” asks Simon Oxenham in Prime Mind.
• In Pacific Standard, Michael Schulson writes that journalists should be keeping scientists accountable. The piece has generated a lot of pushback from science journalists, which Schulson responds to at Undark.
• The Union of Concerned Scientists “seeks to shield scientists from public scrutiny,” reports David Abel of The Boston Globe.
• Failure is helping science move forward, says Christie Aschwanden at FiveThirtyEight. Also: “Science needs to learn to fail so it can succeed,” writes Andrew Gelman in WIRED.
• We should reward scientists who come forward about their errors. Our latest in STAT.
• Two toxicology journals are being accused of publishing junk science. (Jie Jenny Zou, Center For Public Integrity/Business Insider)
• A “placenta test” for autism is drawing concerns. (Ann Griswold, Spectrum)
• “The medical literature is prone to overstating results, a condition not thoroughly recognized among policymakers.” So begins a review in the Journal of Patient Safety.
• “You, sir, have good reason to be ashamed of yourself.” Alice Dreger responds to the Lambda Literary Foundation after it rescinded the finalist status of her book.
• “Too many medical trials move their goalposts halfway through. A new initiative aims to change that,” says the Economist in a story about Ben Goldacre’s newest project.
• “Diet books are full of lies,” says Julia Belluz at Vox. “But they’re even worse when doctors write them.”
• “Data Sharing Should Be In Everyone’s Interest,” says Stuart Buck in Health Affairs, suggesting a way to incentivize it.
• “At the end of a recent seminar I presented on scientific misconduct, I asked the audience whether they knew anyone who had fabricated data for their final-year undergraduate project,” writes Tim Birkhead in The Chronicle of Higher Education. “Eighty per cent said yes.”
• “Old-fashioned ways of reporting new discoveries are holding back medical research,” writes The Economist. “Some scientists are pushing for change.”
• A pollution researcher who claimed he had no financial ties to industry turns out to have received tens of thousands of euros from companies, Martine Velo and Stephane Foucart of Le Monde report. (in French)
• A doctor enrolled a pregnant woman in a clinical trial despite pregnancy being an exclusion criterion, the FDA reports. She later miscarried.
• Pierre Delaere, a longtime critic of Paolo Macchiarini, reviews the state of trachea transplantation, along with a colleague, in the Journal of Thoracic Disease.
• Shocking: No “evidence supports this pseudoscientific theory” that there was “invisible mending” on the Shroud of Turin. (Thermochimica Acta, sub req’d)
•  “It’s time for positive action on negative results,” says Stephen Curry in Chemical & Engineering News.
• David Allison and colleagues try to get another nutrition paper corrected. (World Journal of Gastroenterology) Background here.
• One of the authors of a PLOS Biology paper being sued by his former postdoc, who wasn’t included as a co-author, says he has “been made aware of concerns regarding some of the figures presented in this study. Together with my institution and PLOS Biology, we are working to resolve the situation.”
• Academics, says Tim Gowers, “can publish journals of the highest quality without a commercial entity.” (Scholastica Blog)
• How useful are altmetrics?  Stacy Konkiel, Cassidy R. Sugimoto, and Sierra Williams take a look in EDUCAUSE Review.
• A group of U.S. business deans has come out against predatory publishing, Jeffrey Beall reports.
• “Editors have a solemn responsibility to strive for quality in all efforts, and a journal’s reputation is based on someone setting standards and consistently enforcing them,” writes The Scholarly Kitchen’s David Crotty of PLOS ONE. “Turn that over to a crowd of editors and the resulting articles are likely going to be all over the place.”
• “More than one in five physicists from sexual and gender minorities in the United States report having been excluded, intimidated or harassed at work in the past year because of their gender or sexual identity or expression,” Elizabeth Gibney of Nature reports based on a recent survey.
• “At first blush, do-it-yourself clinical trials seem pointless and reckless,” writes Arthur Caplan of a new Kindle Single by Jef Akst. “But a deeper truth pervades the research and the patients who drive it forward.”
• “Scientific misconduct: How organizational culture plays a part.” (Rita Faria, Tijdschrift over Cultuur & Criminaliteit, sub req’d)
• Want to find funding for a rejected grant proposal? The U.S. NIH has partnered with a company that wants to help you do that. (Catherine Offord, The Scientist)
• “Biosocial research should deemphasize evolutionary speculations and focus on testable hypotheses,” writes Allan Mazur in Hormones and Behavior. (sub req’d)
• “So, is there a crisis? Or is there a crisis of the crisis, or what?” Andreas Ortmann “On replicability, reproducibility, and other current challenges in the social sciences.”
• Want to extract numbers from figures in papers? Here’s some new free software.

Retractions And Related Issues Outside of the Scientific Literature

• Reddit: “to further reduce the misleading nature of headlines, we will now require headlines to identify the population or model that the study was conducted in.”
• Should The New York Times have noted changes to a recent story on presidential candidate Bernie Sanders? Public Editor Margaret Sullivan weighs in.
• Rich people in the UK are successfully suing to have truthful stories deleted from the Internet, says Jim Edwards of Business Insider.

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