Weekend reads: A whistleblower finds possible misconduct — again; embracing failure; radical transparency for journals

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The week at Retraction Watch featured:

• Exclusive: UCLA found a longtime researcher faked data – but made a strange mistake in its report
• Deceptive Academic Journals: An excerpt from The Predator Effect
• Pain researchers lose three papers after Cochrane group questioned data
• Author critical of study involving abortion hires lawyers after journal flags paper
• “A huge relief”: Journal takes down plagiarized paper after Retraction Watch reporting

Our list of retracted or withdrawn COVID-19 papers is up to 268. There are more than 36,000 retractions in our database — which 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):

• “‘I’m nauseated’: Alzheimer’s whistleblower finds possible misconduct by his mentor in their papers.”
• “STEM Graduate Programs Should Embrace Failure.”
• “Radical transparency can fix bad behaviour by academic journals.”
• “The Quiet Invasion of ‘Big Information'”: A look at Elsevier’s parent company.
• “From plagiarism to scientific paper mills: a profile of retracted articles within the SciELO Brazil collection.”
• “I never received a reply to this correspondence from the publication’s authors.” A Juul vice president takes to PubPeer.
• “Conduct probe exonerates scientist accused of obscuring pandemic’s origin.”
• “Is peer review running out of steam?”
• “For She had Eyes and Chose Preprints.”
• “Medical articles in questionable journals are less impactful than those in non-questionable journals but still extensively cited.”
• “Scientific Integrity: A Duty for Researchers.”
• “Sanctions Recommended for Lawyer Accused of Filing Fake News Story With Appeals Court.”
• Wrongful firing case against Sandia contractor can be heard in state court.” The contractor made allegations of scientific misconduct.
• “Construction and management of retraction stigma in retraction notices: an authorship-based investigation.”
• “Messing with Merton: The intersection between Open Science practices and Mertonian values.”
• “Does early publishing in top journals really predict long-term scientific success in the business field?”
• “It took 199 days on average for papers to get published in 2011/12 and 163 days in 2019/20.”
• An astronomer accused of harassment has sued his critics for defamation.
• “Addressing low-profile misconduct in management academia through theoretical triangulation and transformative ethics education.”
• “Citations are allotted according to a mixture of the “rich get richer” rule and sheer chance.”
• “The University of Wyoming (UW) will repay all costs questioned by the National Science Foundation (NSF) OIG…”
• “The necessity for errata to scientific publications is increasing with the increase in publications which do not send proofs to authors.”
• “In Publishing, Don’t Make the Perfect the Enemy of the Good.”
• “This article has been deleted following a threat of legal action from Dr. William Powers…”
• There is a new member of the Retraction Watch Leaderboard: Dong Mei Wu, coming in at #17 with 35 retractions.

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