Weekend reads: Elsevier’s “stupid patent of the month;” how Republicans and Democrats retract; hospital apologizes for published case report

The week at Retraction Watch featured a shooting by a researcher fired for misconduct, and the creation of fake computer-generated peer reviews. Here’s what was happening elsewhere:

• A hospital is apologizing to a family after revealing in the journal Thorax that a man died of “bagpipe lung.” (The Telegraph)
• Twitter politician retractions: “Democrats tend to delete tweets more quickly than Republicans,” finds Paige Settles in her PhD thesis.
• Elsevier is awarded a U.S. patent for an “online peer review system and method.” (Gary Price, Infodocket) That led to consternation in some circles. (Goldie Blumenstyk, The Chronicle of Higher Education) And the Electronic Frontier Foundation called it the “stupid patent of the month.”
• A whistleblower has sued Duke, claiming that doctored data – involved in 15 retractions – helped win $200 million in grants. Our latest in Science.
• “If we truly want our research to matter, we as academics must be willing to embrace measures that are focused on actual policy and practical management concerns rather than continuing to reward ourselves for talking to each other,” says Philip Joyce. (Governing)
• Parkinson’s disease patients will be forced to wait for a trial of a potential treatment as a feud erupts between the Michael J. Fox Foundation and a Georgetown researcher. (Charles Piller, STAT)
• “Those handful of months seem to have made all the difference.” The inventors of optogenetics may not have been first, but because of the difficulties of publishing, they got all the credit. (Anna Vlasits, STAT)
• The author of a conference case study on the hypothetical export of wild dog meat from Australia has withdrawn it, following an outcry from activists. (The Queensland Times)
• Does archaeology have a reproducibility crisis? It’s a bit more complicated than a simple yes or no, says Joe Roe.
• “Overall, predatory publishers are not transparent about where they are based, who the owners are, and what other publishers they are associated with.” (Jeffrey Beall, Journal of Korean Medical Science)
• Get a request from a paywalled, for-profit, non-association journal for a peer review? Here’s Philip N. Cohen’s template for what to tell them.
• Although they won’t say “plagiarism,” PanAmerican University admits that Mexico President Enrique Peña Nieto copied text on his thesis without permission. (Fox News Latino)
• “Vioxx redux – or how I learned to worry about industry-sponsored clinical trials.” James Brophy writes about attempts in industry-sponsored trials to manipulate the scientific process. (Indian Journal of Medical Ethics)
• Misconduct is not a new phenomenon in science: It’s time to stop ignoring it, say Donald S. Kornfeld and Sandra L. Titus in Nature.
• “The scientific enterprise is overloaded in terms of the numbers of papers that require vetting,” says former Science editor in chief Marcia McNutt. “Only a few journals do ‘expedited’ well.” (Undark)
• “Whistleblowers are very important to the functioning of science even though a lot of scientists wish that they would go away. ” A Q&A with our co-founder, Ivan Oransky. (Ediqo)
• Researchers find that rebuttals scarcely affect perceptions about the original scientific papers, suggesting an important part of the scientific process isn’t working well. (Annalee Newitz, Ars Technica)
• Despite a recommendation from his supervisor that he be fired for misconduct, the Smithsonian’s star mammalogist will keep his job — but will face sanctions. (Michael Balter, The Verge)
• An external inquiry finds a culture of silence and a lack of respect for rules led to the hiring of Paolo Macchiarini at the Karolinska Institutet. (Alison Abbott, Nature) See the inquiry’s report hereand our previous coverage here.
• A predatory journal responds to the Federal Trade Commission’s lawsuit against it. See our full coverage here. Our co-founders ask, are these publishers’ days numbered? (STAT)
• A news outlet loses access to embargoed materials from EurekAlert!, where much of that information is gathered, after breaking embargoes twice recently. (Embargo Watch)
• You’ve heard of the Broad Institute-University of California patent fight over CRISPR. But Kerry Grens of The Scientist has a weirder one for you.
• Are there too few women presenting at emergency medicine conferences? asks a new study in Emergency Medicine Journal. (sub req’d)
• What is an associate dean at the University of South Florida doing with so many predatory journal editorial boards on his CV? asks Jeffrey Beall. Ditto a scientist at Delhi’s Central Road Research Institute’s nine papers in such journals? asks Prasad Ravindranath.
• “The Privilege of Editorship:” Outgoing journal editor-in-chief Harlan Krumholz reflects on his eight years at a heart journal.
• Supplementary materials “can have value but that they place additional demands on all participants,” write Dave Shutler and Ashley Murray in The Auk. And that “may lead to incomplete vetting that may undermine the reliability of [such materials] in some instances.”
• A reproducibility horror story, featuring a video. (David Smith, Revolutions)
• What lessons in reproducibility can scientists learn from outside of science? Eugenia Flores-Figueroa explores. (Simply Blood)
• “So, get on with it. Seriously. Everyone,” says Brent Roberts of discussions of replications. “Please stop the bleating.”
• “Distortions in peer review are driven by economic forces and enabled by a lack of accountability of journals, editors, and authors,” writes Thomas C. Südhof. (PLOS Biology)
• When papers in journals cite other papers in those journals, they’re more likely to do it within the two-year window that counts for Impact Factor calculations, according to a new study in PLOS ONE by Caspar Chorus and Ludo Waltman. The pair discuss the implications here.
• David Tuller has a lot of questions about the PACE trial for Lancet editor Richard Horton. (Virology Blog)
• If we’re going to use altmetrics such as Twitter mentions, we need to figure out how scientists use Twitter, say Cassidy Sugimoto and colleagues. (arXiv) In another arXiv preprint, Sugimoto and other colleagues try to do that.
• In 1975, a cat co-authored an influential physics paper. (Eric Grundhauser, Atlas Obscura)
• The truth about graduate school in 11 charts, from Kelly Oakes. (BuzzFeed UK)
• A paper about typos in genetics papers introduced by Excel grabbed a lot of headlines last week. But Dorothy Bishop explains why she still uses the software.
• Yet another classic finding in psychology has blown up, says Dan Engber in Slate.
• “GRIMMER (Granularity-Related Inconsistency of Means Mapped to Error Repeats) builds upon the GRIM test and allows for testing whether reported measures of variability are mathematically possible,” writes Jordan Anaya. (PeerJ)
• What early studies are cited in climate change research? (arXiv)
• What’s the best way to cite neuroimaging data? Leah Honor and colleagues offer some suggestions. (Frontiers in Neuroinformatics)
• In economics, “gender imbalance in scientific authorships brings a peculiar trait to the networks induced from papers published in Web of Science,” fine Tanya Araujo and Elsa Fontainha. (arXiv)
• The “greater emphasis on measuring performance in terms of quantitative research metrics (such as: bibliometrics, impact factors and/ or citation indices), in an attempt to demonstrate greater accountability and value-for-money within this age of austerity,” write the authors of a paper in Policy Futures in Education, “has the potential to impact negatively on the quality and diversity of research.” (sub req’d SAGE removed the paywall after this post ran)
• “What’s wrong with Science?” David Chavalarais says “publisher or perish has “no significant effects in the developments of emerging scientific fields, while having detrimental impacts on the quality of the production of mature fields.” (Scientometrics, sub req’d)
• Aleksey Belikov has an antidote for the Impact Factor. (PeerJ)

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