Weekend reads: What’s the real rate of misconduct?; research parasites win awards; preprints’ watershed moment

The week at Retraction Watch featured the strange story of a reappearing retracted study, and the retraction of a study showing a link between watching violent cartoons and verbal skills. Here’s what was happening elsewhere:

• So how much misconduct is there, anyway? The muddled testimony of a senior National Science Foundation official to the US House of Representatives could rekindle debate over how the agency is handled. (Jeffrey Mervis, Science)
• And as it becomes clear that research misconduct is widely under-reported in the UK, calls for an oversight body grow. (Helen Briggs, BBC News) Universities UK responds.
• “Science needs incentives that don’t reward misconduct.” As the UK Parliament conducts an inquiry into research integrity, see the evidence we’ve submitted on the issue.
• Remember the Research Parasite Awards? Well, the first winners have been named, by Casey Greene and colleagues. (Nature Genetics) More from Penn Medicine News.
• An engineering professor has been reprimanded for plagiarizing the work of one of his master’s students. (Geoff Leo, CBC News)
• NIH’s recommendation that researchers use preprints is a “likely a watershed moment,” says Jessica Polka. (Our co-founders, STAT)
• Jeffrey Beall has a new book out. Or maybe it’s just April Fool’s Day at The Scholarly Kitchen.
• “Development of high fibre cake using gram flour.” Another predatory journal sting, this one from Norway. (Tor Monson, På Høyden)
• The Economist calls for the embrace of preprints, open peer review, and the use of altmetrics to fix scientific publishing.
• “Are psychology journals anti-replication?” Neil Martin and Richard Clarke survey more than 1,000 journals. (Frontiers in Psychology)
• Susan Fiske – who has referred to some who engage in post-publication peer review as “destructo-critics” – and Hilda Bastian, whose blog was one of those Fiske is analyzing in a study, spoke, in that order, at the National Academy of Sciences last month. Watch.
• “In a move rarely seen in academia, Wayne State University is trying to fire multiple faculty members depicted as abusing their tenure by doing as little work as possible.” (Kim Kozlowski, The Detroit News)
• “I am an Arctic researcher,” writes Victoria Herrmann. “Donald Trump is deleting my citations.” (The Guardian)
• “Unless the copyright is explicitly reassigned to the journal, the reviewer owns the content of the review and, therefore, has the right to share it.” (Lenny Teytelman, Science Editor)
• “It is important to honor and reward the altruism of patients who participate in clinical trials. One way to do so is to share the data gathered in clinical trials with other researchers in a responsible and meaningful way.” And while we’re at it, why not create a category of “data author” to reward such sharing? (NEJM)
• “One of Europe’s biggest science spenders could soon branch out into publishing,” reports Martin Enserink. (Science)
• Elsevier’s SCOPUS is offering “more transparency, more clarity” about its recently introduced CiteScore metric.
• “It’s perhaps not the worst case of plagiarism I’ve seen,” says Neuroskeptic, “but it’s still clear that Blum et al. reused text from Discover and edited it.” (Discover)
• Research ethics committees could police trial reporting, argue Simon Kolstoe and Daniel Shanahan, but resources and a lack of sanctions concern Janet Wisely. (The BMJ, sub req’d)
• U.S. Rep. Lamar Smith (R-TX) wants to punish journals that don’t conduct peer review to his standards — with no details on how. (Jeffrey Mervis, Science)
• “The head of a western Wisconsin laboratory has been sentenced, fined and harshly admonished after being found guilty of conspiring to defraud the federal government.” (Barry Adams, Wisconsin State Journal)
• Debate emerges over whether or not the University of Munster should reveal the names of the three who have had their title of doctor withdrawn. (Frank Biermann, Unicum, in German)
• A recent accusation that Monsanto ghost-wrote a research paper is the latest incident in the long history of an academic journal used by corporations, says Paul Thacker. (Pacific Standard)
• “Speed is becoming increasingly associated with blather.” Perhaps it makes sense for journals to return to slower publishing practices, says Kent Anderson. (The Scholarly Kitchen)
• The new European Code of Conduct for Research Integrity says researchers should “consider negative results to be as valid as positive findings for publication and dissemination.” (David Matthews, Times Higher Education)
• “Academic publishing is becoming more about establishing a pecking order and less about pursuing knowledge,” argues Andrew J. Hoffman. (Inside Higher Ed)
• “From pilots to practice, more and more publishers are warming to open peer review.” (Rebecca Pool, Research Information)
• Whose responsibility is research reproducibility? A recent panel, including our co-founder Ivan Oransky, recently discussed the problem at the annual conference of the Society for Laboratory Automation and Screening. (Lenny Teytelman, protocols.io)
• An Italian researcher resigns after submitting items in his CV that were not his. (Alberto Vannucci, il Fatto Quotidiano, in Italian)
• A professor wakes up “to discover he had been ‘disappeared’ from a website that had once featured at least three of his articles.” (Aaron Barlow, Academe Blog)
• “[S]ome metrics in widespread use cannot be used as reliable indicators research quality,” say the authors of a new preprint. (arXiv)
• “The EU’s learned academies have issued a revised edition of the European code of conduct for research integrity,” Research Research reports.
• “It’s not just you,” writes Philip Ball, “science papers are getting harder to read.” (Nature)
• “More than 30% of biomedical studies funded by the US government are later cited in commercial patents,” reports Elie Dolgin. (Nature)
• So is a commonly used meta-analysis tool as useful as some think it is? Researchers respond to a post by Uri Simonsohn we highlighted last week. (Daniel Cressey, Nature)

And an upcoming event: Bad Science And Good. Join NPR’s Richard Harris, Stanford’s John Ioannidis, and our Ivan Oransky for a discussion on Wednesday in New York, and also livestreamed.

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