This week at Retraction Watch featured a change of heart by a journal, and a look at Nature’s addition of double-blind peer review. Here’s what was happening elsewhere:
- A psychology journal bans null hypothesis significance testing, aka “bans P values,” which led to a rapidly filling inbox for Andrew Gelman.
- Willie Soon, a climate change skeptic at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, took money from fossil fuel interests without disclosing it in papers, The New York Times reports. (The Boston Globe had some of this in a story in January.) The story has prompted an investigation by Congress that has snared an unlikely target, Roger Pielke, Jr., and an op-ed by the Globe’s Dante Ramos in which he points out that “for institutions, the term [academic freedom] shouldn’t be bureaucratese for ‘looking the other way.’“
- “Editors behaving badly?” Dorothy Bishop has an update on “unusual editorial practices at two journals – Research in Developmental Disabilities and Research in Autism Spectrum Disorders.”
- The departure of Norwegian medical journal editor Charlotte Haug brings the journal’s independence into question.
- Dong-Pyou Han has pleaded guilty to HIV vaccine fraud, admitting that his fakery cost the U.S. government between $7 million and $20 million. He could face prison time.
- A scientist tallies up the cost of misidentified cell lines, Jill Neimark reports in Science (paywalled).
- “Positively Negative: A New PLOS ONE Collection focusing on Negative, Null and Inconclusive Results” appears, prompting a WIRED headline, “Scientists Are Wrong All The Time, and That’s Fantastic.”
- “Tortured data will confess to anything,” says Dallas Morning News columnist Scott Burns.
- “Lawyers employ Underpants Gnome lawyering because sometimes it works,” writes Popehat’s Ken White of Mario Saad’s attempts to block publication of expressions of concern about his work. “It didn’t this time.” Sounds a lot like the Streisand Effect.
- “If you don’t publish in the top journals you will not get tenure, you will not get grants, you will not get promoted. So there’s tremendous incentive to do whatever you need to do to get published.” Ivan talks to the University of Melbourne’s Up Close podcast.
- The University of Queensland “suppressed study into racism on buses and ‘victimised’ its co-author,” The Guardian Australia reports.
- Academic science no longer loses more women than men, according to a new study. At the same time, a piece in the Journal of Women’s Health asks, “Why Don’t More Women Rise to Leadership Positions in Academic Medicine?“
- Paging Republican presidential hopeful Ben Carson, MD: “Right-Wing Brain Surgeons: The Case of Surgical Neurology International.”
- “How to Write a Humane Rejection Letter: Advice from a Journal Editor.”
- An unexpected retraction.
- “”Quality control in science journals is evolving,” The Economist reports, “with a code of ethics in hot pursuit.”
- “Do medical experts need peer-reviewed support?” asks a trial lawyer.
- “People with budgetary oversight should to consider whether publishing fees and conference fees are spent with due diligence when faculty members propose to publish or attend conferences.” A look at predatory publishing in the American Journal of Pharmaceutical Education.
- “[H]ostile media perceptions have a direct association with climate activism that is conditioned by political ideology,” according to a new study.
- Want to work at the U.S. Office of Research Integrity?
- An obituary for an open access journal, by Jeffrey Beall.
- “If we wait for perfect evidence, we will wait forever. Perfect evidence is Santa Claus: (spoiler alert) It does not exist.” Silence by academic researchers is dangerous, argues Y. Claire Wang.
- Random House has published a retraction and apology over an allegation against Australian senator in autobiography.
- “[R]esearchers expect published data to be accessible, generally through a database or repository,” according to a new survey published in PLOS ONE.
- “While open records requests are designed to protect press freedom, they also make it possible for people who oppose certain scientific viewpoints to exploit them.” Anna Clark on why scientists often hate records requests.
- “The use of laboratory animals in the largest U.S. labs has grown 70% over the last two decades, according to institutional records obtained by PETA,” Peter Aldhous reports.
- “Does pursuing serendipity really bring about better scientific outcomes?” asks a new study.
- Seven tips on what makes a popular science video on YouTube.
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Peter Nijkamp of Free University Amsterdam was recently awarded with an Honorary Doctorate Degree by the Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań (Poland). Journalist Frank van Kolfschooten presents details on his blog about this event (including a press release of the Free University of Amsterdam about this event, written by Peter Nijkamp himself). See http://frankvankolfschooten.nl/wordpress/?p=755 for more details (in Dutch).
An English translation of the settlement between Richard Gill of Leiden University and Peter Nijkamp / Karima Kourtit of Free University Amsterdam is now available on the homepage of Richard Gill http://www.math.leidenuniv.nl/~gill/declaration.txt
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Richard Gill has also initiated a crowdfunding project to get an English version of the entire report of the anonymous complainer (NN) in the case against Peter Nijkamp and Karima Kourtit, see http://www.math.leidenuniv.nl/~gill/Nijkamp/ and https://www.gofundme.com/namegc for more details (also with links to postings on RW).
The departure of Norwegian medical journal editor Charlotte Haug brings the journal’s independence into question.
BMJ link is paywalled (showing only enough to hint at ‘resignation’ under duress) and the second link is broken. Can you say more?
Fixed, thanks: http://www.cmaj.ca/site/earlyreleases/23feb15_Norwegian-editors-exit-sparks-alarm.xhtml
A PubPeer commentator is concerned by the fact that Elsevier and Springer are making profit from a duplicate publication, stating: “No advantage for the careful shopper here: Springer and Elsevier are selling the duplicate papers for the same price, $39.95.” The commentator further indicates his/her disgust with the authors: “Some of the same authors have since gone on to create “super-duplicate” publications – duplicate publications that cite pairs of earlier duplicate publications:
https://pubpeer.com/publications/15438FA2DFECF01A315412676167FD
https://pubpeer.com/publications/E0CD56F344C1F0DAE48B243EF67534 ”
The full comments here:
https://pubpeer.com/publications/DC9E190D0580B40792D15A62128467#fb25980
https://pubpeer.com/publications/F53F906F121BA8E802B795010DA2D6#fb25981
Perhaps it’s time for mainstream STM publishers like Elsevier and Springer to start addressing real concerns about actual or potential profit from duplicate publications, erroneous science and other issues plaguing many of their journals. The list is only going to get bigger and bigger as move swing into PPPR mode, so the sooner these publishing behemouths address these issues publicly, the better.
The issue of special issues as big money makers for Gold OA publishers deserves much wider examination. So, Beall should be praised for raising awareness:
http://scholarlyoa.com/2015/02/24/so-called-special-issues-of-journals-big-money-for-gold-oa-publishers
But, as one of the anonymous commentators (“A concerned author”) on that blog comments, so too, must we then also analyze publishers like Elsevier and their Procedia: “By the way, have you had a chance to look at the Procedia published by elsevier. The use the same ways as you mentioned and the articles have quite poor quality, although there is a guest editor for each issue. Papers are usually collected through spamming the researchers, students, and conferences. How would you explain this?” This commentator may be onto something, in fact, given that the referenced Procedia have appeared at RW before:
http://retractionwatch.com/2013/08/06/that-face-rings-a-bell-but-where-have-i-published-it-before/
And other retractions in other Elsevier Procedia, for example:
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1877705813003536
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S187704281100766X
In fact, enters the keywords “procedia retracted” in Elsevier’s sciencedirect.com and observe quite a number of retractions from Elsevier Procedia. This volume of retractions in itself deserves much greater attention than the “special issues” published by so-called predatory open access journals.
“The null hypothesis significance testing procedure is invalid” declares an editor, referring to several papers previously published by said same editor. There’s some heavy weight lifting statistical theoretical advance right there. Awesome! As a statistician, I look forward to more statistical advances by David Trafimow. I’ll tear up that useless Ph.D. certificate I received from the University of Washington. The statistician professors there were such boneheads, with their Stanford degrees and stuff! How did I not see that??
” . . . we hope that by instituting the first NHSTP ban, we demonstrate that psychology does not need the crutch of the NHSTP . . . ”
Throw away that crutch, and walk! Ye are healed!
This is going to be a hoot.