Weekend reads: How much is integrity worth?; killing the science poster; future of megajournals in doubt?

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The week at Retraction Watch featured a big announcement: You can now receive alerts about retractions in your database of references if you use Zotero, the free, open-source research platform. Here’s what was happening elsewhere:

• “Integrity is good and fine, but it doesn’t pay the bills.” So says one researcher at Duke, which just settled a suit alleging scientific misconduct for $112.5 million.
• “To Save The Science Poster, Researchers Want To Kill It And Start Over.” (Nell GreenfieldBoyce, NPR)
• “The future of megajournals as a major publishing platform is now threatened.” (Petr Heneberg)
• “All academics are familiar with the adage ‘Publish or perish,’ but for public health this should be rewritten as ‘Publish or the population perishes.'” 
• “Academia should encourage collaboration without exaggerating its credit.”
• “The National Institutes of Health has referred 16 allegations related to foreign influence of U.S.-funded research to investigators and contacted 61 research institutions about such concerns,” Andrew Joseph reports. (STAT)
• The RAND Corporation takes stock of scientific ethics around the world.
• “[A] permissioned blockchain may emerge as an effective middle-ground solution for mitigating scientific misconduct,” argues Vijay Mohan.
• “The editor in chief of the medical journal The Lancet has told funders backing the controversial open-access initiative Plan S that top-ranked journals such as his are worth paying extra for.” (Craig Nicholson, ResearchResearch)
• A UK agency plans a watchdog that will oversee “whether universities have carried out research misconduct investigations properly.”
• U.S. Senator Charles Grassley (R-IA) wants “a thorough vetting of the foreign affiliations of potential grantees.”
• “We find that small journals are rewarded much more than large journals for publishing a highly-cited paper, and are also penalized more for publishing a low-cited paper, especially if they have a high [impact factor].”
• “This large study of medical university press releases and corresponding news stories showed that important measures of a scientific study such as funding and study limitations were omitted to a very large extent.”
• “Hyped-up science erodes trust. Here’s how researchers can fight back.” (Brian Resnick, Vox)
• The acting director of a Federal U.S. watchdog is also now permanent deputy director.
• In Germany medical centers, “More than six years after study completion, 26% of all eligible lead trials still had not disseminated results.”
• “A prominent Chinese specialist in American affairs has rejected claims that he plagiarised research on the roots of the China-US trade war at a symposium last week, saying he simply ‘quoted’ the data to support his arguments.”
• “Funders should award competitive grants directly to journals to underwrite the costs of open access,” says Adriano Aguzzi. (Nature)
• “Through an analysis of more than 3000 randomized controlled trials (RCTs) published in three leading medical journals (the Journal of the American Medical Association, the Lancet, and the New England Journal of Medicine), we have identified 396 medical reversals.”
• “A Chinese university has promised to treat seriously claims that a senior figure in the country’s peak body for legal professionals lifted sections of his doctoral dissertation from academic journals,according to a Chinese media report.”
• “Does the high incidence of plagiarism among students in Nigeria point to the need for more support and mentoring for students or more effective sanctions against those found to be guilty? Or maybe both?” (Tunde Fatunde, University World News)
• “Two patients contracted severe infections, and one of them died, from fecal transplants that contained drug-resistant bacteria” while taking part in clinical trials, the U.S. FDA warned. (Denise Grady, New York Times)
• “Medical staff…continued to sedate people with ketamine and collect data for a study for months after the hospital’s leadership told elected officials they had voluntarily halted the research in response to questions over ethics and patient safety.” (Andy Mannix, Minneapolis Star Tribune)
• “These results suggest that altering the editorial process to include requests for a completed ARRIVE [Animal Research: Reporting of In Vivo Experiments] checklist is not enough to improve compliance with the ARRIVE guidelines.” (Research Integrity and Peer Review)
• “Peer review is not just quality control, it is part of the social infrastructure of research,” argues Flaminio Squazzoni in the LSE Impact Blog.

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