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The week at Retraction Watch featured a boycott by thousands of researchers of a new Nature journal, the birth of a new “data thug,” and the retraction of the wrong paper by a publisher. Here’s what was happening elsewhere:
- Three papers should be retracted for misrepresenting the effects of a widely used medicine for high blood pressure and heart failure, says a university—but the authors are fighting back. (our Alison McCook in The Scientist)
- The editor of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) has resigned, amid sexual harassment allegations. (Meredith Wadman, Science)
- “The dying scientist and his rogue vaccine trial.” (Amanda Schaffer, WIRED)
- Robert Chapple found his work plagiarized. He went to universities, thinking they would do the right thing. Nope.
- “How does gender influence the academic publishing process?” Dina Balabanova and Jamie Lundine answer. (BioMed Central Blog Network)
- “A winner of the prestigious Wildlife Photographer of the Year title has been stripped of his award after it was alleged he used a taxidermied anteater in his winning image.” (Australian Photography)
- “Iheanacho accuses the two of stealing his work, alleging that Van der Bank passed it to Kabongo who then published it with Iheanacho as co-author.” (Zamayirha Peter and Msindisi Fengu, City Press)
- “Is there such a thing as too much science?” Sneha Kulkarni asks whether researchers are writing more, yet contributing less. (The Scholarly Kitchen)
- “The University Grants Commission (UGC), which funds and oversees higher-education in India, has removed 4,305 spurious journals from a list of some 30,000 publications used for weighing academic performance.” (Smriti Mallapaty, Nature Index)
- “Under this policy, Nature journals will require an ethics statement from the authors for papers that involve human embryos or gametes, and for clinical studies of cells derived from pluripotent stem cells.” (Nature)
- “Megajournals are not seen as the future journal form and criticized for lack of selectivity.” That’s one message of a survey of early career researchers. (Learned Publishing; sub req’d)
- Following sexual assault allegations, the Swedish Academy won’t award a Nobel Prize in Literature this year. (David.Gauthier-Villars and Jeffrey A. Trachtenberg, Wall Street Journal)
- “After NPR and Side Effects contacted the journal, it posted a correction noting the possible conflict of interest.” Questions swirl around a study of a device meant to ease opioid withdrawal. (Jake Harper, NPR)
- “‘We continuously increased the number of animals until statistical significance was reached to support our conclusions’. . .I think this is not so bad, actually!” says Andrew Gelman. Casper Albers, who first spotted the line in question, also weighs in.
- “The term ‘witch-hunt’ is routinely trotted out whenever a senior person is criticised.” And Dorothy Bishop doesn’t think that’s a good idea.
- “Nature has named Magdalena Skipper as its new editor-in-chief,” Holly Else reports in Nature. “She is the first woman to hold the post.”
- “Vague and varied retractions point to weakness in the scientific community,” says Felicitas Hesselmann. (Smrita Mallapaty) Indeed. Indeed, we’ve been saying that since 2010. And And Fang, Steen and Casadevall noted in 2012: “Although some retraction announcements are specific and detailed, many are uninformative or opaque.”
- “Journals censorship is not bowdlerisation,” writes Michel Houckx of a recent episode in which “Cambridge University Press was asked to remove several hundred articles from back issues of The China Quarterly.” (Times Higher Education)
- North Korea “publishes fewer than 100 scholarly articles a year— but as political tensions thaw, researchers hope for greater collaboration.” (Richard van Noorden, Nature)
- “In conclusion, this paper should never have been sent for peer-review,” writes Guillaume A. Rousselet of a paper whose retraction we covered in 2016. “That would have saved everyone involved a lot of time.”
- The US ORI has a new acting director of its Division of Investigative Oversight, Ranjini Ambalavanar.
- Calcutta University is investigating after a former lab member took to Facebook about allegations.
- “Why are PhD students, professors, and others who publish their life’s works in professional research publications not paid royalties on their hard work poured into these papers?” (Academia Stack Exchange)
- “University of Illinois at Chicago officials on Tuesday told faculty, staff and students that research misconduct by one of the campus’ star faculty members was an anomaly and there are no systemic oversight problems at the institution.” (Jodi S. Cohen, ProPublica)
- “A Chinese arts professor who was awarded a prestigious international prize for design has been exposed to have plagiarized the winning material.” (Annie Wu, Epoch Times)
- Psychology journal editor Robert Sternberg has resigned following concerns about frequent self-citation. (Colleen Flaherty, Inside Higher Ed) We interviewed a graduate student who is looking into other allegations about Sternberg.
- The editors of Science, Nature, PLOS, PNAS, and Cell have published a joint editorial opposing a new proposed rule on transparency at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. More on the rule from Amelia Urry at Popular Science.
- “[O]ne way to push back against the pressure to “publish or perish” is to randomly audit a small proportion of researchers and take time to assess their research in detail,” says Adrian Barnett. (LSE Impact Blog)
- The Stanford Daily “has chosen to retract this article because the information it detailed was off-the-record and part of a private small discussion.”
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