Weekend reads: Prison for sharing an article?; which country has most fake peer review retractions; counterfeit reagents

The week at Retraction Watch featured a look at a school where everyone has published in possibly predatory journals, and doubts about a study of doing math unconsciously. Here’s what was happening elsewhere:

• Should sharing a copyrighted article lead to a jail sentence? That’s what researcher Diego Gomez is facing in Colombia. Our co-founders’ latest for STAT.
• Can you guess which country has more retractions for fake peer review than every other country combined? Echo Huang uses data from Retraction Watch to find out. (Quartz)
• “China is famous for knock-off DVDs, Louis Vuitton bags and Rolex watches. But counterfeit reagents aren’t on sale in busy public markets.” David Cyranoski explains where they are. (Nature)
• China is cracking down on fake data in drug trials, reports David Cyranoski, with sanctions that could involve jail time – or execution. (Nature)
• “However, we have now learned that they did not, in fact, drink Bud Light.” A retraction, about U.S. Republican politicians, from the A.V. Club. (Sean O’Neal)
• “On the other hand, it is just as clear that they made many meaningful errors, and that the review process fell short of what we should expect from JPSP.” (Data Colada blog) Maybe a preprint claiming that psychology research practices had improved over time — which we highlighted here — wasn’t as accurate as the authors had hoped.
• “A new paper in the prestigious journal PNAS contains a rather glaring blooper,” writes Neuroskeptic in Discover.
• A study finds that over half of human stem cell study data goes unpublished. (Anna Azvolinsky, The Scientist)
• PeerJ’s individual lifetime membership model for authors was a surprising strategy when the journal launched it in 2012. Now, they’re pivoting to cater to institutions instead. (Phil Davis, The Scholarly Kitchen)
• Law professors write law review articles in a publish or perish environment. But LawProfBlawg asks, what’s the point of writing them in the first place? (Above the Law)
• This month marks the 20th anniversary of the Committee on Publication Ethics and will see the fifth World Conference on Research Integrity (where our co-founder Ivan Oransky will be speaking) take place. So it’s time to ask — what progress have we made on research integrity? (The Lancet)
• “If we’re falling down at this early stage, we have very little hope of having a good translation rate.” Many preclinical studies involving animals are ignoring best practices. (Kerry Grens, The Scientist)
• “Plagiarism complaint in PhD thesis lands researcher, supervisor in soup.” But is it at least hot soup? (Harinder Singh Khaira, The Tribune India)
• Journal submission processes are complex — at one time the American Psychological Association’s “instructions for authors” was 439 pages long. But just a few simple changes can make the process less complicated, say James Hartley and Guillaume Cabanc. (LSE Impact blog) We highlighted a preprint of their work here.
• “In our experience, it takes no more than 15 minutes to book a flight online, eight minutes to rent a car, and fewer than 30 seconds to buy a book from Amazon. So why does it sometimes take hours to submit a paper or a review to an academic journal?” (Robert Montgomerie and Tim Birkhead, The Scientist)
• David Lipman, who launched PubMed in 1997 and PubMed Central in 2000, is leaving the U.S. National Library of Medicine for Impossible Foods, which develops plant-based “meat.” Its founder is PLOS co-founder Patrick Brown.
• “With the passing of Gene Garfield at the age of 91 years on February 26, 2017, we have lost one of the great pioneers and innovators of the information age.” Henry Small’s tribute to one of the leading contributors of scientometrics. (Journal of Informetrics)
• ASAPbio, a proponent of preprints, is putting some of its plans on hold for four months to reassess priorities following announcement of support for bioRxiv from the Chan Zuckerberg initiative. (release)
• How to encourage wider data reuse: An interview with the authors of a new paper examining current data sharing practices in biomedical research. (Sierra Williams, PeerJ blog)
• U.S. President Donald Trump cited a paper showing that 14 percent of noncitizens were registered to vote, as evidence of voter fraud. But the paper’s much more complicated than that. (Maggie Koerth-Baker, FiveThirtyEight)
• “I’m aware that I might be breaching copyright […] But I don’t really care.” Science publishers are trying new strategies to stem the rising tide of unauthorized paper sharing. (Quirin Schiermeier, Nature)
• Honesty and transparency in research don’t mean much if researchers don’t understand the importance of data quality, says Andrew Gelman.
• “There are a lot of overlapping issues at present which go into a broader discussion of improving science, and [a] Venn diagram of the New Bad People would be a car crash.” (James Heathers, Medium)
• “Though Cowper was an accomplished anatomist, he is famous for being one of the most notorious plagiarizers in the history of medicine.” (Kris Newby, Stanford Medicine)
• In a look at editorial boards of environmental biology journals, “67.06% of editors were based in the USA and UK, while editors based in the Global South were extremely rare.” (bioRxiv)
• “Psychosocial trials on ME/CFS are more likely to engage in selective reporting indicative of research waste than cellular trials.” (bioRxiv)
• The rifts over a philosophy paper by Rebecca Tuvel are deepening, The Chronicle of Higher Education reports.
• How to write an effective journal article and get it published. (Victoria Reyes, Inside Higher Ed)
• “When I talk to psychologists about these problems, their stock response tends to be: ‘Hang on, none of these sins are unique to psychology, so why are you picking on us?’” Chris Chambers on the seven deadly sins of his field. (The Guardian)
• “Censorship of addiction research is an abuse of science,” says Nature.
• In the wake of the Macchiarini scandal, the Karolinska Institutet announces steps in its action plan for handling misconduct investigations. (press release, in Swedish)
• “Our statistical analysis of research publications in the prestigious scientific journals Nature, Science and Cell reveals that papers represented by an image on the journal’s cover gain many more citations in the academic literature than those papers in the same journals that are not represented on the cover.” (Public Understanding of Science, sub req’d; made free to access following our post)
• A “Spanish court has cleared a leading Spanish mathematician of allegations that he mismanaged funds, and has ordered him returned to his position as head of a prestigious national mathematics institute.” (Elisabeth Pain, Science)
• “Initially, the “Julius Springer Publishing House” chiefly published political caricatures and treatises reflecting the spirit of Germany’s Vormärz period…” Springer celebrates its 175^th birthday. (press release)
• “Both Whistle Blowers and the Scientists They Accuse are Vulnerable and Deserve Protection,” say Lex Bouter and Sven Hendrix. (Accountability in Research, sub req’d)
• How can psychologists best publish integrative research? A group of editors offer their advice. (APS Observer)
• “With reduced research budgets, funding may become an even more inappropriately influential driver of careers.” (John Ioannidis, JAMA)
• Findings of a new study of Sci-Hub downloads “indicated that publishers’ minimum embargo periods – which keep papers behind paywalls for a year or two before they are made freely available – were unlikely to halt the spread of ‘guerrilla open access’ platforms.” (John Elmes, Times Higher Education)
• “What is published is just the tip of the iceberg,” says a researcher examining data claiming that your “date would likely find you more attractive if you turned up wearing red.” “It’s not the whole story.” (Dalmeet Singh Chawla, Slate)
• Downloads don’t correlate well with citations, says Kevin Winker. (bioRxiv)

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