Dear RW readers, can you spare $25?
The week at Retraction Watch featured:
- COPE integrity officer loses 22-year-old paper for image concerns
- Slovak science academy ‘strictly condemns’ government official’s paper on mRNA vaccines
- Guest post: In defense of direct replication studies (if they even need defending)
- Swedish regulators drop investigations into Chalmers’ prosthetics lab
- Science issues correction on a paper after repeat experiments and misconduct finding
Our list of retracted or withdrawn COVID-19 papers is up past 500. There are more than 60,000 retractions in The Retraction Watch Database — which is now part of Crossref. The Retraction Watch Hijacked Journal Checker now contains more than 300 titles. And have you seen our leaderboard of authors with the most retractions lately — or our list of top 10 most highly cited retracted papers? What about The Retraction Watch Mass Resignations List — or our list of nearly 100 papers with evidence they were written by ChatGPT?
Here’s what was happening elsewhere (some of these items may be paywalled, metered access, or require free registration to read):
- Trump administration terminates “millions worth of funding for Springer Nature.”
- CDC presentation cites nonexistent study on vaccine preservative risks.
- “What RFK Jr. Got Right About Academic Publishing.”
- “Sluggishness and defensiveness helped enable an executive order on research integrity,” says Science editor-in-chief.
- “The MAHA children’s health report mis-cited our research. That’s sloppy — and worrying.”
- “My famous father — the fraudulent, fantasist scientist.” A review of a new book by the daughter of Michael Briggs, who faked studies on oral contraceptives in the 1980s.
- “‘Paper mills’ are polluting the world of scientific literature with their false studies, researchers lament.”
- Professor who based his study on Francesca Gino’s “dishonest” work says he is “furious.”
- Researchers “reproduce 12 systematic reviews in two days.” Skeptics “urge caution.”
- Study backing “‘bone-strengthening’ exercise program should be retracted: experts.”
- ”Research Grants Increasingly Require Compliance With Trump’s Orders. Here’s How Colleges Are Responding.”
- James Heathers discusses the Medical Evidence Project, an initiative of our parent nonprofit, the Center for Scientific Integrity.
- “Scientific whistleblower faces defamation conviction” in Switzerland. A link to our coverage of the case.
- Researchers “argue that research—though intended to improve health—can lead to patient harm through the proliferation of honest (though occasionally dishonest) yet unacceptable research practices.”
- New platform “Preprint Watch” is “looking for signs that a preprint may indicate the early stages of a conceptual shift.”
- The podcast (in Portuguese) for the São Paulo Research Foundation’s news magazine talks with Mariana Ribeiro, one of our sleuths in residence.
- Higher Education board member from Turkey defends his paper, which was one of many retracted from Sage journal.
- “What scientists need to know about sharing—and protecting—their published work.”
- Researchers “analyzed multi-decadal entries of life sciences in the Retraction Watch database since 1976 to understand the trends and drivers of retraction across time, countries and reasons.”
- “Will Gates and other funders save massive public health database at risk from Trump cuts?”
- University revokes former South Korean First Lady’s masters degree “over plagiarism.”
- Researchers find “author academic influence functions as a signal of a manuscript’s impact, thereby enhancing its likelihood of acceptance.”
- “AI-mediated translation presents two possible futures for academic publishing in a multilingual world.”
- “Authors correct image errors in Neuron paper that challenged microglia-to-neuron conversion.”
- Ethics professors “have changed our position” and now argue “[d]isclosing generative AI use for writing assistance should be voluntary.”
- “My paper was probably reviewed by AI – and that’s a serious problem.”
- “The Great Scottish Tea Swindle: How a band of brew-swilling detectives brought down Scotland’s ‘Mr. Tea.’”
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“Trump administration terminates “millions worth of funding for Springer Nature.””
Not before time. It’s the fat publishers like Springer Nature science has to worry about, not the so-called paper mills. What do the fat cat publishers like Springer Nature, Elsevier and Wiley add to science, except take the money?
Springer Nature has many publications stuffed with problematic, on the page, data.
As they say, if you procrastinate long enough it’s the same as doing nothing.
Remember, just because Trump is against something is not a reason to be for it.
I understand that Barbara McClintock published the details of herwork on “position effect” variegation in maize in the Yearbooks of the Carnegie Institution Washington, 41-48, (1942-1949). Cold Spring Harbor, where Barbara McClintock was, was part of the Carnegie Institution at that time.
Couldn’t the main scientific institutions go back to publishing their research output in yearbooks, and cut out the the fat cat publishing houses? Many institutions still have yearbooks. That would be an alternative model to the current one.
That way people would get to know what made each scientific institution different, and would be a clear way to show what they were doing that hadn’t been done before.
This work was later summarized in P.N.A.S.
https://www.pnas.org/doi/epdf/10.1073/pnas.36.6.344
Sure, Trump does not want to push antivaxx agenda, but to end the publishing mafia.
Even if Trump only wanted to push the antivaxx agenda, that does not stop people pointing out problematic data. It is something everybody can do.
I do enjoy it when spokespersons for universities, other scientific institutions, publishers, say from behind gritted teeth: ” we believe in the highest standards at all time”, or some formulation of that. People are free to believe what they want, but the lapses in scientific standards are proof that they don’t really give a toss, except when it makes them look careless, reckless…
Without pointing out problematic data they would not even say that.
In addition to the problems already raised in the article on AI-generated reports, those additionally bring major confidentiality questions: LLMs typically reuse everything thrown their way for further training, so there is a definite possibility that bits and pieces of the manuscript which the referee received under a confidentiality agreement will resurface into some future output.
If you look at the surge of tortured phrases and LLM-generated nonsense, the argument about voluntary disclosure is moot and even dangerous.
“Trump administration terminates “millions worth of funding for Springer Nature.””
On a medical librarian discussion list, a comms rep from Springer Nature told us “Please don’t believe everything you read, particularly when the only source is anonymous. … The inference in the article that federal agencies have cancelled $20m of spend with Springer Nature is not true.”