Weekend reads: Journals are MAGA’s ‘latest target’; a psychedelic retraction; professor sues rival over plagiarism accusations

Dear RW readers, can you spare $25?

The week at Retraction Watch featured:

• Journal tells author its retracting three papers for concept that ‘violates’ law of thermodynamics
• Apparent NCI director candidate wants ‘open, respectful’ post-publication peer review while promoting anonymous site that calls sleuths a ‘mob’
• Paper rejected for AI, fake references published elsewhere with hardly anything changed

Our list of retracted or withdrawn COVID-19 papers is up past 500.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):

• “How Scientific Journals Became MAGA’s Latest Target.”
• “Psychedelics meta-analysis retracted after authors request ‘significant changes.’”
• Professor suing “rival who he claims trolled him with ‘scandalous’ allegations of plagiarism.
• Researcher shares experience being the “victim of a predatory journal.”
• “India’s retraction crisis casts shadow over science research.”
• “More than two dozen papers by neural tube researcher come under scrutiny.”
• “’Patent mills’: when the patent becomes a tool for scientific fraud.”
• Fewer psychology papers report results on the “border of statistical significance,” analysis finds. 
• Science funder explains why they are “no longer funding journal publications.”
• NIH to implement a public access plan on July 1st, in which papers will become immediately publicly available: A “Q&A for Authors.”
• A “risk to research integrity”: “Citation Contamination by Paper Mill Articles” in the life sciences “remained low but increased over time.”
• Publishers “have maintained large and persistent gender pay gaps favouring men since 2018, despite promises to close the gender gap,” journal editors say. 
• “Funding competition sabotages science.”
• “Springer Nature Portfolio has launched a “Discover” series of journals that seem to deliberately and systematically mimic the MDPI brand.”
• “Customers, sleuths and the shadowy owner of a paper mill” discuss for-sale authorship.
• “University of South Wales ‘failed to file research integrity statement’” for two years.
• AI “hallucinations” are a “growing problem for the legal profession.” Try not to appear in the database.
• “Can AI help authors prepare better risk science manuscripts?”
• “Peer review protip: even if you’re SURE the author made an elementary mistake, hedge your review,” advises ecology researcher.
• “Please Plagiarize My Work”: “preoccupation” with citations and credit “limits the reach of our research.”
• Researchers look into predatory journals in OpenAlex and caution the “responsibility to deal with possible fraudulent content is squarely on the users.”
• Are those research participants in your study really bots?
• “North Korea’s nuclear test detection project fails amid serious ethical concerns.”
• Does “revealing article reviewer credentials through social media” constitute ethical misconduct?
• Open access dataset shows “machine learning techniques can effectively support” detection of retracted research.
• Was the “gold standard science” executive order a “foreseeable outcome of a movement that overstated the problems in science?”
• “Demonstrating journal value beyond rankings”: president of Springer Nature says journal ranking systems are “overemphasised as indicators of significance and novelty.”
• Linguist offers a “rhetorical perspective” on fraudulent research and the replication crisis and the “state of scientific discourse  in the twenty-first century.”
• “Open-access revolution is squeezing scientific societies’ budgets, survey shows.”
• “The search for peer reviewers”: Peer review has “turned into the academic equivalent of arranging deck chairs on the Titanic.”

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