Weekend reads: A psychology researcher’s confession, a state senator’s plagiarism

Yet another busy week at Retraction Watch, with one of us taking part in a symposium on the future of science journalism for a few days. (See if you can find Ivan in this picture.) Here’s what was happening elsewhere on the web in science publishing and related issues:

• Admirable: “Let me share the lessons learned from 5 research publications that don’t sit well with me,” psychology researcher Todd Kashdan writes of his own work. “This is my confession.”
• A New York State senator plagiarized a high school student’s blog post in a bill designed to safeguard killer whales. Senator Greg Ball’s responses to the coverage of the incident are worth a look.
• “Peer review is also only as good and effective as the people managing the process, and the large variation in standards that exists is one of the reasons some of the research and related communities have become critical of and disillusioned with the traditional model of peer review.” Publishing consultant Irene Hames, who has been active in the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE), takes a look at peer review in the 21st century.
• Neuroskeptic wonders what Open Access Publishing London and Publication Integrity and Ethics — which figured in a November post — really think about duplicate publication, given that at least a few OAPL papers appear to be duplicates.
• The Washington Post will stop publishing health and science press releases, following criticism by the Knight Science Journalism Tracker’s Paul Raeburn. As Andrew Gelman writes, “it’s the job of a serious journalist to read the press release and use it in a story, not just to reprint it!”
• Petard Watch? After numerous press releases about exoplanet research, a new press release is headlined “Rife with hype, exoplanet study needs patience and refinement.”
• “Working to improve the self-correction process is not equivalent to ‘reducing the opportunity for scientific mistakes that turn into big ideas,'” writes Gelman in a different post, taking issue with another essay. “Rather, it’s about getting to those big ideas more effectively.”
• “We all bring bias to what we do,” writes Emily Willingham in a piece expressing concern about undisclosed conflicts of interest in a paper about environmental toxicants and autism. “Avoiding this bias in science requires vigilance.”
• A pair of medical education researchers worry that “more rigorous screening of data reported by reviewers…implies a return to the post-positivist stance that long dominated and hampered the acceptance of qualitative research in health sciences education.”
• Australia’s ABC News picks up on the halted brain cell trial we covered in January. (Quotes Adam.)
• Japanese authorities have raided Novartis’s Tokyo offices, part of a continuing investigation that has already led to two retractions.