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The week at Retraction Watch featured:
- The 21-year-old apology – and retraction from JAMA
- Harvard eye researchers have eight papers retracted for lack of ethical approval
- Einstein duo faked data in 16 federal grant applications: ORI
- So what happened with that Biogen Aduhelm study, anyway?
- Will the real Tim Chen please stand up? A trip down the rabbit hole of deceit
- Fake sex researcher loses zoophilia paper over ethical concerns
- How critics say a computer scientist in Spain artificially boosted his Google Scholar metrics
Our list of retracted or withdrawn COVID-19 papers is up to 215. There are more than 33,000 retractions in our database — which now powers retraction alerts in EndNote, LibKey, Papers, and Zotero. And have you seen our leaderboard of authors with the most retractions lately — or our list of top 10 most highly cited retracted papers?
Here’s what was happening elsewhere (some of these items may be paywalled, metered access, or require free registration to read):
- “AFL to launch review of concussion expert Paul McCrory’s work following plagiarism claims.”
- “Plagiarism Scandal Puts Renowned Concussions Doctor Under Scrutiny.”
- “Mendel the fraud? A social history of truth in genetics.”
- “With new ‘brain-reading’ research, a once-tarnished scientist seeks redemption.”
- “Acing the peer review process.”
- “The rise of citational justice: how scholars are making references fairer.”
- “Combatting Predatory Academic Journals and Conferences.”
- “Other COVID-19 papers that might have influenced public policy also drew critical peer review on Twitter before they were retracted.”
- “Is open access a misnomer?”
- “The Worrying Murkiness of Institutional Biosafety Committees.”
- “Book on Anne Frank betrayer withdrawn after historians publish rebuttal.”
- “Three-quarters of UK researchers ready to quit academia.”
- “There are four schools of thought on reforming peer review – can they co-exist?”
- “If you visit a medical journal homepage, it’s likely that a third-party firm is tracking your browsing behavior — potentially to send you targeted advertising in the future.”
- “So I’m a conspiracy theorist now? A call for retraction.”
- “Is there a role for peer review in uncovering fraud?” Melinda Baldwin’s take.
- The University of Louisville found no misconduct in more than two dozen papers flagged by Elisabeth Bik.
- A group tells the story of their frustrating and unsuccessful attempt to fight plagiarism of their work.
- A sleuth scrutinizes work by a researcher whose COVID-19 paper was retracted.
- “UNI instructor twice accused of plagiarism seeks court review of probe.”
- “Several UK research funders have raised concerns with Researchfish after the academic impact tracker threatened to report researchers to their funders for criticising the service on Twitter.”
- “Funder bars university from grant programme over white-male award line-up.”
- “A Senate inquiry has rejected a proposal to remove the government’s right to veto Australian Research Council grant recommendations.”
- “The worst of both worlds: A comparative analysis of errors in learning from data in psychology and machine learning.”
- A biotech CEO ousted for altering images in her research lands at a $150 million investment firm.
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Well-meaning open-access idealists never seemed to account for how the journals staff would be paid and how the massive computer servers would be maintained.
However, the idealists may be achieving another worthy goal – knocking the “glossies” off their pedestals. I recently decided to send a manuscript elsewhere after looking up the fee for a Nature-family journal. I’m sure I’m not the only one.
And NO, there is NOT money for those fees in my budget. The size of a modular NIH R01 grant has not changed since I started my lab in the late 90s.
Massive servers? They host PDFs and send some emails. They’re not running video games or AI. And open access makes it even easier techwise because it removes the need for reader authentication. The real cost of publishing is not tech, it’s staff. Most academics don’t appreciate this (“we do all the work of peer review!”) but managing the whole enterprise, doing typesetting and metadata takes time and effort. That’s much more work than signing up for AWS.
That’s why it’s possible to find free open access journals. The server costs are cheap and volunteers remove the need to employ staff. But because they have no marketing budget you need to go hunting (DOAJ is a good place to start).
Those Springer Nature staff are certainly worth every penny.
Regarding the UNI plagiarism story, “Pohl contested the discipline, and the dispute was decided in favor of UNI by an arbitrator in September 2021.”
As I understand these things, the court will first have to determine whether the arbitration agreement was entered into properly and was binding on both parties. If yes, then it will have to determine if this particular arbitration hearing was conducted properly. If yes, then the court will probably not intervene with the arbitration decision. It’s not common for courts to rehear an arbitration case just because one party is unhappy with the outcome.
In his abstract of the paper “Mendel the fraud?”, Gregory Radick mentions that one of the things commonly known about Gregor Mendel is that “there is something fishy, maybe even fraudulent, about the data that Mendel reported.” This, however, is mainly the result of prejudicial headlines and titles, as now in Retraction Watch and Radick’s paper, even if they include a question mark. Hartl and Fairbanks appropriately titled their article on the case, “Mud sticks: on the alleged falsification of Mendel’s data.” Radick’s article is behind a paywall and cannot be checked by many readers (including me). His abstract, however states: “…..the notion that Mendel’s numbers were, in statistical terms, too good to be true was well understood almost immediately after the famous “rediscovery” of his work in 1900.” The reality is that many later studies disproved that the data were too good to be true. Perhaps this is mentioned in the article, but it is unclear from the abstract. Indeed mud sticks. This year is Mendel’s 200th birthday; we could do justice to him by avoiding tendentious headlines and article titles.
Some relevant recent references (some open access):
Franklin A, Edwards AWF, Fairbanks DJ, Hartl DL, Seidenfeld T, editors. Ending the Mendel-Fisher Controversy University of Pittsburg Press; 2008.
Edwards AWF. Are Mendel’s results really too close? In Franklin A, Edwards AWF Fairbanks DJ, Hartl DL, Seidenfeld T, editors. Ending the Mendel-Fisher Controversy University of Pittsburg Press; 2008a. p141–163.
Hartl DL, Fairbanks DJ. Mud sticks: on the alleged falsification of Mendel’s data. Genetics. 2007;175:975–9.
Weeden N. Are Mendel’s data reliable? The perspective of a pea geneticist. J Hered. 2016;107:635–46.
Ellis, T.H.N., Hofer, J.M.I., Swain, M.T. et al. Mendel’s pea crosses: varieties, traits and statistics. Hereditas 156, 33 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1186/s41065-019-0111-y