Weekend reads: The editor who’s a dog; the fake author; a monument to peer review

The week at Retraction Watch featured the retraction of a much-discussed paper on using blockchain to prevent scientific misconduct, and a researcher who lost nine studies at once from a single journal. Here’s what was happening elsewhere:

• Ollie’s on the editorial board of seven journals, maybe because she always obeys a “sit” command. She’s a dog, and the heart of a journal sting.(Hugo Wilcken, MJA InSight)
• “It’s just sort of dumb:” A Caltech researcher who harassed women also created a fake female author, Ursula Gamma, and used her name in 11 papers. (Azeen Ghorayshi, BuzzFeed)
• A 1.5-ton stone statue in Moscow that honors peer review “takes the form of a die displaying on its five visible sides the possible results of review — ‘Accept’, ‘Minor Changes’, ‘Major Changes’, ‘Revise and Resubmit’ and ‘Reject’.” (Quirin Schiermeier, Nature)
• A biotech company’s gamble by admitting problems with its research and delaying its IPO paid off in the long run. Our co-founders’ latest for STAT.
• Peer review: It’s just like a baby’s blanket. (Tom Blackwell, National Post)
• Plagiarism charges are so common for political nominees that no allegations might mean they’ve never written a word. The latest charge is against Department of Homeland Security hopeful David Clarke. (The Associated Press)
• The FDA’s guidelines on seafood for pregnant women are unnecessarily putting women off the idea of eating it at all, leading to scientists calling for withdrawal. (Annie Behr, Slate)
• “The ruinous consequences of currently accepted practices in study design and data analysis have revealed themselves in the low reproducibility of findings in fields such as psychology, medicine, biology, and economics.” A manifesto for open science in giftedness research. (PsyArXiv)
• New regulations exempting “benign behavioral interventions” from ethics reviews find support among social scientists who argue they don’t need as much review board oversight as medical researchers. (Kate Murphy, New York Times)
• “NPS’s actions “demonstrate animus towards the religious viewpoints of Dr. Snelling,” the complaint alleges, “and violate Dr. Snelling’s free exercise rights by imposing inappropriate and unnecessary religious tests to his access to the park.” A creationist sues the National Park Service. (Amanda Reilly, E&E News, via Science) We covered a similar case here.
• “The danger is that papers are increasingly like grand mansions of straw, rather than sturdy houses of brick.” (William G. Kaelin Jr., Nature)
• “Impact factors: Is the Nature Index at odds with DORA [the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment]?” ask Ludo Waltman and Vincent Traag. (Nature)
• Following the retraction of more than 100 papers from a single journal for fake peer review, the Chinese government has vowed zero tolerance toward academic fraud. (Xinhua News Agency)
• A graduate student in Colombia who was facing jail time for sharing a thesis online has been acquitted, although prosecutors may appeal. (Michele Catanzaro, Nature) Background from our founders in STAT here.
• “It’s time for academics to take back control of research journals,” says Stephen Curry, co-author of a new report called Untangling Academic Publishing. (The Guardian) More from another co-author, Aileen Fyfe, in Times Higher Education.
• Perhaps someone should sign up for our email alerts: A member of the U.S. Congress said CNN had retracted a story. They hadn’t. (Caitlin Byrd, The Post and Courier)
• “While there is great promise in the reuse of data, there is likely just as much, if not more progress to be gained from public release of detailed experimental methodologies.” (David Crotty, The Scholarly Kitchen) Brian Nosek weighs in in the comments.
• Vaxxed, an anti-vaccine documentary, will be aired at the Cannes film festival. (Oliver Moody, The Times) It was previously pulled from the Tribeca Film Festival, as we’ve reported here.
• An epidemiologist at Columbia University files a lawsuit alleging that her long-term collaborator has discriminated against her and created a hostile environment. (Meredith Wadman, Science)
• “One does not make many friends documenting plagiarism in Russia, it seems.” One of the leaders of Dissernet, which is documenting plagiarism in theses there, found a bullet hole in his window one morning. A report from the Plagiarism in Europe and Beyond meeting in Brno, Czech Republic. (Debora Weber-Wulff, Copy Shake Paste)
• “It turns out that author order is a trickier topic than I previously thought, particularly when an inter-disciplinary team is working together!” (Debra Carr, Research Whisperer)
• “How Big a Problem Are Articles that Should Be OA but End Up Behind Paywalls?” asks Charles Oppenheim. (Scholarly Kitchen)
• It’s time for “Transparency In Authors’ Contributions And Responsibilities To Promote Integrity In Scientific Publication,” write former Science editor in chief Marcia McNutt, high-profile journal editors, and others in a draft  of standards in bioRxiv.
• Sarah Cwiek has details on what’s happened to Christian Kreipke, the would-be whistleblower who’s just won a round in a case against the U.S. VA. He’s now working at a car assembly plant. (Michigan Public Radio)
• Andrew Gelman has thoughts on “how to think scientifically about scientists’ proposals for fixing science.”
• Stephane Boyer and colleagues “propose an easy to apply, fair and universally comparable metric to measure and report co-authors contribution in the scientific literature.” (bioRxiv)
• How do you teach graduate students and undergraduates how to write a scientific manuscript? Michael Halbisen and Amy Ralston have a plan. (bioRxiv)
• How many of today’s scientific papers are written by women? The answer is more complicated than you’d think, according to this interview with Cassidy Sugimoto. (Beyond The Book)
• David Tuller says that in their latest response to criticism, the authors of the PACE study “avoid acknowledging the obvious problems with PACE and offer non-answers instead—arguments that fall apart quickly under scrutiny.” (Journal of Health Psychology)
• “People Don’t Trust Scientific Research When Companies Are Involved,” writes Z. Fareen Parvez. (Elsevier SciTech Connect)
• “Ten simple rules for structuring papers,” from Konrad Kording and Brett Mensh. (bioRxiv)
• Preregistration “is a document of your pre-specified research plans before seeing the results; it is not a prison sentence.” (Alexander DeHaven, Center For Open Science blog)
• ChemComm is running an experiment on double-blind peer review.
• Should animal welfare reports automatically be public? Meredith Wadman takes a look. (Science)

Like Retraction Watch? You can make a tax-deductible contribution to support our work, follow us on X or Bluesky, like us on Facebook, follow us on LinkedIn, add us to your RSS reader, or subscribe to our daily digest. If you find a retraction that’s not in our database, you can let us know here. For comments or feedback, email us at [email protected].