Weekend reads: Publisher under fire; Canadian scientists demand change; a troubled psychiatry trial

The week at Retraction Watch featured an unwitting co-author and a painful example of doing the right thing. Here’s what was happening elsewhere:

• Wiley is under fire for using “trap URLs” to foil automated downloading, Rachel Becker reports. (Nature)
• “Nearly 1000 Canadian researchers,” led by Jim Woodgett, “are demanding that the government immediately reverse ‘radical’ changes that the nation’s main biomedical research funder has made to its grantsmaking process,” Wayne Kondro of Science reports.
• A troubled psychiatry trial led to the dismissal of a top researcher from New York University. (Benedict Carey, New York Times) Neuroskeptic digs into what happened. (Discover)
• If you’re going to attack a scientific paper, first make sure you’re attacking the right one, writes Larry Husten. (CardioBrief)
• Are research papers too complex? In STAT, our co-founders consider the question.
• U.S. Vice President Joe Biden says that if researchers don’t report all of their results, their universities will lose their funding. (The Verge)
• “What do we know about journal citation cartels?” ask Philippe Mongeon, Ludo Waltman, and Sarah de Rijcke.
• The Relative Citation Ratio “won’t do your laundry,” says Ulrich Dirnagl, but it might “exorcise the journal impact factor.”
• Andrew Gelman asks if a paper in Psychological Science should be retracted, and wonders when people are “gonna realize their studies are dead on arrival.”
• Family-friendly tenure policies aren’t so friendly to female professors. (Justin Wolfers, New York Times)
• “[P]eople think that the more feminine a woman is, the less likely she is to be a scientist,” Matt Shipman reports. (SciLogs)
• “Women make up the minority of cardiologists,” notes Megha Prasad. (Journal of the American College of Cardiology) And they make up just nine percent of math editorial boards, according to a new analysis by Chad Topaz and Shilad Sen. (arXiv)
• There are even deeper flaws in a much-discussed 2011 study of transgender criminality than we realize, argues Benjamin Brage. (Misfitreindeer)
• “Hence, being a ‘slow professor’ would ensure a healthier and scientifically sustainable academia,” argues Song Bk. (The Star Online, Malaysia)
• A researcher at the University of Tokyo has been sentenced to five years in prison for embezzlement­. (Mainichi Shimbun, in Japanese)
• Perhaps molecular biology “should develop a more public culture of calling people out like in physics, but I’m not sure that would necessarily work very well, and I think the hostile nature of discourse in that field contributes to a lack of diversity,” writes Arjun Raj.
• “Scientific misconduct is jeopardizing the quality and integrity of journals,” reports Kimberly Hatfield in Genetic Engineering & Biotechnology News.
• “Calls for retraction have become yet another avenue of redress for an affluent society, which has exhausted the legal system, and which increasingly yearns for perfection, is intolerant of uncertainty and can’t handle variation,” says Saurabh Jha, writing of calls to retract a recent study in The BMJ.
• According to a new study in PLOS ONE, “federal funding plays a fundamental role in inducing complementary investments from other funding sources.” (Lauren Lanahan, Alexandra Graddy-Reed, Maryann P. Feldman)
• “Contrary to common perceptions that Economics researchers used a predominantly alphabetical order of authorship, our study found that a considerable percentage of respondents (34.5%) had practiced an order of authorship based on the significance of the authors’ contribution to the work.” (PLOS ONE)
• How is Twitter used at physics conferences? asks Stephen Webb. (Scientometrics)
• “[T]he subject matter of many important fields of science is very different from that of physics – several of the physical sciences and much of biology, as well as the social sciences, are good examples – and…trying to ape the descriptive and analytic characteristics of physics in these fields hinders the development of understanding,” says Richard Nelson. (Research Policy, sub req’d)
• “That Trump Institute, what criminals they are.” The crime? Plagiarism. (Jonathan Martin, New York Times)
• arXiv is planning a multimillion dollar overhaul, reports Richard van Noorden in Nature, although it seems some users are worried about changing the preprint server.
• Is it time to eliminate tenure for professors? ask Samantha Bernstein and Adrianna Kezar. (The Conversation)
• Should scientists work at night? (Neuroskeptic, Discover)
• Plagiarist and fabulist Jonah Lehrer is back with a new book. Here’s how he tried to assure readers they could trust what’s in his new work. (Dennis Berman, Twitter)
• Proposed reforms to the U.S. Freedom of Information Act “should be a net benefit to public understanding of the scientific process and knowledge,” write Alexander Howard and Patrice McDermott, “by increasing the access of scientists to archival materials and reducing the likelihood of science and scientists being suppressed by official secrecy or bureaucracy.”
• “Interdisciplinary research has consistently lower funding success,” according to a new paper in Nature.
• “[A]rticles with positively-framed titles, interesting phrasing, and no wordplay get more attention online,” says Gwilym Lockwood. (The Winnower)
• “What factors influence views on last authorship in ecology?” asks Meghan Duffy.
• “Stop teaching Indians to copy and paste,” urges Anurag Chaurasia. (Nature)
• “The US government’s proposed overhaul of regulations that govern research with human subjects is flawed and should be withdrawn,” an independent advisory panel said this week. (Sara Reardon, Nature)
• “Is the hyper-competitive world of grant-funded research now characterized by ‘impact factor mania’ driving investigators to commit misconduct and feeding the escalating number of retractions?” Theresa Defino reports from a recent meeting convened by the Friends of the National Library of Medicine. (Our Ivan Oransky spoke, and was on the planning committee.)
• Would requiring co-authorship increase the comfort level with open data? asks Bob Reed.
• “He thinks he’s untouchable:” An infectious disease researcher leaves a trail of sexual harassment and misuse of public resources. (Azeen Ghorayshi, BuzzFeed)
• “Time-poor scientists inadvertently made it seem like the world was overrun with jellyfish,” authors of a new paper say. (The Conversation)

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