The week at Retraction Watch featured a look at how long journals take to respond to retraction requests, and news of a $10 million settlement for research misconduct allegations. Here’s what was happening elsewhere:
- “In view of these problems, we believe that the only reasonable course of action in this case is to retract the article,” write Nick Brown and colleagues to a journal editor about his approach to an article by embattled researcher Brian Wansink.
- “In sum, Lancet Psychiatry published a study that generated misleading media headlines around the world, which have served to misinform the public about what is known about ADHD.” An open letter calls for that study’s retraction. (Robert Whitaker, Mad in America)
- Two percent of all the papers published in Tumor Biology between 2010 and 2016 had fraudulent peer reviews. The latest from our co-founders in STAT.
- How long does peer review take at Nature journals? (Neil Saunders, Twitter)
- An analysis of social psychology “research published in 2013-2014 shows some improvement over research published in 2003-2004, a result that suggests the field is evolving in a positive direction,” according to a new preprint. (PsyArXiv)
- “Instead, it offered compelling evidence that something went seriously wrong in TOPCAT, because the evidence now shows that many patients in Russia and Georgia did not even receive the study drug.” Larry Husten takes a look at the worrying conclusions of an analysis of a study. (CardioBrief)
- Thanks to twenty-one research projects involving ethical breaches in the past two years, Australian taxpayers have funded bad research to the tune of $3 million. (Timna Jack, The Sydney Morning Herald)
- A man in Virginia scammed the U.S. government out of over $500,000 in science grants and education funds. (ABC7 News)
- A former ASU professor has won an arbitration hearing against the city of Phoenix, who had alleged that a presentation he gave to the police department took material from the Chicago Police Department. (Anne Ryman, AZ Central) We’ve previously covered Whitaker’s plagiarism problems at the university here.
- Canada’s experience with virtual peer review panels for grants suggests the need for further experimentation, say Steven Wooding and Susan Guthrie. (ResearchResearch)
- “Should biomedical research be like Airbnb?” ask Viven Bonazzi and Philip Bourne. (PLOS Biology)
- “We advised her to withdraw the manuscript as soon as possible, but in that case she might face a retraction fee.” Two researchers share two students’ experiences submitting papers to predatory and hijacked journals. (Medicine, Health Care and Philosophy)
- Prominent physicist Etienne Klein has lost his post as chairman of the board of France’s Institute of Higher Studies for Science and Technology (IHEST) following plagiarism charges. (Jérôme Dupuis, L’Express, in French)
- “Scientists we interview routinely say that they dare not propose bold projects for funding in part because of expectations that they will produce a steady stream of papers in journals with high impact scores.” (Paula Stephan, Reinhilde Veugelers and Jian Wang, Nature)
- “Scientists must be careful to not police other scientists in a way that makes critical discussion impossible, and that dissuades dissemination,” says Julia Shaw. (Scientific American)
- “This person is criticizing my work, albeit harshly and This person truly hates me and might want to harm me are two genuinely different feelings.” Jesse Singal on “tone policing” in science. (Science of Us)
- Three new perspectives in NEJM on open data: The burden to provide open data in randomized, controlled trials may be too much to bear, says Lisa Rosenbaum. Study patients should have easier access to their data, says Charlotte J. Haug. An Nancy S. Burns and Pamela W. Miller ask, can the rift between pro- and anti-data sharing camps be reconciled?
- “Making research articles freely available can help to negate gender citation effects in political science,” writes Amy Atchison. (LSE Impact Blog)
- The German Research Foundation issues a statement on the role of reproducibility in science, saying that it is not the end-all, be-all for determining scientific merit.
- “While most of one reader’s letters “are about slip ups in sports stories, his recent mail questioned the credibility of a journal cited in a medical story.” (A.S. Panneerselvan, The Hindu)
- So you didn’t get the authorship you thought you deserved. Now what? (Zen Faulkes, NeuroDojo blog)
- “Indeed there is always the possibility that those who would harm science would punish us for ferreting out our own weaknesses and correcting them. If so, shame on them.” (Marcia McNutt, The Chronicle of Higher Education)
- Publish or perish, indeed: A predatory journal sends out a plea for an article in light of their “deadly need” for one. (Rolf Zwaan, Twitter)
- “Sage Products has been generous to science, and science has been kind to Sage Products.” Has a company muddied the research on its antimicrobial wipes? (Reuters)
- PNAS issues a correction for a paper to note that the editor once consulted with the first author about the editor’s son’s health, in a completely unrelated incident.
- The Directory of Open Access Journals has received 1,600 applications for inclusion from Indian journals since they revised their standards — but only 4% were genuine so far. (R. Prasad, The Hindu)
- An author shares their byzantine experiences gaining permission to use their own previous images for a new book. (C B Lucas, Research Information)
- Sometimes, if it takes 200 years for a scientist to get credit for a discovery. (Jayme Blaschke, Texas State press release)
- Jeffrey Beall’s list of possible predatory journals is missed, and it’s time to fortify the defenses against such journals, say authors of letters to Nature.
- “How do Research Faculty in the Biosciences Evaluate Paper Authorship Criteria?” asks Timothy Kassis in a new preprint. (bioRxiv)
- BioMed Central and SpringerOpen have signed the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment, but note that they will not be compliant immediately. (Rachel Burley, BioMed Central blog)
- Jo Wilkinson offers “6 Common Flaws To Look Out For in Peer Review.” (Publons)
- bioRxiv got a funding boost from the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative. (Jocelyn Kaiser, Science)
- Code Ocean hopes to make reproducibility easier by giving authors a platform to share their data and code and give others a chance to re-run their analyses. (Thomas Ingraham, F1000 Research blog)
- The U.S. National Academy of Sciences is beefing up its conflict of interest policies, following criticism of how they were handled in two recent reports. (Paul Basken, The Chronicle of Higher Education)
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