Weekend reads: Medical device maker demands a retraction; an admission from a predatory publisher; a journal digs in and won’t retract

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The week at Retraction Watch featured the story of two scientific sleuths who were right — but paid a price; a retraction from Nature; and the closure of a journal following an editorial mutiny. Here’s what was happening elsewhere:

• A device maker is demanding the retraction of a paper that called one of their studies “grave fraudulence” because it was designed to market the device to doctors rather than test its safety or efficacy. (Our co-founders, STAT)
• OMICS International, a likely predatory publisher, “admit that they published the papers without doing any peer review.” The FTC’s motion for summary judgement: Worth a read.
• “We respect the authors’ decision not to open these data even though we support the general principle of data sharing.” A journal digs in and won’t retract, despite a story in the New York Times. (Roger Pielke, Jr., The Least Thing)
• When should a researcher call for a retraction? And what approach is likely to work best? Ingfei Chen talks to Nick Steneck, our Ivan Oransky, and others. (Undark)
• Meredith Wadman has “the sexual harassment report that felled a famed geneticist—and his defense.” (Science)
• “The article presents serious ethical concerns of author practices regarding self-citations.” Well, yes: 60 out of 66 references are to the authors’ own work. A gem from our database.
• “What does it mean to ‘take responsibility for’ a paper?” asks Stephen B. Heard. (Scientist Sees Squirrel)
• A researcher explains how he came to publish a study of how politicians wipe their bums in the UK. (Gary Lewis, The Conversation)
• “Currently, the way authors have to retype and reformat to submit and re-submit manuscripts to different publishers is counterproductive.” John Sack discusses one potential solution. (The Scholarly Kitchen)
• Peer review, as viewed by XKCD.
• Now this is an appropriate title for a predatory journal: “International Invention of Scientific Journal.”
• A “Federal jury says a professor of business at Columbia retaliated against a former junior faculty member when she complained of harassment.” (Colleen Flaherty, Inside Higher Ed)
• “Inspiration or plagiarism? Writing hackles raised in Boston dispute.” (Graham Ambrose, The Boston Globe)
• A community college trustee “says she accepts responsibility for her 2011 dissertation that an academic board found contained several pages of plagiarized material.” (Keaton Fox, ABC13)
• “By selecting and distributing research metrics, [database]…providers have gained a powerful role in defining de facto standards of research excellence without being challenged by expert authority.” (Arlette Jappe, David Pithan and Thomas Heinze, LSE Impact Blog)
• Two years ago, a group of researchers published a paper in PNAS suggesting that the rate of false positives in fMRI studies could be as high as 70%. Now, in a new preprint, they look back at that paper, and the discussion it caused. (Neuroskeptic, Discover)
• “Did a study of Indonesian people who spend most of their days under water violate ethical rules?” (Dyna Rochmyaningsih, Science)
• “Researchers call for a change in evaluation to recognise the importance of reproducibility,” writes Anja Krieger. (Nature Index)
• “A senior academic has resigned from his post at a Scottish university in protest at its failure to punish his boss for failing to declare business links to a colleague who was hired to a top post.” (Daniel Sanderson, The Times)
• “Should We Rethink the Way We Evaluate Research?” (Shreya Ghosh, The Wire)
• An NIH announcement “appears to defuse, for now, a yearlong controversy over whether basic research on humans should follow the same rules as studies testing drugs.” (Jocelyn Kaiser, Science)
• “Was it ethical for Dropbox to share customer data with scientists?” asks Emily Dreyfuss. (WIRED)
• A newspaper found 14 cases of “plagiarism or inadequate attribution” by a longtime staff member. (Sydney Smith, iMediaEthics)
• A university in Niger expelled a PhD student for plagiarism. (Vanguard)
• “Upon discovering the error, I called Dr Beaglehole, have offered my sincere apologies, and informed him that I would be issuing this apology. Bugger.” (Scoop Politics)
• A German ex-senator’s thesis is being questioned, for problems including copying and pasting from Wikipedia. (Stefan Buchen and Robert Bongen, Spiegel Online)
• “The winner of a 2018 Maine Literary Award was found ineligible because he is not a resident of Maine, and the Maine Writers & Publishers Alliance, which gives the awards annually, has named a new winner of its speculative fiction prize.” (Mary Pols, Portland Press-Herald)
• “Has the tide turned towards responsible metrics in research?” asks James Wilsdon. (The Guardian)
• “Forbes deleted a deeply misinformed op-ed arguing Amazon should replace libraries,” reports Thu-Huong Ha. (Quartz)
• “Fundamental details in the story regarding a flagpole at St. Adalbert’s Polish National Cemetery in Dickson City are incorrect.” (The Times-Tribune)
• “Long gone will be the days when a collaborative paper’s success will depend on the sex of the author!” Blockchain is the answer, says Manuel Martin. (Coin Journal)
• “J. Craig Venter, the San Diego genetic researcher whose drive and insight sped the sequencing of the human genome, has been accused of stealing trade secrets by a company he helped found to exploit one of the great advances in modern science,” reports Bradley Fikes. (San Diego Union-Tribune)
• “Articles with a large number of tweets tend to be the ones receiving immediate social media exposure and are often tweeted by journal associated organization accounts or other individual accounts with a large number of followers. By contrast, highly cited articles in general are neither tweeted timely nor promoted by their respective journal accounts.” (Liwei Zhang and Jue Wang, Scientometrics)
• “The University of Edinburgh has asked for the retraction of five papers by [a] cell biologist and former faculty member…following an internal investigation.” (Times Higher Education, via The Scientist)
• Right angles, wrong conclusions: Statistical analyses of cell orientations from -90 degrees to + 90 degrees produced false positives.
• Remarkable: In a letter, authors acknowledge their results do not reach overall significance, but they “are convinced that our conclusion concerning a secondary endpoint…can be drawn.” (European Journal of Clinical Nutrition; sub req’d)
• “In the years 2007-2017, the Max Planck Society has produced more than 120,000 scientific articles with the participation of Max Planck authors. Amongst these articles, only nine articles appeared in OMICS magazines.” Max Planck responds to an investigation of predatory publishing in Germany.
• There’s another misconduct investigation at the Karolinska. (Jens Krey, Dagens Medicin)
• Preprints could promote confusion and distortion, says Tom Sheldon. (Nature)
• Sometimes it’s the mixing bowl that fails the cake: Use of plastic culture dishes created artifacts in a now-retracted study of saturation kinetics in Scientific Reports.
• Single-word abstracts: Now everyone’s doing them. (eLife) More from January in Gizmodo.
• Eleven babies died after Dutch women were given a Viagra-like drug in a clinical trial. Researchers have halted the study, and more children may be affected. (Daniel Boffey, The Guardian)
• Did an advocacy group just take a step toward a dreaded “close hold embargo?” (Embargo Watch)
• Ten mistakes not to make when writing the title of your next paper. (Anna Clemens, PeerJ blog)
• “So what’s the new equilibrium, if we move…to open post-publication review?” asks Andrew Gelman. “Is it just that zillions of things get published and a few of them get reviewed in an unsystematic manner?”
• “It was an honest mistake and all authors agreed that we had to contact the editor promptly and request a retraction,” the corresponding author of a paper in Current Biology tells us.
• “[T]he computer-science community should change its peer-review process to ensure that researchers disclose any possible negative societal consequences of their work in papers, or risk rejection,” according to Brent Hecht. (Elizabeth Gibney, Nature)

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