Weekend reads: Suicide after misconduct; taxonomic vandalism; a disastrous Nature editorial

The week at Retraction Watch featured a battle over psychologists and torture, a case of misconduct at Harvard, allegations of bribery, and a lawsuit against the New York Times. Here’s what was happening elsewhere:

• A researcher committed scientific misconduct, under great pressure and while taking inappropriate medications, was found guilty, and agreed to a ban on funding. Years later, he committed suicide. (Anonymous, Times Higher Education)
• “Taxonomic vandalism:” It’s a thing. (Benjamin Jones, Smithsonian)
• Nature corrects an editorial arguing to preserve the monuments dedicated to scientists with questionable pasts after drawing immense criticism from The Atlantic. The Washington Post, and Nature‘s own readers, weigh in.
• STAT retracts an article about doctors benefiting from talking to pharma sales reps after discovering the author did not disclose conflicts of interest. More at HealthNewsReview.
• PubMed could be called a search engine, a filter, a publisher, an enabler of open access publishing — and maybe a facilitator of predatory publishing. (Kent Anderson, The Scholarly Kitchen)
• A 92-year-old retired biochemist’s questionable “institute” convinced conspiracy theorists on the internet that it had found the cure for all cancers. (Alex Kasprak, Snopes.com)
• “Rankings measure research production and funding, but not the ethics of the knowledge production.” (Michelle Stack, The Globe and Mail)
• Insys Therapeutics boosted sales of its cancer drug by making it look like patients who didn’t have cancer did. (Aaron M. Kessler, CNN)
• On October 6th, U.S. National Library of Medicine staff will present a webinar on the changing landscape of scholarly communication. (Gary Price, INFOdocket)
• In genomics research, publishing open, transparent information clashes with legal requirements to protect the privacy of patients’ medical records. (Bradley J. Fikes, The San Diego Union-Tribune)
• “A stunning two-fifths of papers with reviewer recommendations suggested an all-male panel.” (Nature Geoscience)
• Elsevier will add 1,800 journals to those already operating under the “Transparency and Openness Promotion” guidelines. (Paul Basken, The Chronicle of Higher Education)
• “While acknowledging that error is human, often inadvertent, and part of the natural course of science, we embrace corrections and think of them as positive contributions to the scholarly literature.” (Stacy Christiansen & Annette Flanagin, JAMA)
• How does one detect scientific fraud and avoid false accusations in the process? (Journal of Clinical Epidemiology)
• The director of an Australian health research institute tried to circumvent author signature requirements for a paper by redirecting their emails to his own account. (Rick Morton, The Australian)
• Scientists are using Freedom of Information Act requests to catch a glimpse at what their peers are putting in their grant proposals. (Teresa L. Carey & Aylin Woodward, Buzzfeed News)
• The downstream effects of a retracted stem cell paper affected more than 33,000 papers: Why not to cite retracted papers. (Jerome Samson, Medium)
• Oxford scientists face harsh criticism after they tested a TB vaccine in African infants even though it was not safe for monkeys. (Claire Newell & Edward Malnick, The Telegraph)
• “To put it bluntly, academic psychology’s public reputation seems to be in free fall.” (Hal Pashler & J.P. de Ruiter, Association for Psychological Science)
• “Last-minute withdrawal is agony for the editor. Editing and peer reviewing a manuscript is a lengthy process.” (Amitav Banerjee, Medical Journal of DPU)
• Codgertations: scientific papers that aren’t really scientific papers, but are more accurately a jumble of thoughts or other odds and ends published together. (Grumpy Geophysicist blog)
• Just weeks after Cambridge University Press replaced hundreds of scholarly articles after initially pulling them because of pressure from the Chinese government, China says any imported publications must adhere to Chinese law. (Reuters)
• “To improve reproducibility, listen to graduate students and postdocs,” says Ahmed Alkhateeb. (Nature blogs)
• “What kind of scientific crisis is the field of ecology having?” asks Brian McGill. (Dynamic Ecology)
• “[T]he majority of the content was not written by [the book’s author], but was copy-and-pasted from discussions on LinkedIn. A novel way to produce a book, certainly, but is it… legal?” Matt Hall wonders about a new book from Elsevier. (Agile Scientific blog)
• The debate over unpaid peer review continues at SVPOW.
• “Biomedical researchers and experts have sharply rebuked the lack of safety oversight and slammed the poor quality of the data collected, which has been rejected from scientific publication.” Questions about a herpes vaccine trial backed by Peter Thiel. (Beth Mole, Ars Technica)
• Journal policies that encourage data sharing have proven extremely effective, argues Michèle B. Nuijten. (LSE Impact Blog)
• “Remarkably, Lewis Carroll’s Red Queen could also have predicted how antagonistic interactions in the current academic culture would eventually help to save it.” (Casparous Crous, Web Ecology)
• “To our knowledge, there are no specific guidelines on how to evaluate nonauthor contributions.” (Spyros D. Mentzelopoulos, Spyros G. Zakynthinos, JAMA)
• “The journal responded that a $319 retraction fee was due. (Such fees are unheard of at legitimate journals.)” (Kelly Cobey, Nature)
• “Several recent incidents of peer review fraud have involved the use of author-suggested reviewers.” Alice Landwehr, An Aries Editorial Manager user, offers some suggestions on how to avoid such cases.
• A researcher in Queensland, Australia, is arguing that a university is handling a research misconduct investigation into his work “in a way that amounted to bullying.” (Bernard Lane, The Australian)
• Elsevier will hold a webinar on transparency in peer review as part of Peer Review Week. (Bahar Mehmani, Elsevier Connect)
• Confidence intervals for Impact Factors? David Stern weighs in. (Stochastic Trend)
• Alexandra Elbakyan, the creator of Sci-Hub, is not happy that researchers have named a parasitic wasp after her. (Dalmeet Singh Chawla, Chemistry World)

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