Weekend reads: How to squander a $10 million grant; paid to publish; funding lotteries

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The week at Retraction Watch featured:

• the retraction of a Nature paper by Harvard researchers;
• 13 retractions and 61 expressions of concern for a controversial psychology researcher;
• the temporary withdrawal of a paper on cats and female students;
• a fourth retraction in the STAP stem cell scandal.

Here’s what was happening elsewhere:

• “How to squander a $10 million donation from a dead man.” “An experimental brain treatment blows up two lives.”
• “I am primarily paid for publishing…” Researchers see “reward structures as competing with—rather than incentivising—broader notions of societal responsibility.”
• “A German research institute is offering scientists a €1,000 (£847) bonus if they publish null results or a replication study as part of its bid to reshape academic incentives.”
• “They Wanted Research Funding, So They Entered the Lottery.”
• “I asked for pro bono help for someone being menaced by antivaxxers and @wolmanj volunteered and wrote a letter and I just wrote the letter and have soiled myself, in part from sympathetic terror and in part from laughing.”
• “It’s time to be super heroes for scientific truth,” instead of “despairing about the apparent elasticity of inelastic facts.”
• From 1970 to 2010, the number of retractions in biomedical research grew 900 percent.
• “Like all retractions, there is surely a story behind this one.”
• “Popular preprint servers face closure because of money troubles: Repositories like INA-Rxiv and IndiaRxiv boost regional science, but finding cash to run them is proving difficult.”
• “Overall, I think this paper demonstrates that the research literature is a bit too much like Sportscenter.”
• “This definition will help institutions, funders and other stakeholders generate practical guidance on avoiding predatory journals and publishers.”
• “Do Top Economics Journals Hold Female-Authored Papers to Higher Standards?” The authors “also find that men’s citations rise when they co-author with women.”
• “Now, for the first time, law journals from the top 16 law schools in the US are led by women,” reports Mihai Andrei in ZME Science.
• “A former administrator at the University of Central Florida said he lost his job after filing a whistleblower complaint and raising concerns about discrimination.”
• “The two University of Central Florida professors who were recently implicated in an alledged cheating scandal are fighting back, calling the university’s investigation ‘sloppy and flawed.'”
• “Dozens of law professors have protested against the University of Southern California’s use of peer review comments on manuscript submissions to reject a tenure application.”
• What do journal editors think of “self-plagiarism,” aka duplication?
• “Lack of compliance with journal publishing standards, including peer reviewing of articles, leads to the fact that virtually any article can be published.” A look at law journals in Moldova.
• “In the last four decades, journalists learned to distinguish between science communication and science journalism.”
• “[P]oor statistical practices don’t simply displace good practices, but actually create substantial barriers to doing things the right way…”
• “Honesty in authorship. Who’s on first?”
• “Irreproducibility should not automatically be seen as a sign of failure. It can also be an indication that it’s time to rethink our assumptions.”
• A look at publishing in disaster risk reduction.
• “On Wednesday, The Daily published a satire article on its website regarding Purdue Pharma and the cost of prescription drugs. The article did not meet our standards and was removed less than three hours after being published.”
• “How to write a top-notch paper.”
• “Be sure to read the paper…you will be astonished!” In honor of the Oscars, Grumpy Geophysicist looks at what it would be like if geoscience papers came from Hollywood.

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