Weekend reads: Sabotage in the lab; a lab animal database disappears; PACE authors push back

The week at Retraction Watch featured the launch of the greatest journal ever, and a story about the backlash against widely covered research on why men eat more. Here’s what was happening elsewhere:

• “Falsified data is a crime against scientific truth. This was personal.” Theodora Ross writes about sabotage in her own lab. (New York Times)
• “It Just Got Much Harder To Know What’s Going On In US Animal Research Labs,” reports Peter Aldhous, as a government database disappears. (BuzzFeed)
• The research team behind the controversial PACE trial of treatments for chronic fatigue syndrome are still pushing back: “In this article, we suggest that Dr Geraghty’s views are based on misunderstandings and misrepresentations of the PACE trial; these are corrected.” (Journal of Health Psychology)
• Scientists are committing acts of academic “civil disobedience” in response to the Trump administration’s immigration ban. Our co-founders write in STAT about the likely effects.
• “Nothing like this had ever been seen before: a massive, open, retroactive evaluation of scientific literature, conducted entirely by computer.” Statcheck, designed to root out errors, has earned its share of detractors. (Stephen Buranyi, The Guardian)
• A company said it was working with Jeffrey Beall – whose site about predatory journals recently went dark – to put a journal blacklist together. He says they’re not. (Prasad Ravindranath, Science Chronicle)
• According to a new paper, “the threat of predatory publishing in rehabilitation is real.” (Archives of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation, sub req’d)
• “’Poor supervision’ simply is not available as the basis for a research misconduct finding,” write Karen Karas and Paul Thaler, who frequently represent scientists accused of misconduct.
• “Psychology is not in crisis, contrary to popular rumor,” write Susan Fiske, Daniel Schacter, and Shelley Taylor. (Annual Review of Psychology)
• Scholars should delete their Academia.edu accounts, says Sarah Bond. (Forbes) A take from Jon Tennant. (Discover)
• “[I]n order to increase the number of replication studies, it seems useful to make replications a mandatory part of curricula and an optional chapter of (cumulative) doctoral theses,” researchers conclude based on the results of a survey of 300 social and behavioral scientists. (The Replication Network)
• “In some cases, the direct replication of ecological research is difficult because of strong temporal and spatial dependencies, so here, we propose metaresearch projects that will provide proxy measures of reproducibility.” (BioScience)
• “Today, some scientists are seeing faces on Mars in their own data. With tight budgets and a competitive job market, they produce low-resolution evidence that builds their resume, but little else.” Dakin Henderson on why scientific results should be reproducible. (NOVA Next)
• What’s the best way to cut down on scientific plagiarism? A recent conference in Iran gathered experts to discuss. (Financial Tribune)
• Does criticism of bad research do more harm than good? asks Andrew Gelman.
• There is speculation that “authors may soon be requesting to publish anonymously to avoid political retribution from anti-science politicians,” says Kent Anderson in The Scholarly Kitchen. This, of course, has already happened in different circumstances.
• “Ethical review boards must focus on clinical promise as well as safety to hold the first tests of drugs in humans to a higher standard,” say Jonathan Kimmelman and Carole Federico. (Nature)
• Elsevier commits to breaking down reproducibility barriers, including developing a new article type specifically for replication studies. (Donna de Weerd-Wilson and William Gunn, Elsevier)
• Should research be reproducible in perpetuity? Roger Peng argues that we need limiting principles for what we can expect from reproducible science. (Simply Statistics blog)
• “We should think twice before allowing autonomous AI systems to decide what research warrants publication.” Janne I. Hukkinen explains why artificial intelligence is a risky fix for peer review. (WIRED)
• From “points” scientists can earn toward career progression, to rewards of hard cash, the incentives to publish in developing countries need more behind them than article metrics, says Dyna Rochmyaningsih. (Nature)
• The case of Czech researcher Wadim Strielkowski, who moonlighted as publishing consultant and predatory publisher,highlights the need for work like that done by Jeffrey Beall through his predatory publisher list, say Ludek Broz, Tereza Stockelova, and Filip Vostal. (Derivace blog)
• As the number of researchers with multiple affiliations rises, a new paper looks at how the phenomenon might affect institutional assessment. (Scientometrics)
• Elsevier has acquired Plum Analytics, a source of alt-metrics. (Andrea Michalek, Elsevier Connect)
• An author and one of her reviewers trade notes. (Philippa Matthews and Gustav Nilsonne, F1000 Research blog)
• Researchers should be allowed to submit manuscripts to journals in any format, and comply with a journal’s style only after the paper is accepted, argues Khaled Moustafa. (Science and Engineering Ethics, sub req’d)
• “Studies with low statistical power appear to be common in the biomedical sciences, at least in the specific subject areas captured by our search strategy.” (Royal Society Open Science)

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