Weekend reads: Bragging about burying bad science; women still underrepresented in Nature; does brilliance justify bad behavior?

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The week at Retraction Watch featured a look at a dozen scientific sleuths; the story of how gambling got in the way of a promising scientific career; and details on why a misconduct probe took more than four years. Here’s what was happening elsewhere:

• A professor “bragged about burying bad science’ on 3M chemicals.” (Carrie Fellner, The Age)
• “Women continue to form too small a proportion of [Nature’s] authors and referees,” say editors there.
• “In science, is brilliance ever an excuse for bad behaviour?” asks Darren Saunders. (ABC)
• How did Gary Taubes’ $40 million nutrition science crusade collapse? (Megan Molteni, WIRED)
• “Computer algorithms can test the dodginess of published results,” reports The Economist based on a new preprint.
• The U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is soliciting proposals for projects that will “assign explainable [confidence scores] with a reliability that is equal to, or better than, the best current human expert methods, and will enable a consumer of [social and behavioral science] research to quickly calibrate the level of confidence in the Reproducibility and Replicability (R&R) of a given SBS result or claim.”
• “The decreasing attention to recent literature published within the last 6 years suggests that science has become stifled by a publication deluge destabilizing the balance between production and consumption.” (Scientometrics)
• A university rector in Pakistan has been cleared of plagiarism charges. (Pakistan Today)
• The Lancet is starting a pilot on preprints “to see whether health and medical researchers are ready for this form of sharing work early in the research or publication process.”
• “Preprints can help detect flaws thatmight otherwise escape the notice of a conventional peer review process.” (Int’l Journal of  Epidemiology)
• “More is better than less in managing [conflicts of interest],” say Lisa Kearns and Arthur Caplan, calling for the Electric Long-Form COI Disclosure Statement. (Bioethics.net)
• “Scientists at the U.S. Geological Survey must now submit their presentation titles for review by the Interior Department to get approval to attend two major conferences, and they will have to identify how their research relates to Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke’s priorities.” (Sarah Kaplan, Washington Post)
• Why one professor announces his lab’s failures as well as its successes. (Alexander Kafka, Chronicle of Higher Education)
• “Replication studies aren’t glamorous, but they’re a good way to learn the techniques of science.” (Russell Warne and Jordan Wagge, Wall Street Journal)
• “Biopharmaceutical industry sponsors have responded to the ethical and legal demands of clinical trial disclosure to a greater extent than non-industry sponsors.” (bioRxiv)
• “Dalmeet Singh Chawla investigates if it is time to revamp the grant-funding process.” (Physics World)
• “We need a formal centralized platform for ongoing constructive peer-review of already-published papers,” says Milton Packer in MedPage Today. Of course, we already do. It’s called PubPeer.
• Peer review — designed for rigor but tainted by randomness, bias, and arbitrary delays — is not scientific, says E Price. (Medium)
• Peer review needs a revision, says Thomas Wagenknecht. (Elephant in the Lab)
• “Do Researchers Anchor Their Beliefs on the Outcome of an Initial Study?” (Experimental Psychology)
• Promoting good practice: A Q&A with the director of Norway’s National Commission for the Investigation of Research Misconduct. (Elephant in the Lab)
• There are three types of peer reviewers, says Mike Duncan — who only recommends “accept” for one. (Chronicle of Hgher Education)
• “Stop saying that publication metrics don’t matter, and tell early-career researchers what does.” (John Tregoning, Nature)
• A BMJ initiative to include peer reviews by patients “is going strong, has led to many changes in how manuscripts are reviewed, is well-received by all involved, and has been expanded in interesting ways,” reports Kent Anderson. (The Scholarly Kitchen)
• “Resubmitting your study to a new journal could become easier,”writes Chris Woolston of a new initiative for rejected manuscripts. (Nature Jobs)
• A paper that made the case for colonialism — and that had been retracted — has been republished.
• “The Free Journal Network was established earlier this year in order to nurture and promote journals that are free to both authors and readers, and run according to the Fair Open Access Principles.” (Mark Wilson, LSE Impact Blog)
• “How do you choose a journal when it’s time to submit a paper?” asks Stephen B. Heard. (Scientist Sees Squirrel)
• The U.S. government has once again delayed the implementation of the Common Rule, which governs research involving human beings, for six months. (Ropes & Gray)
• Hundreds, including many scientists, are calling for more openness about animal research. (Meredith Wadman, Science)
• How much editorial misonduct goes unreported? asks Phil Davis. (The Scholarly Kitchen)
• Institutional versus commercial email addresses: which one to use in your publications? (Ronald Rousseau, LSE Impact Blog)
• How should researchers provide study data to study participants? (Wong, Hernandez, and Califf; JAMA)
• A new code of conduct for researchers in Australia has been met with mixed reviews, reports Smriti Mallapaty. (Nature Index) Background is available in a February 2017 post of ours.
• Do you trust your reviewers? A new study in Managementforschung.
• BioMed Central gets a makeover, and becomes BMC — and Design Week notices. (Sarah Dawood)
• “Scholars should learn to ask, ‘What is the motivation of this organization?'” says Sarah Elaine Eaton in a guide to avoiding predatory publishers and conferences.
• “In the field of Palliative Care there [are] open access publications, however some of them are suspected [of] predatory publishing.” (Medicina Paliativa, sub req’d)

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