The week at Retraction Watch featured the story of a group devastated to learn that they had used the wrong mice in their experiments, and the tale of how keycard swipe records gave away faked data. Here’s what was happening elsewhere:
- In China, “scientists who publish in the top Western journals can earn in excess of $100,000 per paper.” (MIT Technology Review)
- “The custom of rewarding researchers monetarily for single publications is deeply entrenched at Chinese scientific institutions.” (Nature)
- “I think I am the only living person in Sweden who achieved a professor chair with only one international journal publication; a publication I use as an example of a totally incomprehensible text!” (Per Flensburg, Scandinavian Journal of Information Systems)
- “Some researchers share their papers before publication and let Google give suggestions.” Google’s influence campaign. (Wall Street Journal, sub req’d)
- Biology’s debate on preprints extends past questions of reproducibility; publishers have a stake as profits are threatened. (Megan Molteni, WIRED)
- “If a scientist fails to disprove their own idea, then they may be onto something new. But scientists often succeed at disproving their ideas, and there’s currently a stigma that would describe those studies as failures.” (Dan Robitzski, Scienceline)
- Scientists should prioritize local science journals when choosing where to publish their research, says Ahmad Ibrahim. (The Star Online)
- Donald Trump, Jr.: A fan of preprints? (Matthew Taliaferro, Twitter)
- A new paper reviews the importance of whistleblowing when it comes to patient safety in healthcare. (Journal of Patient Safety, sub req’d)
- A new case study examines what strategies researchers take against getting scooped in the era of open science. (Helda)
- “Authors submitting a manuscript to eLife are encouraged to upload it to a recognized preprint server at the same time in order to make their results available as quickly and as widely as possible.” (Eve Marder, eLife)
- “What is clear is that we need a more nuanced message than ‘science works’ or ‘science fails.’” Stephanie Wykstra discusses how to move past the replication crisis. (Inside Higher Ed)
- A new paper surveys the state of retracted articles in dentistry —many of the retractions were due to malpractice. (BMC Research Notes)
- Diverse clinical trials are “an issue of an essential ethical principle of justice,” Jennifer Wenzel tells Oncology Nursing News.
- In a first for the organization, the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research will fund nine studies specifically intending to replicate earlier findings.
- “Our paper- in the end- potentially pours gasoline/petrol/das Benzin on a fiery debate about reproducibility (i.e. not only do many studies not reproduce- but also, scientists have limited awareness of which studies will reproduce).” (Jonathan Kimmelman, STREAM)
- Atoms: The original data fakers. (Our co-founder Ivan Oransky, Twitter)
- “So it’s no surprise that authors feel frustrated while waiting weeks or months for the editor’s decision about that potentially career-making paper, and even more so if the whole process remains a mystery.” Elsevier discusses how it intends to introduce more transparency into the review process.
- “We envision Open Research Central as a portal that will ultimately free researchers from the prisons of academic journals and become the default way in all research areas to formally publish their findings.” (Vitek Tracz, F1000 blog)
- A recent study we highlighted in Weekend Reads, concluding that open peer reviews are of poorer quality than standard reviews, but Richard Smith says the study’s comparison is meaningless. (Open Pharma) Full disclosure: Smith is on the board of directors of the Center for Scientific Integrity, our parent non-profit organization.
- A new study “found no relationship between data sharing and reporting inconsistencies. We did find that journal policies on data sharing are extremely effective in promoting data sharing.” (PsyArXiv Preprints)
- A journal in India is now subject to the sincerest form of publishing flattery: A fake clone. (Prasad Ravindranath, Journos Diary)
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A journal in India is now subject to the sincerest form of publishing flattery: A fake clone.
Jeffrey Beall’s list of cloned predatory journals was a useful resource. He called them “hijacked journals” but it is more a case of identity theft. Archives exist of the list — e.g.
http://beallslist.weebly.com/hijacked-journals.html
— but they are increasingly out-of-date, as the scammers keep adding new ones. Anyone who can be persuaded to take up the baton will earn a lot of gratitude.
Checking my Spam folder, I find the submission solicitations streaming in from “Arctic Journal” (http://arcticjournal.org/submit.html) — a recently-cloned version of the legitimate, well-established version at http://arctic.ucalgary.ca/about-arctic-journal.
Another new clone — “Hereditas Journal” (http://hereditas-journal.com/submit.html). The original is part of BMC and may have enough clout to do something about it: https://hereditasjournal.biomedcentral.com/.
The spammograms arrive just before or just after other spam from older, already-recognised predaceous clones like “Jokull” and “Interciencia” and “Revistas Academicas”, and are identically formatted, so the same crooks are involved.
A journal in India is now subject to the sincerest form of publishing flattery: A fake clone.
These cloned fakes — a branch of the broader parasitic-journal ecosystem — indicate a problem with the idea of White Lists for academic publishing. Any list of journals that will count towards promotion or tenure is like shining a spotlight on journals to become the next targets of the predatory-cloning scammers… they can read lists too!
Of course there is a tie-in with the predatory-conference industry. I see that the recently-cloned ‘Current Science’ is on the whitelist curated by the Centre for Research at Anna University. So we can safely predict that the next round of Indian scamferences will invite prospective attendees with the promise that if they pay the top-tier registration fee, their presentation will be published in ‘Current Science’, to the benefit of their careers.
There are precedents for this prediction. The “International Organization of Scientific Research and Development” — parasitic-journal publishers and scamference organisers — were doing this in 2016, using publication in “Transylvanian Review” as the bait for attendance. The original of that journal appears on the Anna University whitelist, so a predatory clone was created in early 2015.
The “International Organization of Scientific Research and Development” — parasitic-journal publishers and scamference organisers — were doing this in 2016, using publication in “Transylvanian Review” as the bait for attendance.
Forgot link: https://www.complaintboard.in/complaints-reviews/international-organization-of-scientific-research-and-development-iosrd-l517141.html
Covered by Jeffrey Beall.
The recent to-do about Google and funding seems to have more sides than you have pointed out here.
https://www.wired.com/story/googles-academic-influence-campaign-its-complicated/
I am rather surprised that the legitimate journal does not even protect itself with an SSL certificate which cannot be faked,
A lot of journals have not done that. For instance, Science still uses http in their urls (for example, a recent paper with http instead of https (http://science.sciencemag.org/content/357/6347/162) . A quick analysis of NCBI Catalog suggests that >95% of the urls in the NCBI catalog are ‘http’ and not ‘https’ (look for the ELocationID tag in the xml output).
However, the catalog may be a bit outdated as most Springer journals have started re-directing traffic to their https pages even though the NCBI Catalog still gives the http link. I suspect the rise of ‘https’ in the corporate journal publishers is due to the rise of sci-hub and its neat trick of linking to PDFs from the journal web-page itself (which works with http, but not with https). Other cash-strapped journals have not yet migrated to ‘https’.