The week at Retraction Watch featured a new member of our leaderboard and a discussion of what would happen if peer reviewers didn’t look at results. Here’s what was happening elsewhere:
- A chemistry society fears vote rigging in its leadership election after candidates receive more votes than there were members. (This is the first piece for our new collaboration with Science.)
- Five (bad) reasons to publish in predatory journals, from Alexander Clark and David Thompson. (Journal of Advanced Nursing)
- Is Italy living with “academic apartheid?” (Donato Rigante, The Lancet)
- “Why bother diagnosing Alzheimer’s disease early, while people are still healthy?” The “surreal” questions one researcher faced that revealed grant application reviewers really didn’t understand her research. (Elizabeth Payne, Ottawa Citizen)
- Why talking about scientific fraud is good for science: It rebuilds confidence and deepens understanding of how science works. (Darren Curnoe, The Conversation)
- Atmospheric scientists are so fed up with chemtrail conspiracists that they’ve published a study rejecting the conspiracies. (Sarah Emerson, Motherboard)
- Good news from our sister publication, Embargo Watch: PNAS won’t embargo papers that have already appeared as preprints.
- “Workers are genuinely afraid for their jobs and scientific careers.” A report details the “environment of fear” at the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases. (Sylvia Carignan, The Frederick News-Post)
- “Would any of our current systems have funded a young Einstein or a Marie Skłodowska-Curie?” A new proposal for EU research funding to empower younger researchers. (Jack Grove, Times Higher Education)
- Scientific facts cannot be copyrighted. And yet there are legal hurdles slowing down the progress of data science. (Simon Oxenham, Nature)
- “Without open data, a scientific paper is little more than a statement that, in the author’s opinion, some evidence supports a certain set of claims.” Neuroskeptic weighs in on the data-sharing debate. (Discover)
- “The reality is that studies can be notoriously difficult to decode in isolation.” But a new tool promises to put those studies in context to help the public understand. (David Robert Grimes, The Guardian)
- Political science and the reproducibility crisis: How can researchers create reliable and replicable political science data? (Political Science Replication Blog)
- The number of retractions each year is skyrocketing — but that’s a cause for celebration, say our co-founders in The New Atlantis. Elsewhere in the issue, Barbara Spellman writes that modern science is becoming more complicated — and that’s a problem. And Daniel Sarewitz has a new way to save science.
- The collaborative spirit of research is being replaced by a desire to give precise credit for who did what, says Leonard Cassuto in The Chronicle of Higher Education.
- A bright side to Melania Trump’s convention speech: It’s a handy way to help students understand plagiarism. (Gefen Bar-On Santor, Academe Blog)
- Don’t be hasty and don’t say you’ve done something if you haven’t. Here are eight tips on how not to respond to reviewers. (Jack Leeming, Nature)
- What lurks in aging academics’ archives? wonders Ron Iphofen. (Times Higher Education)
- A rapid-fire tour of scientific publishing, from David Crotty. (The Scholarly Kitchen)
- A large chunk of clinical trial results go unpublished. Here’s why that’s bad news, according to our co-founders in STAT.
- “Bad science” could be costing Australia billions of dollars, Simon Gandevia tells ABC.
- “[B]ias can be introduced in major scientific journals by the editors’ choices and policies,” argues Ruth Macklin. (Indian Journal of Medical Ethics)
- There are four categories of cheating, and how students feel about them is related to how often they cheat. (Brian Winrow, Journal of Accounting Ethics; sub req’d)
- “I wake up early, make an espresso, and write until I’m spent” – how Jeffrey McDonnell found time to write papers. (Science)
- “Research conduct has increasingly become the focus of European and international organisations, with a flurry in the production of codes, reports and positions.” (Caroline Dynes, In Verba, The Royal Society)
- “Fees paid for hybrid journals were on average more expensive than those paid for fully open access journals.” (Najko Jahn, Marco Tulley, PeerJ)
- “[I]ncreased representation of women in the academic workforce will lead to economic gains, increased scientific discovery, and improvements to women’s health,” argue the authors of a piece in the Journal of Women’s Health.
- “19 Things You’ll Get If You’ve Been Through Peer Review.” (Kelly Oakes, BuzzFeed)
- Dodgy academic journals are “publishing anti-vaxxers and other ‘crappy science,’” reports Timna Jacks. (The Age)
- A review of ethical issues in radiology and its journals, in the American Journal of Roentgenology.
- Data sharing should be routine, not just reserved for public health emergencies, argue the authors of a new essay in PLOS Medicine.
- Plagiarism in theses is a big problem for libraries, reports Hermann Horstkotte in Der Tagesspiegel. (in German)
- Publisher Karger is partnering with Kudos and Figshare. (Research Information)
- The Association of American Publishers wrote a stern letter complaining about a librarian who talked about Sci-Hub. (Scott Jaschik, Insider Higher Ed)
- A new report from UNESCO and others sounds an alarm about corruption in higher education.
- Why do so many innovative ideas in scientific publishing fail? asks Lenny Teytelman. (Science Editor)
- There is “a crisis in public trust in science,” says recently appointed Science editor in chief Jeremy Berg. (David Matthews, Times Higher Education)
- Even more preprint servers: PsyArXiv launches. (Bob Grant, The Scientist)
- The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency won’t investigate a scientist accused of underestimating methane leaks, Phil McKenna of Inside Climate News reports.
- “We observe that French academics are considerably more left-wing, more hostile to free-market economy and more atheist than French citizens.” (French Politics, sub req’d)
- “Spiking genomic databases with misinformation could protect patient privacy,” reports Anna Nowogrodzki. (Nature)
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For more on plagiarism, see Naive Melania Plagiarism, Not McIver Error And Excuse.
In context, the evidence says that McIver story made little sense.
On “Five (bad) reasons to publish in a predatory journal”, I think the author forgot to include legitimising dodgy research. I increasingly see anti-vaxxers, climate-change skeptics and even pro-lifers, quoting “research” from these journals, as they respond to the demand for “show me the evidence”. The utter hokum found in some of these journal is staggering.
We have prospective postgraduates who include their own as examples of research potential. I don’t think they realise that they would be better off without, both theirs and the other papers. Obviously no peer review.
Yes, although they are climate pseudoskeptics, i’ve read quite a few such papers.
the daniel sarewitz’ article “saving science” in the new atlantis seems to make one fundamental mistake – confusing science with engineering. they are closely interconnected, but definitely not the same. more, if some one wants to develop some new technology or approach (e.g. as for the treatment for the patients with brain deceases), it is needless to accuse science of “reductionism” (i am afraid, this is one the most misinterpreted words when talking about science), it is rather a better solution to give grant money directly to such research&development. and repeating the whitesides’ poorly evidenced slogan “purely curiosity-driven science has delivered only one or two fundamentally transformational breakthroughs” really points on gaps in history of science knowledge – i hardly believe that albert einstein developed his relativity theory not by pure curiosity; not mentioning many more discoveries. even the transistor effect did not appear out of clear air, there was a work of liliefeld, whose patents were used to construct it in bell labs. also it was not built because they already knew what it would be good for, but just out of curiosity, what and why it may preform.
science is a process fuelled not by visions of some particular application (this is often a road to hell, because people tend not to see what there is, but rather what they want to see), but by curiosity, by ability to methodically recognise and determine “rules” in the noise of the world around. the polish logician and philosopher jan lukasiewicz said in 1912 (liberal translation from “o tworczosci w nauce / on creativity in science”) that “all what we thing is the purpose of science (search for truth, practicalness), it rather is not, except for curiosity, which leads through enthusiasm to attempts to understand”. science survives because it is beneficial, but not directly, more likely as a source of solutions for engineering (that is also the reason why science is much much younger that engineering).