Weekend reads: How to rescue science, what “censorship” really means, worst paper of the year?

Another very busy week at Retraction Watch. There were a lot of gems elsewhere. Here’s a sampling:

• Biomedical research in the U.S. must be rescued, write four heavy hitters in PNAS. It’s “time to confront the dangers at hand and rethink some fundamental features of the US biomedical research ecosystem.”
• “If you’re yelled at, boycotted, have your show canceled, or get banned from an Internet community, your free speech rights aren’t being violated.” XKCD at its best.
• “This is possibly the worst paper I’ve read all year.” Lior Pachter stones the marijuana-brain changes study. Another takedown here.
• “Dear Academia, I loved you, but I’m leaving you. This relationship is hurting me.”
• Is the scientific paper a fraud? Two researchers revisit Peter Medawar’s 1963 talk. (subscription required)
• See Arr Oh reflects on a lab group with 11 recent corrections.
• “Would You Submit A Paper To This Publisher?” asks Jeffrey Beall.
• “[W]hile there is no reasonable doubt that Stapel, Smeesters, and Sanna all faked, there is that Mendel did,” notes Uri Simonsohn. “Why? Why does the same statistical anomaly make a compelling case against the psychologists but not Mendel?”
• “Social media is just the biggest research conference in the world,” writes Zen Faulkes in a look at the importance of post-publication peer review.
• Even five-year-olds don’t like plagiarism. Of course, kindergartners don’t vote.
• Paul Simon meets science satire: The NSF has trained an elite force of grant reviewers equipped with 50 ways of rejecting grants.
• Introducing Super Closed Access Journals!
• Is success at science fairs “10/10 Privilege, 0/10 Ability?”
• Did that study really take socioeconomic status into account? Here’s how to tell.
• Documents obtained through FOIA “show conflicts of interest for the FDA ethicist who investigated a fetal drug experiment,” Alice Dreger and Ellen K. Feder report.
• “Medicine may be a noble profession, but its members do not always act nobly.” (subscription required)
• Judy Mikovits will be speaking at Autism One, an annual conference that typically features discussions of how vaccines cause autism. Her talk: “Environmental Causes of Autism: Investigate If You Dare.”
• “Let’s elevate the tone of the commentary and let’s comment on the vast majority of papers that are good and not headed for Retraction Watch,” urges Lenny Teytelman of PubChase.
• It’s may be publish or perish, but Jonathan Eisen says it’s also tweet and blog or perish.

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