Weekend reads: Robots come to scientific publishing; questions about a COVID-19 vaccine; funding by lottery

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The week at Retraction Watch featured:

• Johns Hopkins student newspaper deletes, then retracts, article on faculty member’s presentation about COVID-19 deaths
• Authors retract Nature paper after realizing some data were “calculated wrongly”
• Subtraction by addition: A journal expresses concern again — but this time, with feeling
• Former Harvard cancer researcher faked a dozen images, say Feds
• Stem cell researcher’s retraction count may near two dozen
• Psychologist’s paper retracted after Dutch national body affirms misconduct findings

Our list of retracted or withdrawn COVID-19 papers is up to 39.

Here’s what was happening elsewhere:

• “Need a Hypothesis? This A.I. Has One.”
• “Do You Have a Conflict of Interest? This Robotic Assistant May Find It First.” 
• “The creators of a scientific search engine have unveiled software that automatically generates one-sentence summaries of research papers, which they say could help scientists to skim-read papers faster.”
• “After Admitting Mistake, AstraZeneca Faces Difficult Questions About Its Vaccine.”
• “German funder sees early success in grant-by-lottery trial.”
• “Croatian scientist attitudes were lowest for open peer-review in small scientific communities (Md 2.0) and highest for open data (Md 3.9).”
• Another month, another sting: “I Published a Fake Paper in a ‘Peer-Reviewed’ Journal.”
• Are authors who post data entitled to co-authorship of any future papers that use those data?”
• “Public discussion of preprints was modest and COVID-19 articles were overrepresented in the pool of retracted articles in 2020.”
• “University rankings need a rethink.”
• “[H]ow papers get published, how they get retracted, and what a better system might look like.” Our Ivan Oransky on the Body of Evidence podcast.
• Is “the current system for assessing and publicly notifying concerns about publication integrity” broken?
• The c-index: The number of cartoons drawn about your research. Or it’s this one.
• “Following the death of a star scientist, do coauthors experience a uniform decline in productivity?”
• “The conclusion suggests that conference proceedings are increasingly indexed by major databases, and that scholars might have found advantage in publishing conference papers that were quicker and easier to publish than journal articles or book chapters.”
• “Editors need to, in some cases, quite frankly, find their spines.” Is science self-correcting?
• How much will it cost to publish in Nature? Well, “For €9500, Nature journals will now make your paper free to read,” Jeffrey Brainard of Science reports.
• “Errors of omission: Why we are deeply concerned about research on autism therapies.”
• “The world’s largest multidisciplinary survey on research integrity is in danger of falling short of its goals…”
• “We found that 49% of the journals surveyed checked all manuscripts for plagiarism, that 61% allowed authors to recommend both for and against specific reviewers…”
• A study shows artificial intelligence “can generate realistic western blot images that [are] indistinguishable from real western blots.”
• “While biology students at all levels of the study had a high rate of knowledge about research misconduct, 4.29% admitted plagiarism, 3.28% fabrication of data, 2.78% falsification, and 1.78% presentation of the results or data in a misleading way.”
• “Research intelligence: does excellence beyond publications really matter?”
• When a paper on music therapy for chronic fatigue was retracted, a critical comment disappeared.
• The former editor-in-chief of Science posts his first preprint.

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