Weekend reads: Why some scientists lie, the state of academic integrity in Iran, Nature goes double-blind

The week at Retraction Watch featured Matlab miscoding and a look at how often a retracted paper was cited. Here’s what was happening elsewhere:

• What pushes scientists to lie? asks The Guardian.
• “[T]he state of academic integrity in Iran is not unlike that of other Western nations.” Iranian ghost authors tell all.
• Close your eyes: Nature journals are now letting authors elect to use “double-blind” peer review, in which they hide their names and affiliations from reviewers.
• Such blinding may come in handy for scientists who are from the “non-preferred class,” according to a study in Research Policy that found that even small biases on the part of grant reviewers can affect funding rates.
• Where there is smoke, there’s fire: A Swiss anti-smoking organization is calling for the withdrawal of tobacco-company sponsored papers (not peer-reviewed) that the company used to deter the UK from adopting Australia’s practice of using plain packaging for cigarettes. In response, the authors are asking “the anti-smoking organization OxyRomandie and its president Mr. Diethelm to stop their defamatory campaign against us and the University of Zurich.”
• Leiden University has weighed in on a dispute between Richard Gill, Peter Nijkamp, and Karima Kourtit (Dutch) that had led to a few retractions. As Gill describes it, “After several hearings including one where all parties were present together, a “verklaring” (declaration) was drawn up, which all parties could agree to, and whereby the conflict between Kourtit and Nijkamp on the one hand, and myself on the other hand, is considered by all parties to be settled. I am very grateful to the CWI for their patient and careful work.”
• Leonid Schneider follows up on the Jens Christian Schwamborn case for Laborjournal.
• Trying to figure out the best mix for your lab? According to a new study, “while postdocs account for the large majority of publication outputs, graduate students and postdocs with external funding contribute equally to breakthrough publications. Moreover, technicians are key contributors to breakthrough publications, but not to overall productivity.”
• Ivan has been in Australia to give talks in Melbourne and Lorne. Here’s a vodcast of his University of Melbourne presentation.
• Lenny Teytelman is depressed: “In contrast to the pharmaceutical shift towards collaboration, academic research has become dangerously competitive on all levels (competition to publish, to get a position, to get funding).”
• Focus on Fraud: CNRS International Magazine dedicates a special report to the topic.
• Would these journal titles fool you into publishing in the wrong place?
• The Brazilian press picks up the story of one of its country’s star researchers who’s suing a journal to prevent retractions.
• A strange new publisher has debuted with 42 new journals, reports Jeffrey Beall, and a commenter notes that the publisher’s site plagiarized from Nature’s 1869 mission statement.
• “John Ioannidis has dedicated his life to quantifying how science is broken.” A Q&A by Julia Belluz of Vox.
• The U.S. Office of Research Integrity is offering grants to study research integrity.
• Kidney International has moved from Nature Publishing Group to Elsevier.
• Der Speigel interviews Debora Weber-Wolff about VroniPlag and Europe’s “right to be forgotten” law (German).
• Questionable conferences continue to proliferate.
• After failed trials of drugs for fragile X syndrome, “researchers need to rethink how they measure the drugs’ effectiveness,” says one scientist.
• “When researchers share data, everyone wins,” says Jennifer Richler.
• What can we learn from millions of RateMyProfessor reviews?
• David Gorski Steven Novella of Science-Based Medicine is concerned that, “taken out of context,” a recent study of how the FDA deals with fraud “can be used to dismiss any scientific findings that one finds inconvenient to their ideology.”
• “The [Research Excellence Framework’s] formal assessment of the impact of academic work was highly controversial in theory: how did it play out in practice?” asks Times Higher Education.
• “In the past, researchers who had nothing to say were not incentivized to publish but nowadays they also have to publish continually. Non-performance has been replaced by the performance of nonsense.”
• A Spanish television show has clarified that no, smelling lemons will not prevent cancer (Spanish).
• An update on the Paolo Macchiarini case: The surgeon has been cleared of some charges (Italian).
• Why does science find it so difficult to set the record straight? asks François-Xavier Coudert.
• Launched: The Journal of Brief Ideas, “a citable online index of research articles that are 200 words or fewer.”
• Science fraud hunters encounter collective denial: Jop de Frieze on whistleblowers (Dutch; requires subscription).
• The University of Illinois used a DMCA takedown notice to have a student’s coursework removed from GitHub. They later rescinded that demand.
• A potential autism gene gets downgraded.