Weekend reads: When reproducibility is weaponized; Internet-based paraphrasing tools; go parasites!

The week at Retraction Watch featured a predatory journal sting involving a fake disorder from Seinfeld, and a study with disturbing findings about how retracted papers are cited. Here’s what was happening elsewhere:

• “Openness and reproducibility may be core to how science works, but they can be misused or turned into ways of pursuing ideological attacks,” writes Ed Yong. (The Atlantic)
• “Internet-based paraphrasing tools” are being “increasingly being marketed to and used by students that are hoping to fool plagiarism detection software,” writes Jonathan Bailey. But they don’t seem to work very well. (Plagiarism Today)
• “I think that we have to accept that enforcing the western journal business and operational model on the world is not feasible — and may not be scalable in the long term.” Pippa Smart says we may be making incorrect assumptions about many “predatory” publishers. (Learned Publishing)
• PLOS ONE, the quintessential model of the successful megajournal, loses the title of largest megajournal to Scientific Reports. (Phil Davis, Scholarly Kitchen)
• “Authors sometimes encounter obstacles to publishing corrections.” Some authors have started using PubMed Commons to alert readers of potential changes or corrections to their published work. (PubMed Commons blog)
• “Congratulations, you’re a parasite!” Two scientists have been named parasites in a respected journal — because they’re the inaugural recipients of the Research Parasite award, celebrating meaningful data reanalysis. The latest from our co-founders in STAT.
• Fears of “research parasites” are melting away at the U.S.’s National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute, writes Nicole Lou. (MedPage Today)
• A proposal by the American Geophysical Union to classify sexual harassment as scientific misconduct has some concerned that “it could complicate efforts to promote ethical conduct.” (Maggie Kuo, Science)
• Have you experienced a company trying to subvert academic publishing? COPE wants to hear your stories. They’d like your feedback on new guidelines for keeping the scientific record clean, too.
• “I wanted to prove to you, the most exacting of reviewers, that I was a good researcher and what I had to say deserved to be heard.” One researcher would like to thank their overly critical peer reviewer. (The Guardian)
• In the vacuum left behind by the disappearance of Beall’s blacklist, Andy Nobes argues that what’s needed more than anything else are researchers who can think critically about where to publish. (Research Information)
• Cell Press introduces Sneak Peek, a system for researchers to share their papers with others while they’re still being considered for publication. (Emilie Marcus, Crosstalk blog) More details — and some criticism — here and here.
• Our co-founder Ivan Oransky was in conversation with John Ioannidis and Richard Harris for “Bad Science and Good: Telling the Difference.” Check out the video stream for their insights on bad science, reproducibility, and…broccoli. (Hosted by the Arthur Carter Institute of Journalism at New York University)
• “Psychology is not just a club of academics, and ‘psychological science’ is not just the name of their treehouse.” As is often the case, Andrew Gelman isn’t pulling any punches.
• Andy Pleffer and Susan Shrubb discuss how to navigate the thorny maze of predatory publishers now that Beall’s list has gone dark. (Australian Open Access Strategy Group 2017 webinar)
• The Chair of the U.S. House Science Committee, Lamar Smith (R-TX), says the journal Science is not objective — much to the disbelief of scientists. (Alex Kasprak, Snopes)
• After writing about a potentially unethical paper in the Journal of Stem Cells, Neuroskeptic dug deeper and says the journal itself is problematic. (Discover)
• Unpaywall is a new tool that scours the web for freely available copies of paywalled papers. (Dalmeet Singh Chawla, Nature)
• Researchers love open data — as long as it’s someone else’s. Turns out many aren’t so fond of sharing their own. (John Elmes, Times Higher Education) See the survey results here.
• A reminder – involving a study of dogs and language processing — from Neuroskeptic “that it’s possible to make sense of almost any results if you try hard enough.” (Discover)
• StudySwap allows scientists to “exchange resources and find suitable collaborators for replication studies.” (Dalmeet Singh Chawla, The Scientist)
• “Using Citations to Rank Universities Isn’t Always as Simple or Sensible as You’d Think,” writes Vyasa Shastry. (The Wire)
• Millions of citations to papers are now freely available, thanks to the Initiative for Open Citations. (Quirin Schiermeier, Nature)
• Women authors are underrepresented in top political science journals, and are not benefitting from the growth in co-authorship, according to a new study in PS: Political Science & Politics.
• “[B]ibliometric evaluation proves to be more favourable to women than peer review evaluation,” a new study finds. (Research Policy, sub req’d)
• A conservative talk show host and columnist for The Toronto Sun is calling for the CMAJ to retract what he calls a flawed report on firearm injuries. (Brian Lilley)
• Early career researchers are not taking advantage of opportunities “developing within the context of open science, open access, and social media, to publish their research,” according to a new study. That’s because they “are constrained by convention and the precarious employment environment they inhabit and know what is best for them, which is to publish (in high impact factor journals) or perish.” (Learned Publishing)
• “Étienne Klein, a celebrated French physicist and popularizer of science, seems set to lose his post as president of the Institute for Advanced Studies for Science and Technology (IHEST) in Paris after allegations that he plagiarized more than a dozen scientists, philosophers, and writers in books and articles,” reports Martin Enserink. (Science)
• “Are universities complicit in predatory publishing?” asks Derek Pyne. (Ottawa Citizen)
• Pressure “from third-party, post-publication blog reviews has added an additional stressor and burden, particularly on small independent or academic society journals with volunteer editors, editorial boards and peer reviewers,” writes Committee on Publication Ethics treasurer Deborah Poff. (University Affairs)
• “Turkey’s research agency TÜBİTAK has told journals to remove from their editorial and review boards any academics who have been dismissed or suspended from their institutions in political purges following last July’s failed military coup,” Nature reports.
• PLOS and protocols.io have partnered “to provide authors better ways to share methodological details about their work, practical tools to reduce wasted research efforts and persistent, citable identifiers for laboratory methods.” (PLOS Blogs)
• “What does it mean when one scientist is unable to reproduce the work of another?” asks Levi Garraway, whose work was among those studies analyzed by the Reproducibility Project: Cancer Biology. (Nature)

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