Weekend reads: Vaccine-neurological damage paper retracted under protest; buy a PhD thesis for $10,000; retraction by press release?

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The week at Retraction Watch featured a three-part series about what happened when a team tried to publish a replication attempt in a Nature journal, the story of how an author hoodwinked a journal with a fake name, and one former editor’s frustration with a publication ethics group. Here’s what was happening elsewhere:

• A journal has retracted a controversial paper claiming that mice given an HPV vaccine showed signs of neurological damage. (Dennis Normile, Science)
• “Buying a doctoral thesis can cost anywhere from $10,000 to $25,000.” (Eurasianet)
• Retraction by press release? A surgical device firm — which managed to obtain earlier drafts of a now-published study — is demanding the retraction of a study paid for by its rival, alleging problems. Our latest for STAT.
• The Journal of Death has a deadline, folks. Also, its title is taken from a Western TV series. Don’t submit here, as tempting as it may be.
• Roger Pielke, Jr., and colleagues want the authors of a study of androgen levels in athletes to release their data. So far, crickets. (British Journal of Sports Medicine blog)
• “In the Editorial originally published on 1 May 2018, we mistakenly wrote that ‘the NAOJ is exploring new projects and may decommission Subaru in favour of other priorities’. In fact, the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan is committed to the long-term operation of the Subaru Telescope. We are in the process of correcting all versions of the Editorial.” (Nature Astronomy)
• A deputy chairperson of the Finns Party has been accused of plagiarizing in her thesis. (Aleksi Teivainen, Helsinki Today)
• For one “data thug,” it’s been Error Detection Week. Read his first post here, and follow along. (Medium)
• “Are anonymous reviews fair? Are they effective? What do you gain or lose by choosing to be anonymous?” (Razi Sheikholeslami and Saman Razavi, EOS)
• “Because we collectively accept a system that rewards individual scientists through prestige, I can feel both sympathy for people who experience negative affect when their reputation suffers, as indignation when they sent lawyers after people who publicly share perceived norm violations.” (Daniel Lakens, The 20% Statistician)
• “[S]cientists in the physical sciences generally write shorter reviews than their counterparts in biology, psychology, and the environmental sciences.” (Dalmeet Singh Chawla, Physics Today)
• Dr. Oz has removed a reference to an offensive stereotype after Dr. Jen Gunter called attention to it. (Dr. Jen Gunter)
• How do you tell the difference between scientific misconduct and fraud? (Torrey Young and Michael Tuteur, Foley & Lardner)
• “The American Heart Association (AHA)/American Stroke Association (ASA) is revisiting its recently updated stroke guidelines after issuing a ‘correction’ that removed several portions.” (Daniel Allar, Cardiovascular Business)
• The agenda of open science is “effectively to re-engineer science along the lines of platform capitalism, under the misleading banner of opening up science to the masses,” writes Philip Mirowski. (Social Studies of Science)
• Springer Nature “cancelled its 3.2 billion euro (2.8 billion pound) stock market flotation planned for Wednesday on weak investor demand,” Arno Schuetze reports. (Reuters)
• “The editor also should keep both the author and the reviewer in good humor.” (Amitav Banerjee, Medical Journal of Dr. D.Y. Patil Vidyapeeth)
• “Stop treating [peer] review submission like a credit card application!” (George Helffrich, EOS)
• A paper has been cited 2.8 million times on Wikipedia. (Melissa Davey, The Guardian)
• “Non-White scholars continue to be underrepresented in publication rates, citation rates, and editorial positions in communications and media studies,” according to a new study. (Press release, New York University)
• “These powerful stories demonstrate the change needed — at the individual and institutional levels — to make scholarly publishing the welcoming and inclusive community it could and should be.” (The Scholarly Kitchen)
• “Funders should assign research grants via a lottery system to reduce human bias,” writes Dorothy Bishop. (Nature Index) The idea has been floated before, including by Ferric Fang and Arturo Casadevall.
• “The sponsor of the trial, Glenmark, and the hospital’s principal investigator have been told to respond to the drug regulator on allegations of data falsification, among other things.” (The Hindu Business Line)
• “Top climate scientists say their field can improve its transparency.” (Scott Waldman, E&E News via Scientific American)
• Plagiarism charges have emerged as a tool for defamation in Pakistan, reports Riazul Haq. (The Express Tribune)
• “Hollywood’s Academy Expelled Harvey Weinstein,” writes Peter Aldhous. “But The National Academy Of Sciences Hasn’t Ousted Sexual Harassers.” (BuzzFeed)
• “Scientific integrity needs to apply to how researchers treat people, not just to how they handle data, says Erika Marín-Spiotta.” (Nature)
• “Scientists who have been sanctioned by their institutions [for sexual harassment] could lose out on funding from the Wellcome Trust,” Holly Else reports. (Nature)
• Nell Gluckman explains “Why Internet Scholars Are Calling Out Facebook for Restricting Access to Its Data.” (Chronicle of Higher Education)
• “[T]he subjects were 11-year-olds, and neither they nor their parents had any idea what they were signing up for.” A troubling experiment from the 1950s. (excerpt from David Shariatmadari’s The Lost Boys, in The Guardian)
• “The publication of a ‘crappy’ acupuncture ‘network meta-analysis’ for acupuncture and chronic constipation illustrates the [garbage in, garbage out] problem on steroids and reveals a problem with peer review.” (David Gorski, Science-Based Medicine)
• “We find that [a registration-based editorial process] increases up‐front investment in planning, data gathering, and analysis, but reduces follow‐up investment after results are known. This shift in investment makes individual results more reproducible, but leaves articles less thorough and refined.” (Journal of Accounting Research, sub req’d)

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