Weekend reads: Western publishing at a ‘breaking point’; NIH to cap publisher fees; sleuths say their work is being ‘weaponized’ 

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The week at Retraction Watch featured:

• Viral paper on black plastic kitchen utensils earns second correction
• Harvard researcher’s work faces scrutiny after $39 million private equity deal
• When it comes to conflicts of interest, affiliations are apparently no smoking gun
• Do you need informed consent to study public posts on social media? 
• Retraction for ‘unsound’ analysis was ‘disproportionate and discouraging,’ author says

Our list of retracted or withdrawn COVID-19 papers is up past 500.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

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

• “How the Growth of Chinese Research Is Bringing Western Publishing to Breaking Point.”
• “NIH Plans to Cap Publisher Fees, Dilute ‘Scientific Elite.'”
• “Research-integrity sleuths say their work is being ‘twisted’ to undermine science.”
• “Nature retracts paper on novel brain cell type against authors’ wishes.”
• Limiting federal scientists to government journals “would compromise scientific research:” op-ed.
• “Most science is published from countries lacking in democracy and freedom of press,” say John Ioannidis and a colleague.
• “Can academics use AI to write journal papers? What the guidelines say.”
• “The world of scientific journals on the verge of suffocation.”
• A study linking wildfire smoke and dementia risk is retracted after researchers find an “and/or” coding error.
• Minister of Education nominee “faces allegations of thesis theft” and “splitting papers” before confirmation hearing.
• Researchers find “patterns of irreproducibility across an entire life sciences research field” after analyzing 400 Drosophila papers. 
• Committee finds “gross negligence” in work by former German university president.
• “Tell the Bot to Tell the Bot About the Bot”: When AI instructions show up in academic papers.
• “To bioRxiv or not to bioRxiv?” Commentary on a study of “How COVID-19 affected academic publishing.”
• Editorial: “Addressing gaps in author and reviewer gender diversity.”
• “Scholarly publishing’s hidden diversity: How exclusive databases sustain the oligopoly of academic publishers.”
• University “cuts funding, class credit status from undergraduate research journal.” 
• Psychology’s research problems lie beyond its practices in its fundamentals, which are “grounded in their insufficiently elaborated underlying philosophy of science“: researchers. 
• Survey reveals over a quarter of researchers report observed misconduct “within their networks,” but less than 3% tell on themselves.
• “The Race to Publish, Publication Pressures, and Questionable Practices: Rethinking the System.”
• The 13 top Indonesian universities flagged in the research integrity risk index.
• A proposal for dual journal submission which works “by requiring the researcher to give the right to proceed to peer review (and eventual publication) to only one journal.”
• “Strengthening Australia’s research integrity system“: More on Charles Piller’s book.
• “Metascience can improve science — but it must be useful to society, too.”
• COPE’s new guideline on guest editors. A look at our recent coverage of a guest editor blunder. 
• “Bias in STEM publishing still punishes women”: An adapted excerpt from a physician researcher’s book. 
• Systematic reviewers are “uniquely positioned – and ethically obligated – to detect problematic studies and champion research integrity.”
• “Bounty Hunters for Science”: a proposal for funders to “establish one or more bounty programs aimed at rewarding people who identify significant problems with federally-funded research.”
• “Japan requires name change after marriage — with big effects on female scientists.”
• Researcher says authors should  “reproduce an existing paper in the same field that is currently under review” for every paper they submit to be published. 
• “AI ‘scientists’ joined these research teams: here’s what happened.”
• “Leadership change at African journal sparks calls for bold reform,” and “researchers say it must evolve to better serve the scientific community.”
• “Staying ahead of the curve: a decade of preprints in biology.”

Retraction Watch Journalism Internship

Applications for our fall journalism internship are open! We typically take current or recent journalism graduate students with an interest in research integrity and scientific publishing. Learn more and apply here. Deadline: July 18.

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