Weekend reads: Fired for fake peer review; world’s most prolific fraudster; peer reviewers behaving badly?

The week at Retraction Watch featured a post on just how much an authorship costs if you want to buy one, anger over charges to use a common research tool, and the revocation of a PhD from a once-rising star scientist. Here’s what was happening elsewhere:

• The author of one of the 107 studies pulled by Tumor Biology for fabricated peer review is fired by his university. (Yan Jie, Sixth Tone)
• The scale of Yoshitaka Fuiji’s scientific fraud is unmatched. Hannah Devlin speaks with those who brought the scandal to light. (The Guardian) In 2015, our co-founders explained how he was caught. (Nautilus)
• How often do peer reviewers misuse the manuscripts they’re reviewing? A survey from the staff of the Annals of Internal Medicine tried to figure that out. (Peer Review Congress)
• In the past five years, almost 100 Canadian scientists have been caught committing scientific misconduct. On top of that, a survey finds half of Quebec universities do not want to say anything about misconduct in their institutions. (Marie-Claude Malboeuf, La Presse, in French)
• The University of Tokyo has published an English language version of its report about the investigation into the work of Yoshinori Watanabe. Background here.
• “Is open peer review just a passing fad (like in 1832)?” asks Phil Hurst. (Phys.org)
• “We appreciate the vigilance of Allison and Thomas and thank them for helping us correct the public record.” (Clinical Obesity)
• Following revelations about undisclosed conflicts of interest for two of its contributors, and a retraction, STAT has revised its submission policies.
• “We have the technology to save peer review,” say Jon Tennant, Daniel Graziotin and Sarah Kearns. “Now it is up to our communities to implement it.” (LSE Impact Blog)
• Results-free peer review: Has its time come? (BMC Series blog)
• Learn to be a reviewer: A journal and a scientific society are partnering on a mentorship scheme. (Chris Grieves, Methods.blog)
• What does “publishing in parallel” mean? Andrew Dunn, Alice Power and Michaela Muehlberg explain. (The Royal Society Publishing Blog)
• How often do studies in biomedicine spin their results? (PLOS Biology)
• The Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) has published “ethical guidelines for peer reviewers.”
• Peer reviews will soon be able to earn DOIs, making them citable and discoverable. (Ginny Hendricks, Jennifer Lin, CrossRef blog)
• “’Dodgy’ articles in academic journals threatens integrity of South African science,” writes Tony Carnie. (News24)
• “Should Research Funding Be Distributed Equally Among Scientists?” asks Neuroskeptic, riffing on a recent paper. (Discover)
• “Women scientists lag in academic publishing, and it matters,” writes Nox Makunga. (The Conversation)
• “So how’s it going out there in the land of the journals that will publish any flippin’ thing you send them?” Derek Lowe takes a look at the “ugly state of the literature these days.” (In The Pipeline)
• Counteracting misinformation requires a multipronged approach, including innovative initiatives like Retraction Watch, suggests a meta-analysis from the Annenberg Public Policy Center. (Psychological Science)
• The vice chancellor of Australian Catholic University “has written to his staff telling them misconduct claims are being taken seriously” following media reports suggesting otherwise. (Rick Morton, The Australian)
• “She Was a Rising Star at a Major University. Then a Lecherous Professor Made Her Life Hell.” Madison Pauly looks into a troubling case at the University of Rochester. (Mother Jones)
• Scientists currently have next to no incentive, financial or otherwise, to replicate the work of others. How do we fix that? (Michael Schulson, Undark)
• “I have had more than a few irate messages along the lines of ‘Do you expect me to just give my data away so that anyone can use it?’ The answer is ‘yes’.” (Peter Brewer, Editors’ Vox)
• The Journal of Stem Cells, about which blogger Neuroskeptic earlier raised serious ethical and scientific concerns, has been removed from MEDLINE. (Discover)
• It turns out even predatory publishers are celebrating peer review week, as our co-founder Ivan Oransky discovered when one sent him an email. (Twitter)
• Eight months after Jeffrey Beall removed his list of predatory publishers, the reasons why remain unknown — and everything from a Swiss publisher to Beall himself remain prime suspects behind why he suddenly gave it up. (Paul Basken, The Chronicle of Higher Education, sub req’d)
• F1000Research investigated whether their model of publishing peer reviews once they’re received was influencing the thoughts of later reviewers on the same paper. (Tiago Barros, F1000Research blog)
• For clinical studies, the idea of a preprint server receives a mixed response, with some worried it might do harm to patients. (Martin Enserink, Science)
• “[A]sking hard questions about a clinical trial and a scientific paper should not result in a threatening letter from a lawyer.” (Larry Husten, CardioBrief)
• When interim results are published in a journal, the journal should give them a warning label, say researchers. (Retraction Watch co-founder Ivan Oransky, MedPage Today)
• Journals come far too late in the process to curb research waste. It’s up to funders and regulators to blaze the trail in implementing techniques to reduce waste, say Paul Glasziou and Iain Chalmers. (The BMJ Opinion)
• “Consequently, reproducibility and robustness are under-emphasized when job applicants are evaluated and when faculty members are promoted.” (Jeffrey Flier, Nature)
• One poet has made it his mission to track down plagiarism in poetry. His latest case involves a former Canadian poet laureate. (Will Storr, The Guardian)
• “Why, after 20 years of effort, have green and gold open access not achieved more?” (Toby Green, Learned Publishing)
• In India, the University Grants Commission hopes to punish plagiarists, but it may be undermined by a lack of systems to check for plagiarism. (Priyata Brajabasi, Catch News)
• “But enjoying research is not about trying to hit a six on every ball or publishing in Nature or Science all the time,” writes Raghu Murtugudde. “It is about seeing yourself make progress on a problem you have set out to work on.” (Huffington Post)

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