Weekend reads: Top researchers resign over publishing issues; organized crime meets publishing; infamous fraudster rides in on a horse

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The week at Retraction Watch featured a look at authors who publish once every five days, a revoked PhD following a retraction, and a case of what sounds like irony. Here’s what was happening elsewhere:

• A top cancer researcher resigns  after reports that he failed to disclose millions in payments “from health care companies in dozens of research articles.” That prompts our co-founders to ask, “Why do medical journals keep taking authors at their word?” (STAT)
• H. Gilbert Welch, a top health care policy scholar, has resigned from his faculty position at Dartmouth, after an investigation concluded that he had committed research misconduct in a paper. Meanwhile, the New England Journal of Medicine is again refusing to retract the article, even after the Committee on Publication Ethics suggested they should consider it. (STAT)
• “Organised crime in certain countries has realised there is a lot of money to be made here.” Our Ivan Oransky talks to ABC News Australia about the black market in China and elsewhere.
• “Once Implicated in Cloning Fraud, This Scientist Now Wants to Bring Back an Extinct Ice-Age Horse.” Hwang Woo-Suk rides in on an…Ice-Age horse. (David Grossman, Popular Science)
• “So what’s with the talk of burning things to the ground?” Tom Bartlett of The Chronicle of Higher Education visits the annual meeting of the Society for the Improvement of Psychological Science. He also profiles James Heathers and Nick Brown, whom we wrote about in February.
• An investigation into the work of Olivier Voinnet “uncovered manipulation of certain figures. However, the commission’s report confirms that Voinnet did not personally initiate this manipulation.” However, “since Voinnet implicitly trusted his former employees at IBMP and saw no reason to be suspicious up to the summer of 2016, some manipulated data may also have potentially crept in to the corrections that he made to the research articles. Voinnet will now rectify these immediately.” (ETH-Zurich) As of now, Voinnet has 8 retractions, 4 expressions of concern, and 24 corrections, according to our database.
• “Journals shouldn’t shrink from offering criticisms that may be considered inconvenient, say the editors of a BMJ journal in the latest round of a dispute over the quality of a Cochrane review.” (Nigel Hawkes, The BMJ; sub req’d)
• “Should We Still Cite the Scholarship of Serial Harassers and Sexists?” asks Nikki Usher. (The Chronicle of Higher Education)
• Some thoughts on the EU’s Plan S for open access: “Open access will curtail profits but not quality or freedom,” says Lenny Teytelman in Times Higher Education. “Scientific publishing is a rip-off. We fund the research – it should be free,” says George Monbiot in The Guardian.
• The Netherlands has a new Code For Research Conduct.
• A new policy from the Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute (PCORI) “lays out the expectation that our awardees will make the data from their PCORI-funded research projects available to third-party requestors. Very importantly, it provides funding to our awardees for their time and effort in preparing the data to be shared.” (PCORI)
• Should the UK create a new committee to ensure that misconduct investigations are done properly? The government says it will look into the possibility.
• “In a letter sent to NIH Director Dr. Francis Collins on Thursday, alcohol researcher Dr. Michael Siegel of Boston University School of Public Health called on NIH to retract and apologize for a statement on the website of NIH’s National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism,” reports Sharon Begley. (STAT)
• “A University of Bristol lecturer has resigned after admitting that he fabricated his research.” (BBC)
• A new grant from the U.S. Office of Research Integrity will be used ‘to develop a data-searching tool that will boost the scale at which articles are automatically searched to detect figure reuse, thus finding cases of potential inauthenticity and inappropriate reuses much more quickly and across broader repositories of information.” (press release)
• Spanish Health Minister Carmen Montón has resigned after allegations of plagiarism in her master’s degree. (El Pais)
• “Publication pressure and scientific misconduct: why we need more open governance.” (Simon Gandevia, Spinal Cord)
• “In a bid to make it easier for university and college teachers to earn points to enhance their research score for recruitment and promotion, the University Grants Commission has decided to treat all peer-reviewed journals at par with its own list of approved journals.” (Vikas Pathak, The Hindu)
• Who are the world’s top reviewers? Find out who Publons ranked.
• “How Would You Ensure Diversity In Peer Review?” asks The Scholarly Kitchen. PLOS Blogs talks to Cassidy Sugimoto about the same issue.
• “Academic publishing is a mess and it makes culture wars dumber,” says Rob Beschizza of some recent controversial cases. (BoingBoing)
• Thou shalt not steal — nor plagiarize. A Christian counseling organization leader faces plagiarism charges. (Michael Gryboski, Christian Post)
• “Twitter Is Denying Access To Its Data To A Prominent Opioid Sales Researcher,” Dan Vergano reports. (BuzzFeed)
• “You are correct in pointing out that we mistakenly identified a significant difference … These [corrected] results suggest that education, while highly effective for engendering healthy life behaviors, had no effect on controlling the BMI of the participants (Table 3).” (The Journal of Nursing Research)
• A scientist at GlaxoSmithKline has pleaded guilty to stealing trade secrets to use at a Chinese startup. (Mark Reisch, Chemical & Engineering News)
• “Research fraud should incur suspension of the license to practice.” A new white paper in Intensive Care Medicine.
• According to prosecutors, a former Washington University employee “committed mail fraud through a variety of means, including seeking reimbursement from the university for contract work she had done for her personal benefit, charged gift cards to a fellow employee’s university account, and traveled around the world using falsified invoices.” (Doug Lederman, Inside Higher Ed)
• “Peer reviewers in developing nations are underrepresented,” suggests a new report. (Dalmeet Singh Chawla, Science)
• A look at the overrepresentation of review articles in citations, and the effect of that phenomenon on the literature. (RubenMiranda and Esther Garcia-Carpintero; Journal of Informetrics; sub req’d)
• How often do dental journals pull papers? Sorry, couldn’t resist. (Journal of Dentistry, sub req’d)

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