Weekend reads: Texas A&M vs. Harvard; scientific publishers a “threatened species”; six researchers with “greed and a disregard” for rules

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The week at Retraction Watch featured:

• A researcher starting 2020 off with a forthright retraction;
• A journal retracting a 30-year-old paper by a controversial psychologist;
• A look at whether reproducibility has improved.

Here’s what was happening elsewhere:

• The chancellor at Texas A&M “sent Harvard’s president an open letter calling for an investigation into Harvard scientists whose actions he said ‘are false and harmful to Texas A&M University and its faculty.'”
• “Scientific publishers as we know them today remain a threatened species,” says Richard Horton, editor of The Lancet. “They will have to do more to prove their added value to science and society. Unless they do so, they may not deserve to survive.”
• “Six Florida cancer researchers who were dismissed last month for hiding their ties to a Chinese medical university appear to have been motivated by simple greed and a disregard for both institutional and federal rules.”
• “In the post-truth era, publication of false results in predatory journals and by fraudulent authors become even more dangerous for the health and life of patients, as their dissemination via new social media is nearly unstoppable and in the public perception truth is losing its meaning.”
• “A Brown U. Professor Took On Big Pharma. His University Pulled Him From the Classroom.”
• Come to PubPeer for the FERTINUTS, stay for Colby Vorland thanking “the authors for their cordiality in correspondence.”
• “A translation article was plagiarized in Chihiro Minato’s “Atelier of Species,” which was included in the book “AKI INOMATA: Significant Otherness When Living Things Meet” published by our company.”
• How did “a somewhat well-known spiritual guru” become first author of a scientific paper?
• A journal is facing calls to retract a paper on “group differences in intelligence.”
• “Putin wanted Russian science to top the world. Then a huge academic scandal blew up.” More on the more than 800 retractions recently announced in Russia.
• “We made a mistake.” The U.S. National Archives says it should not have altered images to remove criticisms of President Trump.
• A Catholic university will “review the doctoral dissertation of Scotland’s Bishop Stephen Robson, which is alleged to contain several acts of plagiarism.”
• “[G]etting named on a journal article is not the same as having a) done the lion’s share of the research and/or b) actually writing the journal article.”
• “Who are journals for, anyways?”
• “Should research misconduct be criminalized?” ask several authors.
• “He resigned amid allegations of sexual misconduct. Then Millersville University hired him.”
• “A UW-Madison investigation into a longtime ecology professor found he engaged in sexual harassment — an investigation that the university is withholding in its entirety.”
• “Clone journals: a threat to medical research.”
• “A growing number of data detectives are on the hunt for sloppy science and dodgy statistics.”
• “Whether co-reviewers are named or not, this practice, along with the more patently unethical ghostwriting, has no defensible place in the live arena of academic publishing.” But the authors of a paper on the subject disagree.
• Because most plagiarism detection databases do not include Arabic, researchers at the University of Jordan have created a database of theses in Arabic to screen for plagiarism.
• “I…came to the realization that the list of well-known, prestigious authors and the clear and convincing story that they told blinded me to the flaws in the work as an early career reviewer.”
• “An EPA dedicated to the best use of science in regulation would not automatically exclude studies based on the absence of publicly available data.”
• A professor at Dhaka University is accused of plagiarism in his thesis.
• A coder at a Chinese Academy of Sciences Institute is “accused of ripping off an open-source version” of Python and calling it “Mulan.”

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