Weekend reads: A “culture of fear?”; blogs vs. academic papers; neurosurgery retractions on the rise

The week at Retraction Watch featured a new record for most retractions by a single journal, and an impassioned plea from a biostatistician for journals to clean up their act. Here’s what was happening elsewhere: 

• Amy Cuddy, whose work on the “power pose” has been criticized, says there’s a “culture of fear” in social psychology. (Katie Corker, Twitter)
• Blogs are open access, have open data, correct errors quickly. Those are just some of the reasons why they’re higher scientific quality than academic papers, says Daniel Lakens. (The 20% Statistician blog)
• Retractions of neurosurgical papers are on the rise, says a new paper that finds that duplicated publications and plagiarism were the top reasons for retraction. (World Neurosurgery, sub req’d)
• “Female scientists are considerably more likely to be mistakenly cited as if they were males than vice versa,” writes Michal Krawczyk, about a paper he published late last year that we featured in Weekend Reads. (LSE Impact Blog)
• In “a shining example of scientific integrity,” study authors retract and replace a JAMA paper after errors were discovered that doomed the study’s original results. The latest from our co-founders in STAT.
• “I think that journals should get out of the publication business and recognize that their goal is curation.” Andrew Gelman has an idea for a new kind of journal.
• “I have attended a lot of workshops/sessions on getting a job post PhD, and, particularly for academic jobs, the overarching message seems to be: publish publish publish…preferably in Science and Nature.” Dani Rabaiotti digs deeper into that stress-inducing advice for PhD students.
• “Incentives and post-publication review go together,” says Andrew Gelman, arguing that we should “make people own their errors.”
• “If there are verifiable pre-publication peer reviews done, can we even still call it a ‘predatory’ journal?” What if such journals published their reviews? (Zen Faulkes)
• American History Review apologizes for a review written by a professor seen by many as a white supremacist and commissions another review — but doesn’t retract the original. (Scott Jaschik, Inside Higher Ed) “An excellent apology would have skipped the feeble self-justifying and gone straight to the second graf, which starts, ‘Regrettably, we did not dig further,'” says SorryWatch on the request for retraction.
• Huffington Post SA removes a blog titled “Could It Be Time To Deny White Men The Franchise?” after the author couldn’t be verified. (Verashi Pillay)
• Using Beall’s now-defunct list, “11% and 20% of predatory journals retrieved in neuroscience and neurology, respectively, are indexed in PubMed,” according to a new study, although none are listed in MEDLINE. (Neuroscience, sub req’d)
• Encouragement by a former Psychological Science editor to push to make papers’ data and materials easily accessible has resulted in almost half of the journal’s articles meeting their criteria for Open Practice badges. (D. Stephen Lindsay, Psychological Science)
• How does a ‘traditional’ selective journal transition to the open-access mega-journal model? A new paper examines how the process worked for one title. (Publications)
• Although many scientists are still wary about the idea of sharing their data for fear someone will scoop their research, it’s more important than ever to embrace the idea of open data, argues Marcus Banks. (Undark)
• 12 tips for becoming a better peer reviewer, from.Tom Culley. (Publons)
• PubMed has begun including conflicts of interest for authors of research papers below the paper’s abstract. (Center for Science in the Public Interest)
• “Blowdog” isn’t a word and we should have questioned this each and every 17 times it was used.” Fabrication and plagiarism, McSweeney’s style. (Jimmy Blackmon)
• A new figure from ASAPBio charting the rising number of preprint papers includes several formal journals, suggesting that agreement on what makes a preprint server a preprint server isn’t that universal after all, says David Crotty. Meanwhile, “the stars are aligning for preprints,” says Judy Luther. (The Scholarly Kitchen)
• “The academic poster is a form of knowledge communication which explodes the boundary walls of academic convention, opening up a space for alternative forms of expression.” (Sarah Foxen, LSE Impact blog)
• “Even an outstanding paper cannot provide direct access to all of the research data collected or to the record of discussions among scientists that is reflected in lab notes.” (Marcus Banks, Slate)
• An unpleasant situation: A research group discovers a paper published in an open access journal that seems to have used much of the group’s presentations as a basis. (Derek Lowe, In The Pipeline)
• “Researchers can change the incentive structure by changing publishing choices,” argues Corina Logan, in an F1000Research preprint.
• A health care system has been “accused of coercing patients to participate in genetic research.” (John Beauge, PennLive)
• How much would it cost to make sure that all of the studies published by one foundation’s grantees were gold open access? A new preprint tries to find out. (bioRxiv)
• “As of 2010–2014, post-communist countries are still lagging far behind their EU counterparts, with the exception of a few scientific disciplines mainly in Slovenia.” A new study says the reasons for the lag are unclear, however. (Scientometrics, sub req’d)

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