The week at Retraction Watch featured a retraction of a state senator’s paper, and an editor busted for citation boosting. Here’s what was happening elsewhere:
- “Predatory journals are not desirable, it goes without saying, but the fact that they come about is a sign of a developing market, and a true market in scientific publishing services is a good thing, in my view.” (Jan Velterop, SciELO blog)
- Elizabeth Wager says “we should worry less about predatory publishers and more about the quality of research and training at our academic institutions.” (Journal of Epidemiology; Wager is on the board of directors of our parent non-profit organization)
- “Replication studies are considered a hallmark of good scientific practice,” write the authors of a new SSRN preprint. “Yet they are treated among researchers as an ideal to be professed but not practiced.”
- “Did the rate of autism diagnoses increase 400% between 2007 and 2011? No, they did not.” But a study said they did. (Perry Wilson, MedPage Today)
- Time to retire the p-value? In STAT, our co-founders look at what’s behind a growing chorus.
- James Hartley and Guillaume Cabanac explore the ups, the downs, and the at times absolutely infuriating world of the manuscript submission process, and how to improve it. (Learned Publishing preprint)
- “Post-marketing studies are not improving drug safety surveillance,” according to a new paper published in the BMJ.
- “Reviewers should have flagged this immediately as being ridiculous.” Richard D. Morey explains what went wrong with a retracted paper on verb usage and mood. (Medium) See our coverage here.
- “The research community should reassess whether it can have the luxury of continuing to fund so much research that is nonreproducible.” (John Ioannidis, JAMA)
- “We need to know more about it in order to better assess it,” says Rita Faria of scientific misconduct, which she has studied extensively. (CrimEUR)
- As negotiations for a nationwide license grind on, Elsevier restores journal access for researchers at roughly 60 German institutions. (Quirin Schiermeier, Nature)
- A new $100,000 grant from the Gates Foundation will allow AAAS, the publisher of Science, “to make any paper by a Gates Foundation–funded researcher published in 2017 immediately available for free online.” (Dalmeet Singh Chawla, Science)
- Researchers from English-speaking countries are three times more likely to publish in high-impact journals, a study suggests. (Eleni Courea, ResearchResearch). See the original study, published in ecancer, here.
- “A South African researcher was arrested in Washington DC last week for alleged complicity in stealing US grant money meant to improve HIV/AIDS treatment in poor countries.” (Nature)
- What’s the state of replication in research about international relations? Nils Petter Gleditsch and Nicole Janz take a look. (OUP blog)
- How to write a good review, courtesy of Erin Zimmerman.(Canadian Science Publishing)
- Amidst a labyrinth of life sciences preprint servers, heavyweight funders and scientists are throwing their weight behind the idea of a centralized server. (Ewen Callaway, Nature)
- The best way to fix the reproducibility crisis in science is to give researchers an incentive to do good research, by allowing them to sell what they’ve learned, says Bruce Knuteson. (Physics World)
- Social media referrals make up a sizable portion of the visits to articles, but only immediately after publication. (Xianwen Wang, LSE Impact Blog)
- The findings of a new preprint suggest that middle authors are contributing relatively more than they used to. (bioRxiv)
- A researcher says he’s being prevented, by a journal’s editor, from publishing a response to a paper he considers flawed. (Andrew Gelman)
- “Science is not constantly being proved right,” writes Brian Gallagher in Nautilus. Put another way: “It’s more precise to say that if science ever succeeds, it succeeds in failing to be proven wrong by another idea.”
- A paper explores how to use a “Study of Studies” to teach research students how to assess research findings. (arXiv)
- A biotech CEO’s chatter forces his company to issue a correction. (John Carroll, Endpoints News)
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The Gates Foundation/AAAS deal seems like poor value for money. It will probably come out to ~$10k per article. I’ve never heard of any OA journal charging nearly as much.
For that matter, I find it sad that the AAAS, dedicated to the “advancement” of science has such a proprietary and exorbitant policy regarding its journals. As a non-profit, they should pursue revenue less forcefully and try to make scientific findings more accessible.
I completely agree with your second paragraph.
I support the decision of the Gate foundation to go for full Gold OA, but I am not comfortable with this AAAS deal.
I can’t stop thinking that this surprisingly expensive deal is an attempt to influence the fate of Gate funded manuscripts.
I don’t believe this kind of agreement is fair since, indeed, both the AAAS and the Gate foundation will want to get what they paid for. Imagine an editor who has to deal with a good-but-not-good-enough manuscript from Gate funded researchers. What if only 2 Gate funded papers have been published in AAAS journals so far? What if there have already been 15? What if the manuscript is from researchers funded by another agency?
I wonder why the Gate foundation went that way and did not propose instead to cover the OA costs of all projects up to the limit of $100,000. This would also have the advantage of covering all publishers and not only AAAS. Like I already said, the only explanation I see is to favor publication in one of the 6 AAAS journals, which, by accident have high impact factors (which unfortunately are still used to measure the performance of researchers). Once again, the rich get richer and science is not exception.
Yes, the deal looks like to be another instance of the “Matthew effect”.