Before we present this week’s Weekend Reads, a question: Do you enjoy our weekly roundup? If so, we could really use your help. Would you consider a tax-deductible donation to support Weekend Reads, and our daily work? Thanks in advance.
The week at Retraction Watch featured the story of how an editor solved a mystery about bad data, a new addition to our leaderboard, and a project designed to identify a common mistake in clinical trials. Here’s what was happening elsewhere:
-
-
- A stem cell trial has been paused after calls for dozens of retractions of papers underpinning the work. (Elizabeth Cooney, STAT)
- How long does it take researchers to stop using the name of a Nazi doctor with a disease named for him? About four years, says a study. (Scientometrics, sub req’d)
- More than 30% of about 150 researchers surveyed considered it acceptable to cite a paper that they had not read. (Research Integrity and Peer Review)
- A director of medicine at a medical center “falsified scientific citations for the advertisement of an illegal heart-toxic drug for the treatment of cancer,” alleges Public Citizen.
- “The question is whether the science correction mechanism process is as robust as everybody wants it to be. It’s still not, but we are seeing some signs of improvement.” (Julia Belluz, Vox)
- “Now that Retraction Watch has made this incredible database available, we have also begun scanning every submitting author’s name to ensure that no author published in the Journal has had a paper retracted.” Not everyone thinks the move by the Ochsner Journal is a good idea.
- “Meet Octopus, a new vision for scientific publishing.” (Elizabeth Pain, Science)
- “According to a new book by Marion Nestle, the unstated goal of most company-sponsored studies is to increase the bottom line.” (Jane Brody, New York Times)
- Jose Baselga, the former chief medical officer of Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center has corrected five more conflict of interest disclosures, two of which appeared in journals where he is co-editor in chief. All are in AACR journals.
- Would an electronic long-form disclosure statement (aka ELF) have kept the story of Baselga’s lack of disclosures off the front page of the New York Times? (Lisa Kearns and Arthur Caplan, bioethics.net)
- “Many argue that a lack of transparency risks undermining public trust in research and may also hamper science itself.” (Mark Peplow, Chemical & Engineering News)
- Meet TRANSPOSE, a new “grassroots initiative…to bring clarity to three areas: open peer review, co-reviewing, and detailed preprint policies.” (The Scholarly Kitchen)
- A new study finds “significant gender differences for research productivity in academic journals that are more important for career advancement and peer recognition, even after we control for the most important individual and organizational factors that might explain gender differences.” (Sabrina J. Mayer and Justus M. K. Rathmann, Scientometrics; sub req’d)
- “Most Chinese scientific researchers admit they write papers purely for promotion because the country’s academic appraisal system favours quantity over quality.” (SCMP)
- Why complain about the top five journals in economics? asks the editor of a political science journal. (Chronicle of Higher Education)
- “Prosecutors in Iran have charged four conservationists with ‘sowing corruption on Earth’—a crime punishable by death.” (Richard Stone, Science)
- “A study fails to replicate, but it continues to get referenced as if it had no problems. Communication channels are blocked.” (Andrew Gelman)
- A Guinea NGO “falsified survey participants and responses as well as associated HIV blood test and prevalence data.” (The Global Fund release)
- A USC professor is facing accusations of “data fabrication, exaggerating outcomes and fraud.” (USC Annenberg Media)
- Open access “is unethical for at least three reasons,” say David Shaw & Bernice Elger, Accountability in Research; sub req’d)
- “Universities that fail to publish the results of clinical trials that they have sponsored should face sanctions, potentially including fines or the refusal of approval for future experiments, according to MPs.” (Rachael Pells, Times Higher Education)
- “Why do many retraction notices provide readers with such scant information about the reason for retraction?” asks Suzanne Farley, who, as Springer Nature’s scientific integrity director, could change that.
- “Few people seemed to have noticed that [the ‘Sokal Squared’ hoax] was a put-down of academics concerned with racial issues,” write Joel P. Christensen and Matthew A. Sears.
- “Should Failure to Disclose Significant Financial Conflicts of Interest Be Considered Research Misconduct?” asks Jeffrey Botkin in JAMA. And a related editorial.
- “[T]he ongoing malaise of biomedical research results from adopting a doctrine that is incompatible with the principles of creative scientific discovery and thus should be treated as a mental rather than somatic disorder,” writes Yuri Lazebnik. (Organisms)
- “What should journals do to promote transparent and responsible research?” asks Mario Malički. (Elsevier Connect)
- Following an investigation by New Scientist, “the LIGO Scientific Collaboration, which detected gravitational waves in 2015, has announced that it will publish a detailed explanation of how it analyses the noise in its detectors.” (Joshua Howgego)
- If journals want to attract more reviewers, they “should introduce monetary or non-monetary rewards that are sufficiently valuable for competent and motivated researchers, or provide rewards that are not framed as such, but as signs of a trustful, grateful relationship – like providing unexpected ‘gifts’, such as subscription discounts, and keeping reviewers updated on the fate of a manuscript – which can foster a sense of reciprocity and of being part of a community.” (Marco Seeber and Monica Zaharie, LSE Impact Blog)
-
Like Retraction Watch? You can make a tax-deductible contribution to support our growth, follow us on Twitter, like us on Facebook, add us to your RSS reader, sign up for an email every time there’s a new post (look for the “follow” button at the lower right part of your screen), or subscribe to our daily digest. If you find a retraction that’s not in our database, you can let us know here. For comments or feedback, email us at [email protected].
“Unethical aspects of open access” is poorly argued.
“But this just shifts the problem: allowing OA fees to be included in budgets will either mean less money is available for research projects themselves to be funded.”
“Even If more funding is made available globally for research to offset the introduction of OA fees, that money could instead have been spent on other promising research projects.”
The idea is of course that there is less money required for the subscription journals, which can be redirected to directly benefit research and open access publishing.
“This benefits universities and the public, but disadvantages researchers who cannot afford OA fees.”
It’s not argued how researchers who cannot afford OA fees will have sufficient funding to buy/access subscription journals articles.
“Second, it seems plausible that editors are less likely to reject a below-average paper if acceptance means their journal will ‘earn’ several thousand dollars.”
Of course, ideal Open Access would separate the editorial work from the business of running the journal. But still, editorial boards of subscription journals also have an incentive to only accept research that will increase the impact of the journal and thereby hopefully the number of subscriptions. We have seen signs that this also could introduce a bias, for example by ignoring less sexy replication studies. So editorial bias is not unique to open access publishing.
I disagree that the article is poorly argued. Unoriginal maybe but these are commonly understood problems with author pays OA.
1. OA adoption has stalled. Only 20% of articles are published OA – OA is doing nothing to solve the serials crisis.
http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2018/10/22/do-we-need-to-fail-fast-to-achieve-open-access/
2. Researchers do not pay for subscriptions. Libraries do. Or they get copies via sharing or black OA. So they don’t need to explain how researchers who can’t pay for OA can survive with subscription.
3. Incentives are much better aligned for subscription than author pays OA. I’d rather editors select for research that is exciting and will attract attention than accept papers that are mediocre. No one starts a subscription journal to make money out of papers they had rejected. But they do start OA journals to do this (Sci Rep, Heliyon). And no one can credibly argue that open access article processing charges have nothing to do with the rise of predatory journals and the mountain of spam in my inbox.
OA advocates need to accept there are problems with APC OA. Only then can we get on with the business of advocating for more ethical OA models like library and funder publishing models, community based platinum journals and submission fees. The author pays vs reader pays argument has been going on too long.
Note that the article aimed to argue that OA is *unethical*, not that there are problems.
Regarding your points:
1) This has nothing to do whether or not OA is unethical.
2) Libraries don’t pull money out of thin air; they often have to pay enormous sums of money to cover all the important subscription journals. Universities in turn take large sums of overhead on project budgets, partly used to fund the library. This money is also not directly available for research. So whether money is directly used for APCs, or is used by the library to buy subscriptions, in both cases it is money not directly available for research. OA is not more unethical at this point.
And if researchers are associated with a university with a well funded library, the APCs will hardly be a problem. Often universities have funds available to cover OA publishing costs and national science foundations often allow to include OA publishing costs to the project budget. So the most likely scenario for a researcher having no funds available to publish in OA is that this researcher will also struggle to get access to all the relevant subscription journals.
3) The nature publishing group is a perfect example where several subscription journals were created to publish less high-profile research that was originally rejected for the nature journal.
For sure the debate goes on for too long now. Luckily I’m working in a field with several high quality OA journals and society journals, such that I can afford to not publish in commercial subscription journals and reject all requests to review for those journals. Nature and all the affiliate journals being the only exception as the truth is that it is needed for my career.
More than 30% of about 150 researchers surveyed considered it acceptable to cite a paper that they had not read.
I guess I should read the paper before commenting on it.