Weekend reads: Open data’s downsides; do journals serve a purpose?; fraud allegations down in China

The week at Retraction Watch featured news that a religion journal wouldn’t be retracting a paper despite evidence of forgery in the evidence it relied on, and also news that we’re hiring. Here’s what was happening elsewhere:

• “Open Data may be good for science, but it may be bad for scientists — especially early career ones,” writes Margaret Kosmala. (Ecology Bits)
• Former BMJ editor Richard Smith considers whether academic journals still serve a purpose. (The BMJ; Smith is a member of the board of directors of our parent non-profit organization)
• In China, “The proportion of allegations of misconduct is declining even though more attention is being given to actively detecting cases,” writes Wei Yang in Nature.
• Do science fraudsters deserve a second chance? In STAT, our co-founders take a look at a recent grant award to a researcher with 13 retractions.
• The journal Science rethinks a prize after a connection with disgraced researcher Hwang Woo-Suk emerges. (Antonio Regalado, Technology Review)
• The Ethics Committee of the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS) weighs in on the Voinnet case, with a response from the CNRS president. (in French) Here’s our coverage of the story and all of its retractions and corrections.
• Is publishing climate research before peer review an acceptable form of activism? (Aleszu Bajak, Undark)
• How can you confront scientific misconduct? (Enago Academy)
• Following a number of recent cases, the Netherlands plans to survey every researcher there about misconduct. (David J. Matthews, Times Higher Education)
• Think papers are getting longer and more complicated? It’s not just your imagination, says a new paper about the “average publishing unit.” (PLOS ONE)
• Let’s separate disclosure of a new finding from its validation, say Ronald Vale and Anthony Hyman. (eLife)
• Trachea surgeon Paolo Macchiarini, whose research has been dogged by questions, is facing preliminary charges of manslaughter, the AP reports (via STAT). The case may or may not lead to formal charges.
• Most clinical research is not useful, says John Ioannidis. Here’s why. (PLOS Medicine)
• What do mathematicians think of their journals? ask Cameron Neylon and colleagues. A hint: Peer review is first on the list of issues. (LSE Impact Blog)
• A scholarly black market “negatively affects the validity and reliability of research in higher education, as well as science and engineering,” argues Shahryar Sorooshian. (Science and Engineering Ethics, sub req’d)
• Bernard Carroll has a proposal for new oversight of clinical trial reports. (Health Care Renewal)
• “Are research ethics obsolete in the era of big data?” asks Kalev Leetaru. (Forbes)
• “He helped establish a mechanism to determine whether there are issues of integrity.” How Mortimer Litt made his mark as a research fraud investigator. (Ellen Ishkanian, Harvard Medicine)
• “Scientific publishers are killing research papers” by neglecting materials and methods sections, says Chris Lee at Ars Technica. Thoughts from Lenny Teytelman.
• Lee Nadler’s journey from ‘street kid’ to champion of medical research reform. (Melissa Bailey, STAT)
• British scientists are reeling from their country’s vote to leave the EU. (Daniel Cressey & Alison Abbott, Nature)
• Drug approval needs better evidence, says the editor of The BMJ, Fiona Godlee.
• “Bias is creeping into the science behind risk assessments and undermining its use and credibility,” say three environmental toxicologists. (Environmental Toxicology and Chemistry)
• Andrew Gelman looks at how sloppy citations can create scientific urban legends.
• What role does geographical mobility play in co-authorship? Bastien Bernela explores in the Bulletin of Sociological Methodology. (sub req’d)
• “Digging for glory:” Paige Williams takes a look at how the fierce competition in paleoanthropology. (New Yorker)
• Two doctors want The BMJ to retract the paper “Medical Error: the third leading cause of death in the US.” (Change.org)
• “Why is biomedical research so conservative?” asks Peter Rodgers. (Nautilus)
• “Pooling clinical details helps doctors to diagnose rare diseases,” says Nature, “but more sharing is needed.”
• The “Scholix initiative is building an interoperability framework that will make it easier to share, exchange and aggregate data,” say Helena Cousijn, Wouter Haak, and Hylke Koers. (Elsevier Connect)
• How would you like to learn that a stranger had bequeathed you $1.7 million for your research? That happened to Elena Cattaneo. (Allison Abbott, Nature)
• Why scientific diagrams are so important: The Economist looks at a preprint on “viziometrics.”
• How can authors identify journals that follow best practices? Here’s Andy Pleffer’s advice. (Australasian Open Access Strategy Group)
• How can researchers identify predatory conferences? Draft criteria from James McCrostie, via Jeffrey Beall.
• “A former University of Arizona professor plans to file a $3.6 million lawsuit against the school for releasing a confidential report that alleged he violated the school’s sexual harassment policy.” (Curt Prendergrast, Arizona Daily Star)
• Health journalism has a lot of problems, says Julia Belluz of Vox. Here’s how to solve them.
• “Journals will link published reports of clinical trials to the registered studies as part of [a] Crossref initiative,” write Rolf Kwakkelar and Ash Allan. (Elsevier Connect)

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