Weekend reads: Grad student who alleged discrimination dismissed; academics who play dumb; when papers cite predatory works

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The week at Retraction Watch featured:

• A rare permanent ban on U.S. federal research funding for a lab tech at the center of the Duke case;
• A look at whether 61 likely retractions for a controversial psychologist is a low estimate;
• A university giving the task of clearing a researcher of misconduct to one of his frequent co-authors;
• A glaring conflict of interest for the academic editor of a paper published in PLOS ONE.

Here’s what was happening elsewhere:

• A university dismisses a grad student who alleged gender discrimination and research misconduct.
• “Academics hide, play dumb, don’t care or over-perform. Everything to oppose the system and administration.”
• “The fact that these [predatory] journals’ articles are being regularly cited by articles in the legitimate medical literature should give all of us serious pause.”
• “In a move likely to attract criticism, a peer-reviewed journal has agreed to publish an Italian physicist’s highly contested analysis of publications, which concludes that female physicists don’t face more career obstacles than their male colleagues.”
• “[M]ost of these academics have never published any research about cigarettes because their opinions can’t stand up to peer review.”
• “The committee’s chair was independent of King’s, and its remit of enquiry into joint publications in no way reflects an attempt to absolve Eysenck of responsibility nor to lay responsibility on Grossarth-Maticek.” King’s College London responds to a story in the BMJ largely based on a Retraction Watch guest post.
• Kobe Gakuin University has found that a professor — whom they did not name — plagiarized in 10 papers.
• “Here, six academics recall their most traumatic rejection – and how they got over it.”
• “It’s apparent to anyone who’s familiar with the scientific literature that citations to other papers are not exactly an ideal system.”
• “Gerwin Schalk, a high-ranking neuroscientist at the state Health Department’s Wadsworth Center, was charged in a federal complaint [in August] with making false statements to hide his receipt of nearly $70,000 and a car from a European company that provided neurotechnology equipment to the research lab.”
• “According to Dosenko, around 90 percent of all science professors in Ukraine are not legitimate researchers.”
• “Despite the prominence of the London-based journal [Nature], which celebrates its 150th year of publication next week, it has not always been a favorite among physicists.”
• “20% of retracted articles are related to cancer treatments and may contain misleading information accessible to cancer patients.”
• Image manipulation: It doesn’t just happen in scientific journals.
• In the Ten Years Reproducibility Challenge, “Researchers are invited to test code reproducibility by trying to rerun a code created for a scientific paper they published more than ten years ago.”
• “How do researchers acquire and develop notions of research integrity?”
• “[Prevailing legal practices can undermine access to information by patients, clinicians, and the US Food and Drug Administration and also obscure patterns of injury and disease associated with the drugs and medical devices at issue.”
• Contract cheating “is an attack on core academic values,” says Tracey Bretag.
• “We show here that implementation of the NIH [open access] policy was associated with slightly elevated mortality rates and mildly depressed natality rates of biomedical journals, but that birth rates so exceeded death rates that numbers of biomedical journals continued to rise, even in the face of the implementation of such a sweeping public access policy.”
• Two looks back at the scandal that at one point overtook the career of the late Bernard Fisher, a prominent cancer researcher.
• “This is sort of an admission of plagiarism and the public condemnation is, as far as I understand it, a signal to the Rectorate to cancel his doctorate.”
• “Observational studies touting small effects despite high risk of confounding and selection biases should rarely be published by general medical journals,” says John Ioannidis.
• “We still need more trust in science: the need for broader adoption of Registered Reports.”
• “Preregistration is redundant, at best.”
• “More must be done to strengthen research integrity,” says the chair of the UK Parliament’s Science and Technology Select Committee.
• UK funders will now “only provide funding to organisations that can demonstrate that appropriate structures are in place to ensure research integrity in their research activities.”
• “The new rules are designed to prevent the [U.S. National Science Foundation] from being blindsided by media reports of current grantees who are found guilty of harassment.”
• “Unfortunately, the gold open‐access model is being exploited by some publishers, who forgo a proper peer review and accept as many papers as possible just to earn the fees from authors.” Jeffrey Beall pens a book chapter on open access.
• “From all too scarce, to professionalized, the ethics of research is now everybody’s business…”
• “Unless and until leadership is taken at a structural and societal level to alter the incentive structure present, the current environment will continue to encourage and promote wasting of resources, squandering of research efforts and delaying of progress; such waste and delay is something that those suffering diseases for which we have inadequate therapy, and those suffering conditions for which we have inadequate technological remedies, can ill afford and should not be forced to endure.”
• “Anglia Ruskin strips Hong Kong lawmaker of honorary degree.”
• “Chinese Nationalist Party Legislator Apollo Chen yesterday accused President Tsai Ing-wen of self-plagiarism.”
• “The wrong western blot was used…” “During our investigation into this matter, a reader also noticed…” A correction.
• “The collaboration science needed.” Our partnership with Zotero.

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