Weekend reads: The strain on publishing; Gino defends herself; the rise of fake peer review retractions

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The week at Retraction Watch featured:

• How a canceled panel on sex plays into censorship by the right: A guest post
• One year later, bioinformatics journal with unclear leadership yet to retract plagiarized article
• Nobel Prize winner Gregg Semenza tallies tenth retraction
• To guard against fraud, medical research should be a profession:  A book excerpt
• Authors file complaint with publisher as journal retracts vaping paper
• Signs of undeclared ChatGPT use in papers mounting

Our list of retracted or withdrawn COVID-19 papers is up to well over 350. There are more than 43,000 retractions in The Retraction Watch Database — which is now part of Crossref. The Retraction Watch Hijacked Journal Checker now contains well over 200 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? Or The Retraction Watch Mass Resignations List?

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

• “The strain on scientific publishing.”
• “‘I Am Innocent’: Embattled HBS Prof. Francesca Gino Defends Against Data Fraud Allegations in Letter to Faculty.”
• The remarkable rise of retractions because of faked peer review, with data from the RW Database. And a case in point from Norway.
• “Swedish National Board for Assessing Research Misconduct confirms that research which the Lancet refused to retract is fraudulent.”
• “Spanish university administrator and colleagues linked to ‘factory’ producing fraudulent scientific studies.”
• “Keywords to success: a practical guide to maximise the visibility and impact of academic papers.”
• The U.S. “Office of Research Integrity (ORI) proposes to revise the Public Health Service (PHS) Policies on Research Misconduct.”
• “Who’s Afraid of Open Science?” asks the head of public affairs and advocacy for North America at Frontiers.
• “A bibliometric study of article retractions in technology fields in developing economies countries.”
• “AI beats human sleuth at finding problematic images in research papers.” Reporting on a preprint we previously highlighted.
• “Biomedical publishing: Past historic, present continuous, future conditional.”
• “Listing quality: Chinese journal lists in incoherent valuation regimes.”
• “Risk And Reward In Peer Review.”
• “Spitting out the AI Gobbledegook sandwich: a suggestion for publishers.”
• “Plagiarising professor stays in post and threatens student journalists.”
• “Ending Human-Dependent Peer Review.”
• The New York Times and The New Yorker offer longreads on the Francesca Gino and Dan Ariely story.
• “How ‘Preapproved Narratives’ Corrupt Science.”
• Scholars in Malaysia are no longer allowed to use public funds to publish articles in journals owned by MDPI, Hindawi and Frontiers.
• “Meanwhile, our commercial peers have mechanisms to conveniently generate new journals every year. Many of these are fine publications, but there is a profit associated with each of them.”
• “A Critical Examination of the Ethics of AI-Mediated Peer Review.”
• What do biomedical PhD students do when faced with dilemmas?
• “Double-anonymous review is an effective way of combating status bias in scholarly publishing.”
• “Top science journal faced secret attacks from Covid conspiracy theory group.”
• “The Lancet was made for political activism,” writes Ashley Rindsberg in Unherd.
• “Hundreds sign letter against spiking of sexual misconduct chapter.”
• “Are the lists of questionable journals reasonable: A case study of early warning journal lists.”
• “Open peer review urgently requires evidence: A call to action.”
• “‘In case I die, I need to publish this paper’: scientist who left the lab to fight in Ukraine.”
• “Is Substack a brave new world for academic publishing?”

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