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The week at Retraction Watch featured a collection of reports of scientific misconduct investigations, the story of a researcher who thought his work was important enough to be published three times, and a look at what happened when Elsevier tried open peer review. Here’s what was happening elsewhere:
- “The practice of conducting ethically dubious research in foreign countries is under fresh scrutiny.” (Linda Nordling, Nature)
- “Scientists Rarely Admit Mistakes,” writes Dalmeet Singh Chawla at Undark. “A New Project Wants to Change That.”
- Conference dinner chatter: No way to correct the scientific record, says Raphael Levy.
- In a new investigation for Science, correspondent Charles Piller “finds a pattern of after-the-fact compensation by pharma to those advising the U.S. government on drug approvals.”
- Preregistration — promoted as a way to improve rigor and reproducibility — may be being misused, worries Neuroskeptic. (Discover)
- The perils of incentives: “We find that the introduction of a regulation that links the possibility of career advancement to the number of citations received is related to a strong and significant increase in self-citations among scientists who can benefit the most from increasing citations, namely assistant professors, associate professors and relatively less cited scientists, and in particular among social scientists.” (Research Policy, sub req’d)
- Much of the July issue of Perspectives on Psychological Science is dedicated to a creativity symposium focused on open science and the “credibility revolution,” among other issues.
- “It is feasible to achieve 100 per cent open access in the future while saving around 99 per cent of the global spending budget on publishing,” says Jon Tennant. (Aeon)
- “[W]hile sales of all scholarly journals grew at a compound annual rate slightly over 1% between 2015 and 2017, open access journals grew at a compound annual rate well into the double digits,” according to a new report. (press release)
- Birgit Schmidt and colleagues present “Ten considerations for open peer review.” (F1000Research)
- “What Should be Done When Data Have Creators?” asks Roger Peng. (Simply Statistics)
- At least one predatory publisher is no longer happy to simply guarantee publication of your next manuscript. This one promises, according to the subject line of an email, “Your Research In NY Times.”
- “Spotting an open-access predatory journal is no easy task, and there is no foolproof way to guarantee you won’t be reading substandard science.” (Samantha Andrews, The Fish Site)
- The Czech Justice Minister is facing plagiarism allegations. (Prague Daily Monitor)
- As more and more funder open access platforms come on the scene, how do they “disrupt or complement the scholarly communications landscape?” (LSE Impact Blog)
- “We ask the question of whether one’s political preferences are manifested in the hand used while cleansing one’s posterior.” Another predatory journal sting, courtesy of Gary Lewis. (Psychology and Psychotherapy)
- Our co-founder described a recent talk in Dublin as “meeting in an alley after midnight and going to see the unsavoury parts.” (Anthony King, The Irish Times)
- “We’re talking mostly about the endless terrible studies on coffee, chocolate and red wine,” [Ivan Oransky] said. “Why are we still writing about those? We have to stop with that.” (Ivan Couronne, AFP)
- “The purpose of this post is to highlight some good practices when journals cease, some situations to avoid, and room for improvement in current practice.” (Heather Morrison, The Imaginary Journal of Poetic Economics)
- A new journal sting of scholarly journals suggests that it’s fine to defend colonialism, but not to defend genocide. (Reuben Rose-Redwood, The Conversation)
- Nature “will continue to work with research communities to enhance reproducibility and transparency in science,” writes its new editor.
- “In the end, the skeptics often do science a disservice by providing a poor example of how science is to be conducted,” says Kevin Knuth, who urges scientists to take studies of UFOs seriously. (The Conversation)
- “Is the Research Article Immune to Innovation?” asks Sarah Andrus. (The Scholarly Kitchen)
- The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) lifted the embargo early Monday on a study of which marine mammals were most vulnerable to sea vessels on newly opened parts of the Arctic, after a story appeared on the CBC before the originally scheduled embargo time. (Embargo Watch)
- “A Missouri State University professor announced Thursday that she would discontinue her study on penis size and self-esteem after public response to the study threatened the reliability of the research.” (Emma Whitford, Inside Higher Ed)
- “We contacted the authors to ask for the raw data so that we could conduct corrected analyses, but they declined to provide such data. We therefore ask that they conduct and present the results of the proper statistical analysis in the Journal.” (European Journal of Clinical Nutrition, sub req’d)
- “The suit asks for retractions to be published ‘in the same manner as the defamatory statements were published,’ presumably meaning not only on Facebook but with picket signs outside the hospital, as well, since those are specifically cited in the complaint.” (Sheri McWhirter, Traverse City Record-Eagle)
- “If you work for a university, you should not be allowed to receive any money from anybody else…There will be those who argue that there will be no money for research. I say, so what?” (Jason Fung, Medium)
- “There is an urgent need for publication houses to foster universal publishing standards along with discipline-specific retraction guidelines.” A look at retractions in radiation oncology. (International Journal of Radiation Oncology *Biology*Physics)
- This would appear to be a retracted story about a retracted study, from Axios.
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