Weekend reads: A Harvard prof in handcuffs; an alleged PhD for grant scheme; unethical reviewer behavior outed

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The week at Retraction Watch featured:

• growing concerns — and a new retraction — in a case involving spider research that we first reported on two weeks ago;
• an apology in a retraction notice for a paper about apologizers;
• a retraction at NEJM.

Here’s what was happening elsewhere:

• “By afternoon, one of Harvard’s scientific luminaries was in handcuffs, charged with making a false statement to federal authorities about his financial relationship with the Chinese government.”
• A university “plans to fire three people who they say helped a graduate student obtain a doctoral degree in return for the student getting them grant money.”
• A journal has “discovered an individual behaving unethically as author, reviewer and editor, and we felt moved to put this before our readers to not only expose this type of behavior but also to prevent it from happening again through awareness.” They did not, however, name the individual, although the editor seems to have rectified that on Twitter. Our earlier coverage.
• “A snowballing initiative to list authors’ contributions aims to make sure credit is always given where it is due. But will it be enough to ease the angst?”
• “A new ranking system for academic journals measuring their commitment to research transparency will be launched next month – providing what many believe will be a useful alternative to journal impact scores.” Retraction Watch readers may recall that we proposed such an index in 2012.
• “Former University of Southern California (USC) law professor Shmuel Leshem recently filed an appeal against the university, alleging USC Gould Law School botched his tenure review and compromised the integrity of the scholarly process.”
• “Peer Review Is Science’s Wheel of Misfortune: The system for evaluating the quality of research papers works little better than flipping coins. Budding scholars pay the price.”
• “There are so many challenges to maintaining a reliable body of published research!” Why one plagiarism sleuth who has led to dozens of retractions does what he does.
• “How do we reward people for putting up their data and making it accessible prior to publication – in a sense, making the journal article less important than engagement around the scientific questions?”
• “Data From A Top Geneticist’s Lab Was Flagged To A Major UK University. It Didn’t Launch A Formal Investigation Until A Decade Later.”
• “[M]any authors and readers misunderstand, misapply, or misinterpret the disclosures,” so ICMJE proposes several changes to their disclosure form.
• In Taiwan, researchers “generally agreed that [questionable authorship practices] had a long history among local academics but were rarely reported.”
• “Universities should be doing more to ensure the integrity of their research and to retain the trust of society at large, says a paper from League of European Research Universities.”
• “How Academic Science Gave Its Soul to the Publishing Industry.”
• “The research-publication system is a mess, and open access would be one small step toward a fix.”
• “After watching the University of California head toward a series of open access agreements with other big publishers, industry titan Elsevier has agreed to resume exploratory discussions with the unbending state system.”

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