Weekend reads: An editorial board resigns over interference; what a manuscript rejection means; the scientific 1%

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The week at Retraction Watch featured:

• Exclusive: Ohio State researcher kept six-figure job for more than a year after a misconduct finding
• Widely shared vitamin D-COVID-19 preprint removed from Lancet server
• ‘No malicious intent’: Authors retract week-old Science Advances paper based on embargoed data
• Publisher retracting five papers because of “clear evidence” that they were “computer generated”
• Third journal scammed by rogue editors
• ‘Conference organizers have ignored this:’ How common is plagiarism and duplication in abstracts?

Our list of retracted or withdrawn COVID-19 papers is up to 85.

Here’s what was happening elsewhere (some of these items may be paywalled, metered access, or require free registration to read):

• The editorial board of a journal in Peru resigned after a university official asked for the editor to be fired after he did not publish work promoting ivermectin for COVID-19.
• “What does a manuscript rejection really mean? (Probably not what you think)”
• “In their analysis of more than four million authors and 26 million scientific papers, they found the top 1% of all scientists increased their citation share to 21% in 2015, up 7% from 2000.”
• “Indeed, after 10 years as a journal editor, seeing how things work behind the scenes, I’m convinced that journals and the people who run them…are a bigger culprit for the spread of bad science than are individual researchers.”
• “The fundamental challenge that we face is that publishing has, for decades, functioned based on trust. Unfortunately, it has become clear that there are some individuals and groups who are intent to deceive and abuse this trust…”
• “The increasing volume of this ‘junk science’ is wreaking havoc on the credibility of the research emanating out of China,” say two journal editors.
• “[Y]an acknowledged…that her three co-authors on the original Sept. 14 paper were pseudonyms.” COVID-19 origin misinformation goes viral.
• “A scholar’s address about racism and music theory was met with a vituperative, personal response by a small journal. It faced calls to cease publishing.”
• A controversial paper about “comfort women” has lost Harvard an archival donation.
• “Research linking violent entertainment to aggression retracted after scrutiny.” Our coverage of the 2019 retractions.
• “Librarians and the failure of data interoperability.”
• “Top German geoscientist fired after police raid, faces allegations of financial crimes.”
• “An occasional justification for publishing dangerous or creepy research is that sunlight is the best disinfectant…”
• “A dark landscape unfurls itself across the world of scientific information, forcing us to question and improve its current state.” “Publish, perished…cursed!”
• Researchers who published a paper on unprofessional peer reviews now say that “priority should be given to repairing the negative cultural zeitgeist that exists in peer-review.”
• “Sloppy work or deliberate fraud can make your theory seem correct enough to get published in one prestigious journal, and cited in many others.”
• “Scientific Integrity Is Threatened by Image Duplications.”
• “Retracted papers on SARS-CoV-2 and COVID-19.”
• “That’s the good news. Here’s the bad: the website Retraction Watch last week announced that its list of retracted coronavirus-related scientific papers has now added its 84th entry.”
• “Findings suggest that editorial positions in academic journals, possibly one of the most powerful decision-making roles in academic psychology and neuroscience, are not balanced in gender or geographical representation.”
• “Recently, the reference manager Zotero has introduced a feature that alerts users when an article in their database has been retracted. One could imagine a similar feature being introduced for replication studies…it is much less straightforward…”
• “In summary, many articles cite retracted publications, with the majority of these references occurring before the retraction.”
• There but for the Grace McFadden go all of us.

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