Weekend reads: Automated image duplication detection?; journal editor frustrations; cash for catching errors

We seem to be past the worst of our technical issues, so thanks for your patience with us over the past few weeks. (Some of the fixes came at a cost, so we would be remiss if we did not ask readers to consider a donation to support our work.)

The week at Retraction Watch featured coverage of a now-dropped lawsuit against PNAS, how much it costs to have a PhD dissertation written for you, and findings of misconduct by a top academic recruit. Here’s what was happening elsewhere:

• “Researchers have finally created a tool to spot duplicated images across thousands of papers,” reports Nature. (Declan Butler) One of those researchers was Paul Brookes, whose name will likely to be familiar to Retraction Watch readers.
• “I am seriously considering giving up this Associate Editor job.” (A Twitter thread from Elisabeth Bik)
• “In the near future, I also plan to set bug bounties, i.e. sums of money you can earn if you find errors in my published work.” (Ruben Arslan, The 100% CI)
• “Very soon, papers published in predatory journals will pollute the scientific literature in several Indian languages too.” Targeted by the U.S. government for deceptive practices, OMICS Group is cutting deals in India. (Prasad Ravindranath, Science Chronicle.)
• A China scholar says another author’s failure to cite her is “calculated erasure.” (Colleen Flaherty, Inside Higher Ed)
• “The case for abandoning metrics is not realistic and not desirable,” says a journal with a huge impact factor. (Nature)
• “Ready access to data and code would ease replication attempts.” Suggestions on “how to make replication the norm.” (Paul Gertler et al., Nature)
• A hoax paper about a “conceptual penis” was retracted, but there was nothing abstract about the reprimand a professor received for emailing a colleague a news item about it. (Colleen Flaherty, Inside Higher Ed)
• The president of the Constitutional Court of the Republic of Croatia has filed criminal complaints against the members of the Committee on Ethics in Science and Higher Education after it concluded that he had plagiarized in his 2013 doctoral thesis. (Mićo Tatalović, Science)
• “Want to Boost Reproducibility?” asks Jim Daley. “Get Another Lab Involved.” (The Scientist)
• A court in Italy has convicted a Boston Scientific employee of boosting unauthorized clinical trials. He was one of three. (Brad Periello, MassDevice)
• Bjorn Brembs says that “methodological quality and, consequently, reliability of published research works in several fields may be decreasing with increasing journal rank.” (Frontiers in Human Neuroscience)
• IEEE has removed an article “after initially defending an article on its news service against allegations of plagiarism.” (Colleen Flaherty, Inside Higher Ed)
• “[I] have been amazed by the diversity of ways that a prospective author can be treated by journals and their editors, how differently the peer-review process can occur, and what is considered as constituting academic substance.” (Jodie Goldney, The Research Whisperer)
• “Efforts by Taylor & Francis to restrict access to 20-year-old content is ‘opportunistic and potentially profiteering‘, librarians in the UK and Ireland have said in an open letter.” (Eleni Courea, ResearchResearch)
• “[W]e will not agree to provide peer review service until editors confirm that their publications do not censor content in the [People’s Republic of China], and we call on all others to do so as well.” A boycott of publishers who bow to pressures from the Chinese government. (Shawna Williams, The Scientist)
• “Key performance indicator culture creates a moral danger for the sciences.” An anonymous academic takes on metrics. (The Guardian)
• “In some cases, the images ­appear identical.” Last year, we reported concerns about work from a trio in Australia; a new report alleges they duplicated images. (John Ross, The Australian)
• An upcoming conference “has sparked controversy around Italy,” in part because it will host a speaker who retracted two papers that linked vaccines to autism. (Marta Paterlini, BMJ News)
• “For many years, trials transparency has been neglected,” says Ben Goldacre, whose team has just launched a tool that will show who has reported clinical study data. (Chris Foxx, BBC)
• “[R]ight now it’s a Wild West of indicators and data sources,” says Vincent Larivière of the metrics used to assess research. He and Cassidy Sugimoto have written a book on the subject. (Richard van Noorden, Nature)
• Bias or just a bad review? “…my impression is that the reviewer screwed up and submitted a bad review based on misunderstandings.” (Neuroskeptic, Discover)
• By adding post-publication, badges, “bioRxiv begins to transform itself into the largest open access megajournalthe world has ever seen.” (Phil Davis, The Scholarly Kitchen)
• “Somebody in the world of fake science publishing” has made up a university in California “and it has messy Canadian fingerprints all over it.” (Tom Spears, Ottawa Citizen)
• Sociologist Didier Torny says, “thanks to the PubPeer platform, public commenting of published literature has found its niche, far from initial aims…” (HAL Open Archive)
• “[J]ournals should consider adding dedicated data review, much as many of them have added statistical review processes,” says Kalev Leetaru. (Forbes)
• “Africa’s scientific integrity problems range from redundant publication, plagiarism, conflicts of interest, guest authorship, and text recycling.” (Munyaradzi Makoni, Nature Index)
• UK Research and Innovation is considering a move away from hybrid journals, reports Eleni Courea. (ResearchResearch)
• “The point of a peer review is to be constructive – and this can’t be achieved with hurtful language.” Advice on peer review, gathered by Sophie Inge. (Times Higher Education)

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