Weekend reads: Backstabbing; plagiarism irony; preprints to the rescue

The week at Retraction Watch featured a call for the retraction of a paper in NEJM, and a withdrawal of a paper because authors couldn’t pay the page charges. Here’s what was happening elsewhere:

• Was this, from In Baby Attach Mode, a case of academic backstabbing? DrugMonkey’s not sure, and In Baby Attach Mode reflects on the response.
• The vice president of academic affairs at Wheelock College — who oversees cases of student plagiarism there — has admitted to plagiarizing.
• The FOIAing of scientists’ emails continues. This week, The New York Times ran a story based on Freedom of Information Acts requests, and Marion Nestle weighed in, as did Steven Corneliussen.
• Peer review “is a troubled process,” says Stephen Curry. “Preprints offer a way out.”
• So, are preprints in paleontology really that radical? asks Andrew Farke.
• A new journal, Discrete Analysis, will “be purely an arXiv overlay journal,” writes Tim Gowers. “That is, rather than publishing, or even electronically hosting, papers, it will consist of a list of links to arXiv preprints.”
• Psychology should aim for 100% reproducibility, says Neuroskeptic. But Lisa Feldman Barrett says psychology is not in crisis. Huw Green explains what he real crisis is, and Dan Mirman explains what it was like to have his study replicated.
• “Unsurprisingly, postpublication review has proven more effective at detecting instances of nonreproducibility and fraud than traditional peer review.” Transplantation journal editor James Hutchinson reviews the evidence for pre- and post-publication peer review.
• Why is science so straight? asks Manil Suri.
• What to do about predatory publishers? Richard Poynder has a modest proposal.
• Should academics be polite about others’ work, or say what they really think? asks Andrew Gelman.
• If you need a more specific guide, see this one for reviewer language, from Kerstin Brachhold.
• “Researchers are not ‘hoodwinked’ victims,” says Cameron Neylon. “All choose to play the publishing game and some can choose to change it.”
• “To his credit, in his reply brief Goodman retracted this wild and unfounded argument.”
• The scientists who say they’ve discovered a new human species “tried to publish a dozen papers on the find,” Dan Vergano reports. “But this effort led to their rejection by the prestigious journal Nature, a diss widely discussed in paleontology.” See more discussion on Twitter.
• Retractions: A guide for students, courtesy of Stephen Ornes.
• Rakesh Kumar has filed an objection (and Exhibit A) to George Washington University’s request to dismiss the lawsuit he filed against them for removing him as department chair.
• Which health studies should you believe? A profile of Gary Schwitzer and Health News Review.
• A newspaper retraction: “The Sentinel-Review has learned that information recently published in our pages and online, about the delivery of a baby on a train, may be untrue.”
• Ivan was in Dresden speaking this week, speaking at the Research Ethics in the Digital Age summer school. Here’s a recap of the week.
• Amgen can’t depose Cancer Letter reporter Paul Goldberg about a story that sparked a class action lawsuit, a judge has ruled.
• “[T]he ‘self-correcting norm’ that has served science well for the past 500 years is no longer enough to protect science’s special place in society,” argues Daniel Sarewitz, in a discussion of the place of scientific reproducibility in politics.
• Is it time for a moratorium on “quitpieces” in which academics explain why they’re leaving academia? asks Ian Bogost.
• Seems almost criminal: “In criminology journals in particular, replication studies constitute just over 2 percent of the articles published between 2006 and 2010,” according to a new study.
• Opportunistic biases “can often be stronger than those of the effects being investigated, leading to invalid conclusions and a lack of clarity in research results,” say the authors of a new paper.
• Learn why “submitting to this journal is like playing a slot machine, you may hit a jackpot, or you may have to pay up to 800 euros,” via Jeffrey Beall.
• Garbage in, garbage out? Apply for National Sanitation Foundation funding (via Andrew Gelman).
• Want help with academic cover letters? Karen Kelsky has you covered.
• The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services is looking at “ways to mitigate the risk of poor performance or misuse of funds” by NIH and FDA grantees, among others, The Scientist reports.
• “[T]he single biggest predictor of a journal’s appearance in Wikipedia is its impact factor,” and Eamon Duede notes that “it appears Wikipedia editors are putting a premium on open access content.”
• And Wikipedians are reaching out to academics for help keeping entries accurate, Nature reports.
• A journal paper almost ended Jenny Ostini’s career before it started.
• “A white guy named Michael couldn’t get his poem published,” writes Sarah Kaplan. “Then he became Yi-Fen Chou.”
• Anomalous citation patterns aren’t always evidence of wrongdoing, says Jenny Neophytou.
• “[A]lthough policies should be able to increase the rate of sharing researchers, and increased discoverability and dataset quality could partly compensate for costs, a better measure would be to directly lower the cost for sharing, or even turn it into a (citation-) benefit,” according to a new study that uses game theory.
• New journals are caught in a “vicious paradox of Catch 22,” says editor Amitav Banerjee.
• September 28 is the start of Peer Review Week. The Scholarly Kitchen has a roundup of scheduled activities, and here’s what Wiley has planned.
• Large open access publishers continue to proliferate, writes Jeffrey Beall.
• What’s the point of discussions about science communication? Rick Borchelt explains.
• Do you suffer from academic FOMO? Amy Loughman explains that’s “fear of missing out on the myriad of extraordinary opportunities for learning, challenge, publication and general scholarship during a PhD.”