Weekend reads: Journal editor fired for homophobic comments; “three-parent baby” paper mega-correction; the Bette Midler journal club

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The week at Retraction Watch featured plagiarism by a priest; retraction of a creationist paper “published in error;” and how a PubPeer comment led a university to reopen an investigation. Here’s what was happening elsewhere:

• Roberto Bolli was fired as editor of Circulation Research because he made homophobic comments. “Bolli previously worked with Piero Anversa, MD, a former Harvard University professor and stem cell researcher who recently had a number of papers retracted for suspected manipulation and falsification of data, and was a coauthor on one of the retracted papers.” (Susan Jeffrey, Medscape)
• The authors of a 2016 paper in Nature on mitochondrial replacement therapy — which would involve “three-parent babies” — have added a five-page correction involving accidental swapping of egg donors and many of the paper’s tables. “All primary sequences and databases from our study are publicly available and anyone could easily re-analyze the data,” corresponding author Shoukrat Mitalipov tells Retraction Watch. “Some errors were pointed by Dr. Claudio Bravi, as we acknowledged in the corrections. Other discrepancies were discovered by us. We carefully examined our results and conclusions after the corrections and confirmed that our original results and conclusions are valid.” This is not the first major correction for the group.
• Bette Midler has raised concerns about conflicts of interest in studies. Is she barking up the right tree?
• That’s Nobel, not Noble, Springer Nature.
• The NIH has asked dozens of major U.S. research universities about faculty members who may have links to foreign governments.” (Jeffrey Mervis, Science)
• “Top Chinese Communist Party officials plagiarised parts of their university theses, an AFP review has found, testing the government’s pledge to crack down on academic misconduct.” (AFP, via Straits Times)
• The principal of a college in India has been found to have committed plagiarism, and barred from supervising PhD students for three years. (Sampath Kumar, Times of India)
• “Stephen Ocheni, the Minister of State for Labour and Employment [in Nigeria], plagiarised one of the papers he used to rise to the pinnacle of his job as a lecturer before he was given his current post,” Sahara Reporters writes.
• “European universities must be watchful that their increasing dependence on industry for research funding does not lead to ‘biased results’ and the undermining of other ‘curiosity-driven’ scholarship, a new report says.” (Rachael Pells, Times Higher Education)
• “A common prostate cancer cell line classified as African-American actually carries more than 90% European ancestry,” Tien Nguyen reports. (Chemical & Engineering News)
• “A single, open access, online, life sciences journal could solve the myriad problems associated with current publishing paradigms and would be feasible to implement.” The paper, in Accountability in Research, is paywalled.
• Journalists seeking scoops are as bad as scientists doing unreplicable research,” says Andrew Gelman.
• “This study shows that while Scopus needs to improve its quality control systems, editorial management teams need to routinely check the information being indexed by the databases.” (Erwin Krauskopf, Scientometrics, sub req’d)
• A former graduate student is suing two collaborators, who she says should have included her name on a book chapter based on a paper they had co-authored. (Ted Booker, South Bend Tribune)
• Renae Merle, a reporter at The Washington Post, explains “How a payday lending industry insider tilted academic research in its favor.”
• “A grass-roots group of biologists has started a website to keep track of the proliferation of experiments in academic peer review,” reports Richard van Noorden at Nature.
• A new study finds that “Papers authored by women have lower acceptance rates and are less well cited than are papers authored by men in ecology.” (Ecology and Evolution)
• Michael Eisen is the new editor in chief of eLife.
• “Contrary to what was reported by previous researchers, our results showed no evidence of an increasing trend in any discipline; in all disciplines, the percentage of p values reported as marginally significant was decreasing or constant over time.” (Psychological Science)
• A researcher in India was found to have committed plagiarism, but will not face sanctions. (Anuja Jaiswal, Times of India)
• Ben Goldacre gets the BMJ Confidential treatment.
• Days after a new investigation into the case appeared in the BBC, An update on a paper by former superstar surgeon Paolo Macchiarini and colleagues in The Lancet.
• China will create a national ethics committee to oversee high-risk trials in the wake of the CRISPR babies scandal. (Jane Qiu, STAT)
• A new review “highlights the areas, methods, and actors favoured in research on research integrity, and reveals a few blindspots.” (Bonn, Pinxten, bioRxiv)
• CERN “has cut ties with the scientist who said that women were less able at physics than men.” (Pallab Ghosh, BBC)
• “Are Editors Determined to Sanitize Medical Journals?” Milton Packer thinks so. (MedPage Today)
• Turnitin, the plagiarism detection software used by many journals,has just been acquired for $1.7 billion. (Beth McMurtrie, Chronicle of Higher Education)
• “Therefore, compared with the submitted papers, a slightly lower proportion of papers with female corresponding authors were accepted, and a slightly higher proportion were rejected.” Alex Holmes and Sally Hardy look at potential gender bias in peer review in their own field. (LSE Impact Blog)

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